The Last Day For A While

I turned on my lights. I powered up my computer. I made coffee. Then I sprayed down the door knobs, the light switch, and wiped off all my tables.

Downstairs in the English hallway, students were singing, laughing, typical shenanigans.

It felt like a normal Friday.

My students trickled into Room 303. They were quiet.  Shayda told me her knee was flaring up. She’s a ballet dancer. “But it doesn’t matter right now anyway. Our show’s cancelled.  Dance SCAPA’s cancelled. Everything’s cancelled.”

Erica, who was sent home yesterday by the nurse with a fever, bounded in, looking fit as a fiddle. “It was just seasonal allergies, guys! I’m not going to die.”

Soon the bell rang. The PA system squeaked on, and our PE teacher Mrs. Howard led our school in its Mindful Minute, a contemplative practice we’ve been doing every morning since August.

“Breathe in. Calm,” she said. “Breathe out. Relax.” I planted my feet on the floor, put my hands on my knees, and closed my eyes.

It had been exactly one week since the first coronavirus patient had been confirmed in Kentucky:  a 27-year-old WalMart employee from a small rural town about 30 miles from Lexington, where I teach. It was a week of will-we-or-won’t-we. A week of rumors. A week of jangly energy in the cafeteria. A week of “Have you heard anything?” when teachers congregated in the halls.

Just yesterday as I drove home through downtown Lexington past Rupp Arena, it had been announced that our girls state basketball tournament, which had already started, would be suspended indefinitely. People were standing in clusters on the sidewalks, looking dazed. Girls were hugging and crying as they boarded their busses to go back to their hometowns.

Last night, we finally got an email from our superintendent: we would be out of school for three weeks. Friday would be the last day we’d be together for a while. Districts all over the state were making similar decisions about how to best serve their students, how to deliver instruction, how to keep kids engaged, safe, and fed.

I opened my eyes. A lot of my students had not come to school, but those who did were ready to go.  We spent the first 20 minutes or so discussing how surreal everything felt. I tried to answer questions as best I could, making sure they knew that everything I was saying right then might change by tomorrow.

My students are smart consumers of current events. They are politically and culturally engaged. Nobody was panicking. Nobody was crying. But I knew they were shaken a bit.  It felt like the last day of camp had arrived, and we weren’t ready for it.

“Let’s do some poetry,” Evelyn said.

“That’s the spirit.”

We started off with storyboarding Matthew Zapruder’s poem, “Birds of Texas.” Then we read a bit from Gregory Orr’s essay, “The Four Temperaments,” on the story, structure, music, and imagination of poetry. Then I opened the podium up for an anything-goes-poetry reading.

Everyone in the room shared. They read poems about grandparents and eyes and lust and death and sardines.  My colleague Mr. McCurry popped in and read a poem from his first book of poetry, which was launched today, Open Burning.

We snapped and read and clapped. We made jokes about the apocalypse.

“I won’t see you guys again until April 6. Let’s take a selfie!” I said.

“Coronavirus!” we all yelled.

“I’m already missing you guys,” Erica said.

The bell rang and it was time for them to leave. We bumped elbows, and I promised to see them on Google classroom Monday morning.

I don’t know what the next few weeks are going to look like. I don’t know how we’ll make up the lost time. I don’t know how to plan for any of this.

“This is us against the coronavirus,” our governor has reminded Kentuckians this week in his twice-daily press conferences. “We will get through this, and we will do it together.”

But my kids and I were all going our separate ways, to hunker down against the looming pandemic.  We had been doing our innocent, every-day school stuff that we love – and suddenly we are not. Maybe it’s just a brief interruption. Or maybe it’s not. Maybe a mystery of COVID-19 is that it’s not clear whether it’s causing us to pull together or pull apart. This is somewhere we’ve never been before.

If teaching has taught me anything, it has taught me the power of community. And even though Americans may pride ourselves on our independence, our rugged individualism, community is the thing that will serve us well in this moment. When we sacrifice, when we love each other, when we give grace, and when we do it together, we can thrive.

And let’s not forget about poetry – and art and dance and song and theatre. Poetry takes on new meaning as well, as we walk out into this strange territory. Poetry becomes how we stay connected. It becomes life.

“Be well. Take care of each other,” I yelled after them.

When I left school later that afternoon, the sun was shining. Yellow jonquils and purple crocuses were everywhere.  Spring had sprung, and it seemed like a normal Friday afternoon.

Except it wasn’t.

A Renga for Room 303

From our window looking out onto the world

Last year, our poetry unit focused on imagery and language.  This year, we focused on form and function and looked at some different forms like sestinas and pantoums.  Most of my students had some experience with the haiku as a form, but only two had heard of the traditional Japanese form of linked verse called a renga (pronounced“reng-guh”).This form encourages collaboration:  one student writes a traditional haiku of three lines of five, seven, and five syllables, then gives it to another student who writes a “waki,” a response of two seven-syllable lines. Traditional themes for rengas are often about nature and love, but we were inspired by “Renga for Obama,” a collaboration of 200 poets curated by poet Major Jackson and published by the Harvard Review, as a way to celebrate, elegize, commemorate, and memorialize something we all shared: our classroom.

(If you want to inspire your students, I suggest you watch the doc-u-reading of  Crossing State Lines: An American Renga, a collaboration of 54 American poets in a “poetic relay race”of ten lines each about America. It’s a marvel.)

For this activity, we used long strips of paper and spent the last twenty minutes of class, writing haikus and passing them around the room to someone who would respond with a waki. There were lots of giggles and threats not to “ruin” their haikus with a wacky wakis. Also, lots of syllable counting on fingers

That afternoon, I sat down to read them. Clear patterns and themes emerged. There were a lot of inside jokes, allusions to shared experiences, and references to a suspected ghost that haunts our room (referred to currently as Toast Ghost Malone). They referenced our third-floor perch with the birds, our view high above Lafayette, and the fairy lighting I have strung around the room. But also the theme of safety, warmth, coffee, creativity, frustration, and beauty materialized.  Here are a few of their rough drafts:

 

Scribbles of pencil                                                                  

Minds crowded with ideas

Angrily erase

 The birds outside chirp on roofs

listening to compositions

  

Small, oblivious

the way we wish we could be

safe in the bright sun

 Underneath the fairy light

the sound of writing pencils

 

Here is a safe place

hidden in coffee heaven

robins and donuts

 Tucked away from the outside

creative machine working

 

Walker cracks a joke

Sarah loves Luke Bryan and trucks

Sarah Grace wants tape

 Here we speak with Welsh accents

‘Welcome to Alabama’

 

The smell of coffee

Hypnotizes us to think

This may be a cult

 Chanting, heaving, laughing sounds

Passer by-ers squint and frown

 

Toast Ghost Malone is

A sister, a father, and

Caregiver to all

 He knocked over the desk laughing

Then stood over our heads, pecking

 

Where is my pencil?

Who took my pink princess pen?

Oh, Toast Ghost, not again

The ghost continues to haunt

The gentle end of March wind

 

All journals worn, torn

Pencils break with ambition

Coffee and tea stains

 Wire bird cages, plastic

Autumn leaves in Christmas lights

 

Surrounded by books

A whiteboard full of wise words

Coffee mugs and art

 Laughing through our deepest fear

Ideal conditions now

 

The bull inside my head

Open the gate, watch it run

Stampede, let it roar

 Watch the crowd erupt with joy

Their screams are heard from miles

 

We are a safe space

On the third floor, oh the stairs  

Free from harsh judgement

Laughing through our deepest fear

Of the mad poets in here

 

People think we’re crazy

They hear us screaming through doors

I bet they’re jealous

 Of our own personal ghost

And kick-ass coffee machine

 

Blank, but untethered

Safely confused until some

Startling explosion

 The caw of a careless crow

Perched outside our large windows

 

That great creative

Spark, in the form of a bird

Like a phoenix

 A birth and rebirth in tandem

When every mind comes alive

 

Yellow world outside

Sat on a muddied rainbox

Stones now falling from our tongues

Each of us speaking our mind

Words full from colorful lands

 

Refuge from the world

Why I want to come to school

The ghost is pretty cool

 Toast Ghost Post Malone stealing

Pencils and also fridges

 

The table thing was an

Accident I swear you guys

Stop mentioning it

 I just wanna hang with you:

The cool kids, coffee, and toast

 

Toast ghost feel welcome

To our sweater vest abode

Please, bring disco pants.

 Feel free to bring your own mug

We have plenty of coffee

 

But you gotta pay

Like twenty dollars, man, you know,

Pay rent or get out

 Ah, not  the rent thing, again

McDonalds won’t hire ghosts

 

We are safe in here

Wearing vibrant reds and blues

Refuge from the grey

 The windows are frozen still

Please don’t come in here, we’re shy

 

Safety in numbers

Spilling community tea

Secrets always safe

 Underneath the twinkle lights

The trees know all our sins

 

Soft orbs shedding light

On each other, igniting

Pens and crisp paper

 Fire and lightning, knowledge

Truthful clichés, warm coffee

 

The warmth of being

Accepted by your peers and

Smiles fill the air here

 There is only truth and joy

Comfort to be found in here

Publishing Outlets for Teen Writers

Students in my Literary Arts program are required to submit their creative projects to the outside world:  writing contests, literary magazines, or local, regional, and national publications. I believe students should experience submitting their academic and creative work for publication for the numerous tangential lessons, including close reading for submission guidelines and preparing their manuscripts with formatting dependent on those guidelines. Researching a possible venue for an article or essay, studying submission guidelines, and actually submitting their work to a contest or a publication is great training for budding writers.

Each year I introduce them to websites such as New Pages, Writers Digest  and Poets and Writers,  which has a searchable index for numerous possible venues as well as a database of articles on both fiction, poetry, and non-fiction craft issues. Students have also submitted their work to contests like Scholastic Art and Writing and the National Council of Teachers of English’ Norman Mailer contest, which awards, as part of their prize package, the chance to be published. There are also local contests (local for me is Kentucky) such as the Kentucky Poetry Society contests which publishes the winners in their literary magazine. Students also submit to our school literary magazine or school newspaper, and really industrious students can even self-publish their work and distribute it.

Another indirect benefit of seeking publishing outlets is that students begin to read online literary magazines searching for potential submission spots. I tell them not to just send their writing like a plague of locust out upon the land, but to make a smart, targeted, well-research submission. One of the first things I ask students when they are considering submitting to a venue is: Have you read their publications to know what kinds of work they publish? Some online venues have hyperlinked back copies or send free sample copies.

Another lesson of submission for publication is the soft skill of fortitude.  The goal of submitting a piece of student writing to the real world is not necessarily to get published, but merely to understand the process of submission.  However, when one does get a response, either publication (yeah!) or rejection (seriously?), there is value in getting that first rejection slip.  Students join the ranks of great writers, like Rowling, Gaiman, or Melville, who were rejected numerous times.

Publishing Outlets

Here are a few of the publishing outlets I suggest for teen writers:

• Amazing Kids Network Magazine is an online publication that features work by both middle grade and teen writers. They also host interviews with mentor writers and have monthly writing contests.
• The Claremont Review publishes young writers and artists, aged 13-19, from anywhere in the English-speaking world.  Twice yearly, they accept fiction, poetry, drama, graphic art and photography.
• Creative Kids Magazine publishes poetry, fiction, personal narratives, humor along with fantasy, historical and science fiction. They publish four print issues and maintain a website of work written by teen writers.
• Hanging Loose Magazine.   A division of Hanging Loose Press, the subscription magazine supports and publishes teen writers in their monthly magazine. They accept poetry and prose from high school students and will offer feedback and editorial advice if requested. If work is accepted, writers are paid a small stipend and two copies of the magazine wherein their work appears
• Rookie Magazine This is a publication especially for teen girls, and I love the funky graphics of this site, which posts writing and art from their readers.  Rookie also hosts over twenty categories of posts from “eye candy” to “you asked it” sections with writing on music, style, clothes, and fashion.
• Stone Soup has been around for more than 40 years and is now available in both print and web versions.  The readers and writers of this magazine are 14 years or younger, so only freshmen writers might want to pursue a publishing spot with this publication.
• Teen Ink.  Since 1989, teen writers have found a publishing opportunities at Teen Ink, who considers submissions for their online and print magazine, as well.  Teen Ink also provides feedback on novels as well.
• Teen Lit  distributes free books to teens in exchange for a review that is edited and then published on their site.  They also publish short stories, poetry, and essays on their site, and host a discussion board, a writing community, and a treasure trove of writing links for craft and inspiration.
• VOYA or Voice of Youth Advocates Magazine  is a journal that promotes YA literature and reading. The magazine invites teen writers to contribute to the magazine through poetry and art contests, as a book reviewer, or by submitting a manuscript for the Notes from the Teenage Underground column.
• YARN or Young Adult Review Network is an online literary journal the publishes fiction, poetry and essays for Young Adult readers, written by established authors and teen writers

Online Writing Communities

Another way students can reveal their work to the world is to join an online writing community.  In these communities, participants submit their pieces for discussion and ranking by other members.  If students are old enough and responsible enough to have a Facebook page, they also may enjoy joining online writing communities.  Several of my students have used one or more of the following to publish their work:

• BookCountry is an online writing community with a crisp look where students can read and review others’ works as well as learn about the craft of writing and pick up a few publishing pointers.
• Figment has a lot of bells and whistles including a blog called “The Daily Fig,” which features posts about craft, inspiration, plotting, manuscript formatting, and much more. There are also multiple forums and a feature called “Figment Chat” where members can chat with published authors and writers.
• Go Teen Writers is a supportive community with a seriously well-stocked archive of craft articles about plot, characters, point of view, and much more. Maintained by YA authors Stephanie Morrill, Jill Williamson, and Shannon Dittemore, the site is well-designed and generous with resources for teen writers.
• Scribophile is less a social media site than it is an online workshop site where community members share their work to get and give feedback as well as trade information about writing.
• Wattpad is a streamlined social media site for writers and readers.  If student create a profile, they can post chapters of their novels and read the work of other writers for free from more than 20 different genres.
• Writer’s Café is a similar social media site that hosts a blog and has a neat publishing tab with a searchable database of literary magazines and writing contests.
• Write the World is my new favorite teen writing community.  A nicely-designed, global, non-profit organization that works with teachers and student writes all over the world, they offer writing groups for peer review as well as competitions, writing prompts, and expert feedback.  This site also provides resources, writing prompts, and lessons for teachers of creative writing.

 

S

Personal Universe Deck: An Oldie, but a Goodie

Personal Universe Deck is a great way to tap into kids’ linguistic whimsy and their sense of playfulness with words. Plus kids get a personal deck of 100 word cards they can keep all year long or for the rest of their lives. The Personal Universe Deck as a writing exercise has been attributed to American poet and playwright Michael McClure .  This archived one-hour 1976 lecture where McClure takes poetry students through the process is a must-listen before you lead your students through the process.

This activity has been tweaked and adapted many times to teach a host of writing and language skills.    Sometimes when we have an afternoon where a fire drill, a pep rally, or some school wide test has jangled our nerves and squandered our sacred time, I ask kids to pull out their universe decks and write a poem using four of their cards. Sometimes I ask each student to throw three cards into a basket, then I pull out ten cards, write the words on the board, and we each write a short story or scene based on the words.  The key to doing this well is allowing each student to build her own universe in words. Their universe; their words. I usually take about five days to allow kids to develop their deck.  Each day, as a bell ringer, I take kids through one stage of creation.

 Day One: I ask kids to write 100 concrete, specific words in ten minutes (or longer, depending on the class) that represent their individual, personal, beautiful universe.  All words need to be words each kid loves, words she thinks are beautiful, words she thinks exemplifies who she is, and words that are in some way associated with the five senses.  The words should also represent their good side and their bad side, as well as their past, present, and future.

I model this on the board:  “Okay, start with free association on clean sheet of paper.  Start with the first word that occurs to you.  Lilac. I don’t know why I just thought of that, but my grandmother had lilac bushes in her yard, and I’m trying to keep in mind my past, present, future. Each word needs to have some significance to you, so lilac. That’s a smell word, right?  And now I’m standing in my grandmother’s yard by the lilac bush, and what do I hear? How about thunder? Yep, I visited her in the summers, and storms popped up a lot.  That would be a sound for me. Now, just start writing concrete words and follow the associations.  I remember touching the cool, rough concrete of my grandfather’s dairy barn.  Barn is one of my words.  That might be a touch word for me.  Don’t just write down anything to finish the assignment – find words that are beautiful to you, that represent your universe, that are concrete.”

Day Two: Same thing on Day Two as Day One:  we create another 100 words.  This second day of free assocation will be important when we start the selection process on Day Three.  My philosophy is that each kid needs 200 words to find the best 100 words that represent his life.

Day Three:  I ask students to start weeding and whittling down their words to the essential 100 beautiful, signficant, personal words.  I remind them  the words should not be descriptive of senses, like “salty” or “sweet,” but concrete words like “hot dog” or “custard.” Cut out the vague words and replace them with specific. Avoid “bird;” intead say “wren” or “raven” or “blue jay.” Also, cut out words with suffixes, like – ing, -ly, -ed, -s.

Day Four: Students begin selecting words for categories. Eighty of the words need to be related to the five senses:  16 words for sight, 16 words for sound, 16 words for smell, 16 words for touch, 16 words for taste.   Add ten words for movement. Add three words for abstraction.  Then the last seven words are anything else they want.  Kids can make the below chart in their writing notebook for classification or just number their words.

Sight  (16)	Smell (16)	Sound (16)	Taste (16)	Touch (16)	Movement (10)	Abstraction (3)	Anything (7)

Day Five: I give each kid 50 index cards, and they fold them in half and divide them into 100 small cards that create their “deck.”  On the back of the card, write your initials or some tag that indicates the card is yours.  On the front of the card, write one glorious word.  Repeat 99 times.  Presto, your Personal Universe Deck! (You can even get fancy and laminate these if you bring your media technician a nice pie and promise to clean her house.)

Teachers, how would you use this in your classroom?! Please share and add your ideas in the comments.

 

 

Arts Integration: Not Your Grandma’s Piano Recital

Three years ago, Cathy Rowland, the piano teacher at the high school where I teach, asked me and the art teacher, Jason Sturgill, if we would like to collaborate with her during a piano recital.  Her idea was that her students could learn piano pieces around a theme, and our students, creative writers and visual artists, could be inspired by those arrangements. Her vision was that all the creation could happen at the same time, in the same room, while the pianos played.   Writers writing and reading their work, artists painting, dancers dancing, actors acting in a dynamic, unrehearsed, live integration.

We did it. And have continued to do it for the last three years.   For teachers who are trying to build an arts integration program within their school, here’s the story of our collaboration.

Six weeks before the showcase, my creative writing students met with Rowland’s piano students to listen to the music.  Each student chose one or two songs with which they felt an immediate attraction.

In addition to listening to the musical compositions over and over, the poets researched the history of the songs, the life stories of the composers, and different forms, such as Russian folk ballads, Germanic legends of the supernatural and Chinese poetic traditions.  During the six weeks, their poems started to emerge.

“I typically write just for myself, but this experience forced me to write for an experience that was being communicated through music by the composers and the pianists. I started to look at music as language, emotion, and thought,” said creative writer Hannah Bernard. “I felt like my poems were much more dynamic and complex because of the music.”

As each piano student performed, they were accompanied by either a piece of drama, art, poetry or drama.  Each student artist created a piece of art in his or her discipline, based on the music of Debussy, Tchaikovsky, and Beethoven, to name a few of the featured composers.

“Playing the piano is traditionally a solitary experience,” said Rowland. “Through this collaboration with students in other arts areas, the piano students were given the opportunity to share their interpretations of both their solo and ensemble pieces with the other artists.”

“My students listen to the piano arrangements to get a feel for what they saw in the music,” said art teacher Jason Sturgill. “I feel like I learned, and my students learned too, a valuable lesson about community.” Some art students completed their works before the showcase and displayed them, but other students painted their works as the pianists performed.

“It was like art theatre.  The audience was behind me, and I zoned out and pretended they weren’t there. The music was all around me as I created,” said graphic artist Nia Burney, who created a digital piece with ArtRage studio software.

In addition to become an invaluable learning tool for students, the showcase also provided an exhibition of the wide range of arts disciplines within our school. Parents, faculty, administration and community members were on hand to witness the range of student talent.  “I can think of no better way to demonstrate the value of our arts program than to experience all of the arts on display in the same program,” said drama teacher Paul Thomas.

If your school wants to host an all-arts spotlight, determining a theme is crucial to create cohesiveness among the artistic products and performances.  After determining a theme that provides artistic unity, students interpret the theme through their own original, interpretative directions. Elementary classrooms could create a showcase within a single classroom, while high school arts components could collaborate across arts disciplines or even content areas.

This project proved what is best about the collaborative dynamic –creation and self-reflection that moves outside the individual artist into a community.

 

The Body Project

In 1855, American poet Walt Whitman self-published his poetry collection, Leaves of Grass, celebrating the human spirit, the body, nature, the shape of democracy, friendship, and love.  Among the twelve poems in the first edition, Whitman included “I Sing the Body Electric,” a multi-part poem of lists that revels in the body as a sacred vessel of the soul.  The snippets of narratives and images in his poem exist almost as organs and systems within the human body.

For this activity, I asked students to brainstorm some language related to their bodies.  They came up with the typical list:  heart, liver, lungs, spleen, blood, bones, bowels, nodes, cells, matter, muscle, tendon, nails, hair, eyes, nose, skin.

Then we brainstormed about language related to their souls. They came up with:  morality, personality, imagination, maturity, emotions, divine/eternal, vision, curiosity, beliefs, values, ego/id/superego, intelligence, reason, memories, language.

My purpose for the brainstorm was to identify how the duality of our bodies mimics the duality of poetry.  A poem about mackerel is not about mackerel. We are not the total of our glands; we are divine.  A poem is not just a collection of artfully arranged words; it’s a prayer, a lesson, a song about being human.

Secondly, I asked students to pair up and help each other draw the frames of their bodies on a large piece of newsprint.

Trust draws

Poetry frames

Once secured on the page, the frame served as a vessel within which students transcribed their own celebration of body and soul, the linkage of the flesh and the spirit, the earthly and the divine.

Written without any drafting or pre-writing, analysis or weighing of poetic or rhetorical postures, these poems emerged over the course of three days of spontaneous writing.  The pieces synthesize song lyrics, spiritual texts, political manifestos, bumper sticker slogans, lines of poetry, battle cries, and original poetic texts.

My goals were: 1) I wanted to introduce them to Walt Whitman’s poem; 2) I wanted them to write spontaneously without regard to analysis, prewriting, drafting, etc. and 3) I wanted them to celebrate their body/soul connection with writing. Here are a few of them:

 

The pieces were a success, so we stuck them on the wall in the center hallway at our school, and I used them for a gallery walk for other classes.

 

Twenty Little Poetry Projects

Wonder how many poems you can stuff in a mailbox?

I am not a poet, but I love the room of opportunites that poem doors open up for writing teachers.  Leave it to a fabulous poem to start many, many conversations about language, choice, authorial intention, image, or persona. Or a hundred billion other things.

The Practice of Poetry is one of those books I’ve used exhaustively over the last ten years to get those discussions started.   The exercises are unique and delivered in such a way that even the most reluctuant student poets can produce something artful.

Because the writing exercises in The Practice of Poetry are written by poets who are also teachers, each exercise comes with an explanation of how the poet developed the exercise and the purpose for which she created it.  In class  Friday, we embarked on Jim Simmerman’s great exercise “Twenty Little Poetry Projects.”  Simmerman states, “This exercise is great for producing free-for-all wackiness, inventive word play, and the sheer oddities of language itself.”   Because I have a mixed bag of writers in my classroom, I felt like this exercise would be great for those who felt stymied by the pressure to sound “poetic” (whatever that means) or any kid out there dealing with writer’s block, or as Simmerman states in the explanation, any one “stuck in a single style.”

The key to doing this exercise is to write all the “projects,” then revise for unity and coherence, looking for the  opportunities for repetition and parallelism, capitalizing on the experimental nature of the activity to have fun and take risks with language and image.  The twenty projects are:

1. Begin the poem with a metaphor.
2. Say something specific but utterly preposterous.
3. Use at least one image for each of the five senses, either in succession or scattered randomly throughout the poem.
4. Use of example of synesthesia (mixing the senses).
5. Use the proper name of a person and the proper name of a place.
6. Contradict something you said earlier in the poem.
7. Change direction or digress from the last thing you said.
8. Use a word (slang?) you’ve never seen in a poem.
9. Use an example of false cause-effect logic.
10. Use a piece of “talk” you’ve actually heard (preferably in dialect and/or which you don’t understand.)
11. Create a metaphor using the following construction: “The (adjective) (concrete noun) of (abstract noun)…
12. Use an image in such a way as to reverse its usual associative qualities.
13. Make the persona or character in the poem do something he/she could not do in “real life.”
14. Refer to yourself by nickname and in the third person.
15. Write in the future tense, such that part of the poem seems to be a prediction.
16. Modify a noun with an unlikely adjective.
17. Make a declarative assertion that sounds convincing but that finally makes no sense.
18. Use a phrase from a language other than English.
19. Make a nonhuman object say or do something human (personification).
20. Close the poem with a vivid image that makes no statement, but that “echoes” an image from earlier in the poem.

The students had a lot of fun doing this activity.  Even though the exercise is a formula of sorts, my students made the poems personal through the use of voice, style,  or mood.   Here are a few selections for your enjoyment.

#1 David, Grade 10 

#2 Marin, Grade 10

#3 John, Grade 10

#4 Katrin, Grade 10

#5 Taleah, Grade 10

 

Lesson Plan: Mirror, Mirror

In the essay “On Becoming a Poet,” Mark Strands says, “A poem may be the residue of an inner urgency, one through which the self wishes to register itself, write itself into being, and finally, to charm another self, the reader, into belief.”

Today in my Literary Arts 1.2 class, my learning target was to register ourselves, to write ourselves into being, and, of course, to use the kind of language and details that would charm a reader into belief.

First, I led the class in a poetry transcription of Charles Simic’s fabulous poem “Mirrors at 4 a.m.”  and afterward, we discussed images: “rooms webbed in shadows,” “the empty bed,” “the blank wall,” and of course, the surreptitious (authentic vocab moment) wiping of the “hanky” over the brow.   We talked about mortality, existence, time and eternity, but my objective was not analysis. The poem was just a spring board for self examination and self rendering.

I passed out small mirrors.  I’ve used these hand-held numbers before to assist students in writing about their hands, but this was the first time we have ventured to the face.  After everyone had a mirror, there was much giggling and groaning and bang fluffing and chin jutting. Then we got down to business.

Employing top to bottom description, we wrote for five minutes on each element of the face, starting with the 1) hair, 2) forehead, 3) eyes, 4) nose, 5) mouth, 6) chin and jaw, and finally, 7) the whole face.   The whole activity took about 40 minutes, and it produced about two pages of description of some element of the face. I urged them to reject the easy description, the cliched, the hackneyed, and take up residence in the unique pores, moles, freckles, and follicles of their face.

Using this fodder as a zero draft, students then created a poem (any length, any form) that addressed, defined, described, or gave voice to one of the abstract words on the board:  self, existence, mortality, personality, identity, purpose, destiny, character.   

Or they could write anything they want.  That’s always an option.   Here are a few of the results:

#1  Leila, Grade 10

#2 Ruby, Grade 10

#3 McKenna, Grade 9

#4 Autumn, Grade 9

#5 Sarah, Grade 9

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.9-10.3.D

Use precise words and phrases, telling details, and sensory language to convey a vivid picture of the experiences, events, setting, and/or characters.

Poetry Boxes: From Concrete to Abstract in Poetic Persona

In Naomi Shihab Nye’s beautiful poem   “Valentine for Ernest Mann,” she says that “poems hide” and that we must “live in a way that lets us find them.”  At the end of the poem, she urges:  “Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us/we find poems. Check your garage, the off sock/in your drawer, the person you almost like, but not quite/And let me know.”

In my writing classes, I urge students to live in a way that lets them find their stories and poems:  to be open, hopeful, observant, humble, and awestruck by the world.  For this poetry box activity, I want them to image a life that exists in the cast-off items that one might discover in the garage or the sock drawer, to create a life from those items, and to imagine a narrative relationship between the items and this fictional character.

When I ask students to write, they often want to write about the big abstracts (LOVE DEATH FEAR JOY WAR), but I am continually urging them to pay attention to the little concretes.  To shore up my argument, I invoke Anton Chekov who said, “Don’t tell me about the moon. Show me the glint of light on broken glass” or Tim O’Brien who beautifully describes the big abstraction of War by saying, “And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It’s about sunlight. It’s about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow. It’s about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.”

And so we start with the concrete. I plunder Goodwill stores and antique haunts for things I can stuff in a gift box and wrap up.  Six or seven things go in each box, including one natural thing in the collection, such as a pebble or a pine cone.  I put in old pictures, charms, trinkets, glass and several item of ephemera. Then I wrap the boxes in whatever gift wrap I have stashed about.

Once students select a box and before they open the box, I ask them to write about what they think is in in the box.  I give them about two minutes of writing time for this.  Then they open the boxes and catalog each item and describe it as objectively as possible.  I urge them to look over each item and detail it exhaustively, using both sensory details and cultural or social associations.  This usually takes about ten minutes.

 

Once all the pieces have been placed on the table in front of them, cataloged and described, students write a character sketch about the person who owned these items.  I give them about seven minutes to write a fully-fleshed out profile of this person.  After they do this, I ask three or four students to share their character, using the artifacts as evidence for particular personality traits and/or lifestyle choices they have given their characters.

Then I ask them to focus on one particular item in the box, the one thing in the box that was the most precious to their character. “What is the item that this person carried with them through every move,  every bad marriage, every child, job, house? What item was this person holding, in her hand, his wallet, her purse, his backpack, when he or she died?”   They select the item, and I ask them to jump or wade out into a poem that tells the story of this item and its relationship to the fictional character who owned it.

Most the poems that are born in this activity eventually become swallowed up by something longer – a piece of flash fiction, a short story, the beginning of a one-act.  I might tweak this assignment in the future to start with the items first and ask students to write from the items or about the items instead of developing the character first.  Students become attached to the character and the story leads from that.

There are a lot of variables that could be used with this lesson.  You could give students boxes and ask them to create their own “artifact box,” collecting five or six items that are emblematic of their own life, to generate writing for a memoir or vignette.   Some teachers have used the idea of items in a box to create “Me Musuems” for first-of-the-year ice breakers or to use boxes as a means to analyze literary characters.

 

Hand Poems: Tools of Industry or Works of Art

My Creative Writing 1 and 2 classes participate in two exploratory units on writing poetry.  During their freshman year, they focus on imagery and language, and during their sophomore year, they focus on different forms.  Even though they will be exposed to a variety of poems through poetry transcription and reading for poetry for pleasure, which is a daily activity in my classroom, the poetry unit concentrates on writing poems, not analysis.  While we discuss and share poetry as models or as inspiration, the writing, not analysis or explication, is the goal of this unit.

A lot of student poetry leans toward the clichéd, the obscure, and the abstract. To that end, this unit is designed to encourage students to plant their poems firmly in the concrete as a way to explore the abstract, to dig into fresh and original language as a way to dispel with the clichéd, and to spend time revising for clarity and sharpness to negate the murkiness that students often believe substitutes for profundity.

The body is great inspiration because we carry in the body the memory of trauma, genetic matter from ancestors, scars, tumors, cells, blood, etc.  We carry the germ of life and the hands that can extinguish life.  We carry glorious things like our pumping heart and sieving liver and inglorious things like pores that explode with dirt and puss-corruption.

The follow-up lesson to the Body Project is an activity where I ask students to look at one part of their body for an extended examination – their hands, specifically their non-dominant hand, since they will be writing with their dominant hand.  We read “Hand” by Jane Hirschfield and Dylan Thomas’ poem “The Hand That Signed the Paper” just to get us thinking about the power of the hand and its role and utility.

Then I ask students to examine their head line, heart line and life line on their non-dominant hand and respond in writing to what they believe their palm is telling them about their dreams, personal relationships and emotional struggles.  I give them about seven minutes to write this up, then we discuss our “fortunes,” which is always a creative and ridiculous conversation.

Then I ask students to start distancing themselves from their the hand.  To enhance this disconnect, I give each of them a mirror, and they must view their hand objectively as if they were viewing a tool or a piece of art impartially either in a hardware store or in an art gallery.  Students write for about 3-4 minutes, describing the item they see in the mirror, then we discuss.

Then I ask students to wrap their hands in chicken wire and observe the metal-wrapped hand in the mirror, which will further distance themselves from their hand and hopefully provide them the necessary objectification to write about this  body part, not as a hand, but as a tool of industry or a work of art. Students write about 3-4 minutes, describing the item they see in the mirror, then we discuss.

In the final step, they add to their wire-bound hands some element of plastic, either a plastic bag that I’ve given them or a green Starbucks stopper-stick.  We repeat the process, observing the hand in the mirror as either a tool of industry or a work of art, and we describe what we see in the mirror, then we discuss.

Then I ask students to look back over their list of descriptions and select one or two lines that seem to have a lot of energy or lines that startled them or lines that unveil a particularly fresh or interesting image, and to write a poem using those lines and images.

Inevitably the poems become something other than about hands, but they benefit from specificity and concreteness that the objective description of the tools and art has  given them.

Here are some of their first drafts:

 Dog Eye Knuckles by Colin

The red dirt of my hands

always gets stuck

in the gears in my head

these spider fingers

always turn up

in the wrong place

and the scales

at the reach of my grasp

grow without my eyes looking

but I like these railroad veins

and these bass string tendons

caked between deep sand dunes

and the knobby knuckles

that pop out of my fist

like bulging dog eyes

 

Lost and Found

By Meredith

The person you almost like

but not quite.

The glove fallen behind the washer

The unfinished heart

drawn on a math book.

Left behind, like

ink running off your skin

during a hot shower after

a long day.

Spiraling down the metallic

drain

The blood stained panties

abandoned in a school

bathroom

The feeling of uneasiness,

swept under the

oriental rug.

 

 

Just In Case

By Strand

 

you are living a torture worse than

the iron maiden

the brazen bull

the heretics fork

the judas cradle

the breaking wheel

it’s an unmistakable sound,

glass hitting the floor,

shattering.

hearts sound like that too

only as they hit the ground,

they bounce a little

roll under the cabinets

sit alone for days, weeks

shrivel up

and shatter

you can’t take a step back,

weigh your options,

and get it through your

thick

skull

that this is not healthy

your brain stuck in

eternal turmoil

your heart stabbed with

six thousand  ruins of glass,

a pocket knife,

and the needle you used

to tattoo my initial on your thumb

and yet you stay

you stay, holding onto hope, just in case

i change my mind, and

choose you.