Writing poetry has always been therapeutic for me. Writing helps me organize my thoughts and deal with my emotions. I like the freedom of free verse and the constraints of stylized poetry like sonnets or limericks. I have always enjoyed writing and experiencing the feeling of poetry. To me poetry is extremely revealing and personal while being slightly vague. I like that you have to work to find its meaning.
When I had to analyze another poet's work, I was able to sit and deconstruct my own work. I saw what worked in a poem and what needed more developing. I actually began to appreciate poetry more once I knew what to look for when reading it. When I begin to teach about poetry, I think I will have the students write their own poem before analyzing another poem.
In one of my classes, we had to take a famous poem and put our own spin on it by replacing key words with words that represented us. It was kind of similar to when we took Shakespeare’s sonnet and rearranged words; I enjoyed projects like these because they helped me find a poetic voice. I had the freedom to choose words or phrases that represented aspects of my personality while working in the confines of an existing poem. I would definitely use a project like this to get kids thinking about poetry and what it means to them. I’d also allow time to do a found poem.
Did you enjoy the poetry projects we did in class? Do you think they would work in a high-school classroom or not? Which project was your favorite?
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I like what you said about poetry being both revealing and personal, “while being slightly vague.” I couldn’t have described it any better! I agree that explicating poetry helped me when it was time for me to write my own poems. I think with poetry you can never come to one interpretation. There will always be another way to see it, and that’s part of what makes it so unique.
ReplyDeleteTo answer your questions, I did enjoy the projects we did in class. I learned many techniques that I would use in my own classroom. I think the collaborative poems are a good way to get students to become more comfortable with poetry writing. It would be good to start off doing group work before they tried to write their own poetry. I think the poems we did in class would work with high school students. I’m sure they would enjoy poetry once they found out that their favorite artists (rappers and so on) are poets, and that would help them identify with poetry.
I loved the “Found Poem” assignment. I enjoyed performing it in class, even though I was really nervous! =)
See you in class!
Hi Amanda,
ReplyDeleteI agree that writing poetry can be therapeutic. Although, I don’t spend much time doing it! I think that’s a great idea to ask students to write a poem before asking them to go into explication. Two popular student attitudes towards poetry are boredom and fear. I think asking them to be the poet addresses both of these attitudes. One, it gives bored students an active role in poetry and shows them the complex process of writing a poem, and two, it gives scared students a position of power in poetry. They become the voice, and that makes poetry a little less intimidating. I did enjoy the poetry projects we did in class! My favorite one was the found poem, because of the freedom it gave when it came to subject matter. However, there were constraints, such as only being able to us words you found. I think this balance of freedom and structure will work for high school students. I’m currently student teaching tenth and eleventh grade, and one think I would alter for my classes is giving these activities even more structure. For example, with the “Wrecking the First Person” activity, I know that a lot of my students would automatically panic without a little more direction, or at least a model. Maybe coming up with a “skeleton” would be useful.