Children grow up loving poetry, from their first songs and nursery rhymes to the raps and song lyrics they listen to as teenagers. Sometimes their attitude toward poetry changes, especially when students are asked to read and analyze verse with more sophisticated imagery and figurative language. Fear and uncertainty of the language often lead to lack of confidence with this genre. As children get older and their thought and language patterns become more adept at recognizing common elements of poetry, such as metaphor, simile, personification, alliteration, and oxymoron, they learn to appreciate these poems because they have the tools to understand them.
The lyrical sound of verse attracts children at an early age, setting the stage for rhyme and meter in later poems and finally for the more difficult Shakespearean sonnet. As in all learning, understanding poetry is developmental, a key concept in planning lessons for students of all ages.
I sometimes tell students that writing poetry is all about saying a lot in a little, not a bad place to begin really because it asks students to accept the idea that meanings can be implied, not directly stated. This concept bears remembering as students receive meaning from literature on different levels of understanding over a period of time. What they read and understand on the literal level of a poem may be surprisingly different from what the more mature student may gain from the symbolic level of the poem. As they acquire more literary tools, they subsequently manipulate both levels of understanding.
Louise Rosenblatt, author of Literature as Exploration, believes the most effective way to help students understand a literary type is to engage in the writing of it. Observations in nature offer vivid examples for imagery and figurative language, while studying the major and minor gods and goddesses in Greek mythology, and the mortals with whom they interact, provides an important poetry writing tool, allusion. I ask students, as they are brainstorming ideas for poems, to include an allusion to the Greeks. To illustrate how that is done, we discuss the various qualities of these mythical figures, even the settings associated with them, and make connections with the elements and experiences in their own lives. I show them a poem I have written about an old house facing the ocean, using allusions to Zephyr and Triton and his mother Amphitrite.
In the first stanza, mythic characters accentuate the images of sea and sand:
One step at a time
I leave behind the old frame house,
survivor of Zephyr's breath,
and descend to the edge where sea and land and sky converge
into a haze of bluish gray and tan.
Colorless dusk turns into colorless night.
When constructing a poem, the poet will draw together the possible components necessary to communicate an idea through imagery. In the process of composing this poem, I remembered experiences on the Gulf coasts of Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi where I grew up and have often revisited. The sounds near the water at night are different from those duiring the daytime, and so choices about setting, with a focus on sound, were made, especially in regard to allusions to mythology. For example,
Amphitrite's song lulls her son to sleep
and pulls a cover of darkness over me.
Still I walk--
ankles, knees, now waist deep into the
black, watery vastness.
Other experiences played a part as well. A family member who lives in Australia shared an article he read about kangaroos swimming out to sea and apparently not returning, which begs the question why. Could the speaker in the poem also choose this path as a solution to life's woes?
On the other side of the moon
kangaroos swim out into the ocean
paddling farther and farther away,
mere pin pricks on the horizon until
nothing.
To what longings did they surrender?
Faith and hope prevent one from this choice, and once realized, can lead to a rebirth of sorts, perhaps fixing what was once broken, an idea I employed later to conclude the poem.
Turning the knob
loose from years of salt air and grit,
I remember I must fix it.
Through images of nature, figurative language, the writer’s experiences and philosophy of life, a poem begins to emerge. When is the poem finished? students invariably ask. Perhaps never might be my response, but realistically the writer reaches a point where she must stop making changes and leave it alone. A number of revisions into the process, I let my poem rest, setting it aside, looking at the choices later with fresh eyes, and posing final questions. Could I reenact the scene in the poem in my head with authenticity? Was the sound of words colliding pleasant to my inner ear? Was the language of imagery in balance, or was it too heavy? Was the message accurately communicated? When my answers affirmed a stopping point, I accepted the draft.
This process works for all writing actually but lends itself especially well in a classroom where students can see the steps for writing poetry evolving more quickly than in a much longer piece. As always, it helps to keep in mind that practice is the key to growth in writing. The last stage in the writing process is publishing, and so we set aside time in the classroom to share our work. Sometimes students want to present orally to an audience of listeners, but other times we spread the poems around the classroom, gallery style, encouraging readers to leave notes about what they liked or how they connected to each poem. The end of one writing project then is really just the beginning of a new journey. What will we write next? The fear diminished, it could be another poem.
For more information see the following sources:
O'Connor, Susan. Dance of Language. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2008.
Rosenblatt, Louise M. Literature as Exploration. New York: Noble, 1978.
Susan O'Connor - Susan O'Connor, author of Dance of Language, has written a number of articles and books on the teaching of English.
Join the Conversation