A satire? Some poems will simply move you through their language. I intentionally did not ask the students to attempt to create a linear narrative for the script. Add those to the growing collection of class favorites. This exercise prompted the students to interact with the poem in more explicit ways than was typical for them, encouraging them to imagine unusual, but helpful, questions for the poet: Example of Students Response to kidnap poem by Nikki Giovanni, Giovannis Words Students Questions. Is it an epic (a long poem on a heroic subject)? This is the Japanese art of poetry about the traces left by life experiences. Lawyers, politicians, and journalists often find that they need to make use of similar skills. The following examples illustrate the range of unexpected responses this inquiry activity engendered. Now is also the territory of what is truly alive, fresh, delightfully unpredictable, thrilling, joyous. Everybody finds it difficult to forget rhythmical poetry. From The Poetry Magazine Podcast February 2023 This week, Adrian Matejka sits down with poet and guest editor of the magazine, Charif Shanahan, to talk about oneness, the shifting of identity, and centering love. (Meaning ascribed to what is going on has a secondary function.) Surely poets mean to tell us something about themselves and their world, if only in the most oblique ways, by recording what they deem important enough to pluck from their field of vision with a pen point. Youll create patterns in your reading that become ways of speaking about the poems; youll be able to trace your attention, and that attention tells an important story. There is so much to discover with sequential reading in this book. About Collins's Introduction to Poetry, whose speaker reveals an unease that the readers of poems are too concerned with interrogating lines for meaning to see the images that lie within and between the lines, one student wrote: So I was sitting next to this poem waiting for the bus, and it starts bossing me around saying 'I say, don't cross your legs.' You can use poems to describe yourself, other people, or things you like. As a poet myself, I beg you, please, please give the poem some breathing space when you reproduce it for class use. cried one of the teachers. Highlight any words that rhyme with each other. The poet, then, can never be positive he has got it down "right" for all time. Another poet whose preoccupation with everyday life cast his literary career into obscurity was Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976). Most books of this kind display the same old trophies, leaking sawdust, gussied up with a veneer of contemporary typefaces and flashy layout. What unifies the volume is quality: each poem was selected because it is artistically, narratively, or aesthetically important. We can call the first group "extroverts," the second "introverts," if we wish. Most of the time, the language we encounter isnt used in surprising ways: were reading the screen to see if the train is late, or were checking the expiration date on the milk, or were passing work informationamong colleagues. A vehicle of wonderment that should draw us closer has been turned into simply another academic job. There's still time to apply to bring the NEA Big Read to your community. When you're leaving a critique or comment on a poem, often the best place to start is with what you think the poem is literally about. Answering these two basic questions about a poem opens up many other possibilities for discussion. Humility again comes into play when a student points out something in the poem that the teacher has never noticed. What we forget is that Shelley and Byron and Keats were legendary freaks in their own time, generally impaled by critics and deemed incomprehensible. . Poems arent a broken pane of glass that you need to painstakingly reassemble. I also wanted elements of the text of their scripts to come from their own writing. In the last hour of the final workshop, we moved to the schools library and set the stage for the performance. It was small, had big ears and was singed. To Neruda's poem, one student wrote, In this poem's pockets are birds, twigs, and the moon. To Ars Poetica, a student wrote This poem is hiding its mismatched socks. Another student wrote, This poem is hiding the secret of poetry and it's being stubborn as a mule about it. The ways the students read and comprehended the poems were connected closely to the tone and content of the individual pieces. Weve seen over the past couple of months how important poetry can be to people. Find another poet. Many of you might be thinking now is the time to try and get to grips with poetry, maybe for the first time. Lines 3-4: Here's a metaphor to make that point visual (It's rain that grows flowers,/ not thunder). I sound like someone in a commercial. Reznikoff lived most of his life on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, walked the streets for miles every day, wrote articles on the law to make a living, and published most of his books himself. With the assistance of three college student volunteers, I implemented a series of four three-hour after-school workshops for seventh and eighth graders designed to offer the students a variety of interactions with poems. Perhaps the last time you really came into close contact with poetry was for a college or graduate school term paper. When I pause to think less about testing understanding and more about internalizing understanding, however, I shudder to think of asking a student to write a response to a question like this one, which is typical of popular high school literature anthologies: How does the reference to Sophocles in Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach support the poet's purpose? Don't get into symbolism, or stress about metaphors. When you put together a well-constructed analysis of the poem, you are not only showing that you understand what is there, you are also contributing to an ongoing conversation about the poem. Poet Nikki Giovanni was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, on June 7, 1943, and grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio. We all have different talents and even if we think we don't have them sometimes all we need to do is just to talk and we will inspire others. Don't crush twelve poems onto one page; and for goodness sakes don't treat the poem as if it was a wilting violet or a new form of disease by fancying it up in Neo-unctial script. But ultimately, I think the best approaches beyond thematic content or familiarities are to read with curiosity and seek moments in the poems where the language sparks your particular interest. Let's talk about mithila ki shaan #shorts #poetry #youtubeshorts #agnikalon #shortsviral The Bard is picked clean, and Hamlet, the fierce and philosophical dramatic poem, crashes to the stage in a pile of bones, all curiously resembling scansion marks. For most people, these occasions as well as their schooldays are the only times they encounter poetry. Step One: Read Have your students read the poem once to themselves and then aloud, all the way through, at LEAST twice. Traditionally, the sonnet is written in iambic pentameter. Poetry, by its very nature, makes demands on a writer who attempts to analyze it that other forms of literature do not. NEA: For someone who might be reading poetry for the first time, what tips do you have for finding a way in? Teachers who adapt aesthetic approaches to introducing the artful impulses that underlie poems run the risk of making textbook comprehension questions obsolete. Its helped me learn more about poetry and its enjoyable too. I will read some poetry from survivors who posted their talent through their written word. For most teachers (and for all too many students) the poem has become a sideshow item, a species of literary anomaly that one walks hurriedly past with eyes half turned away, muttering, "How interesting. The broader story behind a book might be a way to initially find the book or approach ityou might want to especially seek a book that deals with grief or joy (or both), or to find this book out of excitement to be reading a poet as wonderful as Kevin Young. However, poetry makes us experience the human condition at its most vulnerable. blend into the beach Like bury yourself in the sand? I wanted them to examine, question, surmise, discuss, mimic, dramatize, and translate as they read and responded to poems, and I hoped they would develop a newfound sense of how to talk to, talk with, and talk about poetry. The collection centers on two life-altering events: the death of the poets father, and the birth of his son. MEIER: My approach is similar to what Ive suggested above: to read with curiosity and for moments in the poems that resonate. [4] So the crisis has perhaps brought poetry with its ability to make the abstract more concrete, its ability to distil and clarify, its ability to reflect the surreal and strange world we now find ourselves in back to the fore. We also live in language differently when speaking it aloud. So why would your teacher give you such an assignment? AL FILREIS: I'm Al Filreis and this is poem talk at the writer's house, where I have the pleasure of convening three friends to collaborate on a close, but not too close reading of some poems. I gave them sticky notes and asked them to read the poems and then write a response using one of several sentence stems I provided. Oxford Dictionaries: A poem of fourteen lines using any of a number of formal rhyme schemes, in English typically having ten syllables per line.. Poetry allows you to play with words to manipulate, to suggest, to twist, and to turn words inside out. Theme: One place to start when writing about poetry is to look at any significant themes that emerge in the poetry. Learning how to talk about poetry and being able to interpret what poems mean is not the easiest thing in the world to do. When you read a book of poetry, where do you start? [Read: 17 Of The Most Powerful Excerpts From Poetry]. I purposefully skip a linear reading approach in these instances, and instead skip ahead or move backward. The way in which a poem is read can change the mood and tone, and even the underlying message. No one has stopped writing about the Odyssey; the last word on Hamlet has yet to be said. What other themes show up in the poem? Type it up neatly, and credit the author. Main idea is much briefer. 00:00. Like X happened today and this is how I feel about it. That same model works great for poetry because reading poems can be very personal. You will support this thesis by drawing examples and evidence from the poem itself. Readers who skip poems will miss parts of Mr. Youngs elegant world building, for example. Thats part of the reason why we often talk about events narratively and in ways that are connected to our reactions. Writing Responses and Imitating Structures (Developing Fluency)
One student wrote in her journal: I think Readers Theater has been really fun. Activities that encourage a collaborative approach, both in terms of students working together in imaginative ways to deepen their understanding of the texts and in terms of interacting with the poems dialogically in an effort to deepen their relationships with the texts, offer unexpected learning rewards. If you think about it for a moment - it is incredibly easy to write an essay on poetry. We'll talk, maybe even disagree a bit, and perhaps open up the verse to a few new possibilities. In the second session, for example, to prepare the students for performing for an audience, I asked them to choose lines from the poems to render as tableaux. Writing Letters of Recommendation for Students, Writing About Film: Terminology and Starting Prompts, Close Reading a Text and Avoiding Pitfalls, Pre-writing Activities and Drafting Your Essay, Writing in Literature (Detailed Discussion), Writing in Literature: Writing the Prompt Paper, Writing in Literature: General Research Papers, Writing a Thesis Statement for a World Literature Paper--PowerPoint. At least youll know what you do and dont like if you do this. Soon, the students are itching to write. The effect a particular poem has on someone individually is crucial and will obviously vary from person to person. Sound is always a good place to start when you talk about poetry. Type it up neatly, and credit the author. Note for Purdue Students: Schedule a consultation at the on-campus writing lab to get more in-depth writing help from one of our tutors. Here is an excerpt from one student's response. It is a salutary thing for students to hear their teacher say, "I like this poem, but I don't really know what this part of it means," when we really don't. If you dont like something, fine. Teachers and students should likewise be aware of this chance-taking so essential to the making of any art. N The most common citation format for writing about poetry is the Modern Language Association (MLA) format. The line of poetry is more focused, unique, and intense. When they slip off the track (unless the new track is of particular interest), direct them back to the poem itself to see if what they are saying in any way corresponds to what the poem is saying. Poetry lives on the air and not on the page, read it aloud to yourself as you walk around the house, youll get a better understanding of it, youll feel the rhythms of the language move you in different ways even if youre not quite sure whats going on. This is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. In fact, I encouraged them to let the lines speak to each other in whatever language seemed appropriate. The result was a highly improvisational and creative product. BRUMBACH: Everyone knows how to talk about poetry because everyone is part of the human condition and poetry is an art that truly speaks to the human condition. When wildness is once and for all nailed, it becomes an ornament with trophy status. Guesswork can be exciting, germane, and is in fact absolutely necessary. This accounts for the preponderance of so much bad poetry even in anthologies that seem to be searching for something so much better, collections like Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle and Some Haystacks Don't Even Have Any Needle. Poetry allows you to play with words - to manipulate, to suggest, to twist, and to turn words inside out. We ask students to interact with literature in ways that do not encourage them to develop long-term relationships with the texts. Unfortunately, this is especially true of poems. Year after year this goes on, until finally (somewhere in college) we are confronted with that terror of terrors, that event we always fear would happen: the poem has grown so complicated, so ornery, that we find it impossible to put together what we have so industriously "analyzed." Is it any wonder that I have seen third and fourth graders, who don't know the first thing about poetry, cry "Ugggh!" Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. . ADRIAN MATEJKA: Poems ask for a different kind of reading than stories or essays because in poems, were looking for immediate emotion and association as much as meaning. Williams could have established his physician's practice in New York City or in Paris, but chose instead to set up in Rutherford, New Jersey, where he was born and where he died. Long: It is slightly longer. My point is that poetry lives now, and now can be as confusing as this morning's headlines. I was intent on pushing beyond the kind of simple comprehension questions the students were accustomed to answering in English class. NEA: As an example, one of the new poetry titles in the NEA Big Read library is Kevin YoungsBook of Hours. One wonderful aspect of poetry is that it is very subjective and what you get out of it is just as important as what the poet intended for it to mean. NEA: Joy HarjosHow We Became Human: New and Selected Poems 1975-2001is another new poetry title in the NEA Big Read library. Rescuing this short, scribbled testament to married life and household order (as well as to temptation), he made permanent a poetic act of the first magnitude. Hereafter cited as Williams CP, Volume I. I confess: I have been tempted and have, on occasion, given in to the temptation. As for poetry, why, we can always take refuge in the classics. The saddest part of this education, for students and teachers alike, is that it's much easier to trap a stuffed bird than to skin your knees chasing a live one. Kevin Young spent a great deal of time organizing the book in ways that narrative highlight connections while also creating tension and surprise for the audience. The invitation gave me an opportunity to hone an instructional strategy I had been developing in which students become collaborators with texts by translating the text from one mode to another. Born in the. A boy raised his hand, and I called on him. A novel might feel too taxing, watching another film just involves staring at another screen for longer, but a poem can offer a brief window into a different world, or simply help to sustain you in this one. Robert Frost, Irish poets, learn your trade, I have found that most students see poems as little more than extremely difficult puzzles. The opening Prologue is Shakespeare's summary of the play, and it took him 18 lines. Poetry therapy, a form of expressive arts therapy, involves the therapeutic use of poems, narratives, and other spoken or written media to promote well-being and healing.Therapists may use . You dont have to be an expert to talk about poetry, but it seems like a good idea to know something about it before you speak. Talks about Poetry 04:36 Charita Gainey How Phillis Wheatley captured the attention of the world 04:02 Naima Penniman "Being Human" 05:06 Diane J. Rayor Ancient Greece's greatest popstar 05:02 Learning a Language of Response (Priming for Fluency)
Unfortunately, the same poems tend to be anthologized over and over again.). Ask Students to Share a Poem. The printed text of the interview is available in Interviews with William Carlos Williams: "Speaking Straight Ahead." She maximises what she wants to say in two lines. Second, I wanted to recap some of the happenings on campus. Does the poem have power or beauty? I was astounded at his insight. Language is where we meet each otherits what connects us. This handout offers answers to some common questions about writing about poetry. I wanted the students to think of themselves as writers whose words and ideas are important. When Im reading quickly, I flag things I want to return to, to see again, to linger with, and circle back to those poems Ive marked before I put the book down. Watch him read a few times on YouTube. 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