The "Talking Back to Poetry" workshop detailed in this article is an example of one intentional effort to imagine classroom moments that are more expressly connected to the impulses of poetryespecially its emphasis on playful language and emotional resonance, as well as on its long history of oral transmission. That feeds into this sense that poetry is something formal, something which might stand to attention in the corner of the room, that its something to be studied or something to solve rather than something to be lounged with on the sofa. Just listen. Harjos book of selected poems, How We Became Human, is one of the recent additions to the NEA Big Read library, along with two other books of poetry: Citizen by Claudia Rankine and Book of Hours by Kevin Young. Could we say that learning to write even expert answers to such a question will deepen students' love of poetry, of contemplation, of the sea bathed in moonlight? An elegy? Through work like theirs, teachers who are willing to chance the unfamiliar will discover much that they can bring to their students which concerns the human heart. Then, finally, reread it again and focus on each linego line by line. Long: It is slightly longer. How does that happening make you feel? (I even admit to hoping that it will happen, and sometimes to rigging my questions so that it will happen!) After doing that, then I will go back and read the book cover to cover. N In the final workshop session, I rehearsed the students for the performance, helping them to establish a variety of tableaux that would accompany the lines and coaching them about the elements of a theatrical production: interpretation, intonation, volume, pace, gesture, etc. Does it feel like something youd never expect? And welcome to a new release of Otter Talk. The workshop included four dovetailed lessons, each developed to generate material for the script and also to offer students opportunities to practice their reading fluency. Do you jump around? What a relief, what a fantastically lucky breakdown! By selecting what they do select to present to us, they tell us who they are. 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. In my experience, I cannot read a large poetry book like I would read a novel, devouring hundreds of pages in an afternoon's sitting. It can be traced back as far as the 9th century. Certainly the bad poetry of great poets does. Some of the weirdest people I have ever known I met in a factory where I worked in the yard gang and as a janitor when I was eighteen. These types of outcomes seem much more connected to poetry's pulse than the ability to identify a poet's use of allusions or similes or metaphors. When asked at the end of the first session what words they would use to describe their experience, the students included thrilling, helpful, inspiring, fun, and cool. Angelou had a broad career as a singer, dancer, actress, composer, and Hollywood's first female black director, but became most famous as a writer, editor, essayist, playwright, and poet. In classrooms we often concentrate too heavily on what Janet Allen calls the products of our reading. The poem reads us as much as we read the poem. says the husband to the wife. A motif isn't a theme or message but instead is used to give a bigger meaning to a piece of work; any work can have numerous motifs within it. For example language arts *cough, cough*. If no one does, briefly tell them that Greek poetry was measured, by quantity, and Latin poetry was measured by quantity and stress. you will keep more focused on the question and not wander off track. They're venting their pathologies, like going to the. Is there a set number of syllables in each line? How does John Donne's devotional poetry relate to the contentious religious climate in seventeenth-century England? Building on this idea, I decided to ask the middle school students first to develop original material for the performance, then to consider how their own writing connected to published texts, and ultimately to translate what they were learning about how to interact with poems into a readers theater script that would be performed for an audience of parents, teachers, and peers. 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. Poetry emphasises the notion of less is more. Grade: 7 Unit: Poetry Topic 'I Lost my Talk' by Rita Joe. Week 4: Poetry allows you to play with words - to manipulate, to suggest, to twist, and to turn words inside out. We can call the first group "extroverts," the second "introverts," if we wish. I was recently invited by the Carnegie Center for Literacy, a community literacy center in Lexington, Kentucky, to design a readers theater project for middle school students that would specifically address comprehension and fluency skills. 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. The fundamentals of poetry and proseare the same. I find that students are actually well schooled in answering questions. cried one of the teachers. A satire? It is everything and nothing in particular. After all, if you do not quote the poem itself when you are making an argument about it, you damage your credibility. "So think about that format," I tell my students. Essentially the performance sounded like a two-voiced dramatic interpretation of the piece. Most poetry books are around 80 pages, and you can read them in about 2 hours. 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. Was the last time you read a poem on social media or in your inbox? Reality, good old sentence-by-sentence reality, driving hard through the plot, assumes its rightful place in the spotlight. 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. Feel free to play a recording of the poem or show a video of someone reading the poem, too. Each class meeting had a specific set of focuses that asked the students to practice collaboration, comprehension, and reading fluency skill sets: Guiding Topics for Workshop Sessions The most common meter for poetry in English is iambic pentameter, which has five feet of two syllables each (thus the name "pentameter") in each of which the strongly stressed syllable follows the unstressed syllable. Poetry, by its very nature, makes demands on a writer who attempts to analyze it that other forms of literature do not. The line of poetry is more focused, unique, and intense. An acclaimed American poet, storyteller, activist, and autobiographer, Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri. Motif: An image or action in a work of poetry or prose which is shared by other works. Generating a Performance Project (Practicing Fluency) Purdue OWL is a registered trademark. The book pulls together poems from the first 26 years of the poets career, showing the range and breadth of Harjos poetry over that period of time. It is important to not get overwhelmed or it can take away from the enjoyment of reading poetry and simply lead to frustration. To explain what "quantity" means, go over long and short vowels. Don't get into symbolism, or stress about metaphors. Here, the meter and the rhyme scheme are inseparable from the line breaks. In years to come, alongside medical records and political reporting, historians and classes of schoolchildren will look to art and poetry to find out what life was like on a day-to-day basis what things seemed important, what things worried people, how the world looked and felt and was experienced. What we forget is that Shelley and Byron and Keats were legendary freaks in their own time, generally impaled by critics and deemed incomprehensible. The best way to understand poetry is to write your own. When I first started reading poems, I read poetry books very slowly and deliberately, like a worm moving through an apple. To the more lyrical language of Neruda's poem on poetry, the students wrote lovely, creative lines of their own: If this poem were a burrito, it would belong to a nest of birds and would be filled with dirt and insects like bees (see below). Instead of being an encounter with feeling, poetry becomes a task like places and dates. Next comes the tricky part. Edited with an introduction by Linda Welshimer Wagner (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1976). Or provocative? It requires patience and commitment, but the rewards are invaluable. 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. It is useful to follow some standard conventions when writing about poetry. We asked three poets and teachers for their advice: Rachel Brumbach (English teacher at McCaskey High School in Lancaster, Pennsylvania); Adrian Matejka (Ruth Lilly Professor/Poet-in-Residence at Indiana University; mostly recently the author of The Big Smoke); and Tyler Meier (executive director of the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona). With each reading you will pick up more and understand more than you may have realized you would at the start. In poem after poem this writer captured the essence of city life in language so clear and simple that it could be mistaken for prose. Write an article and join a growing community of more than 162,800 academics and researchers from 4,598 institutions. Now, having read many poems, I find I prefer to read more quickly and to take in the horizon. Indeed I did. Although creative prose can be melodic, poetry is always rhythmic. 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