TSS - Focus on Poetry

Can you believe it is already November 1st? It seems like only last week that I was celebrating Labor Day weekend. Time is going by much too quickly.

This week it was time to pay the piper - so to speak - for my reading indulgence last weekend. I intentionally postponed students' papers until after the read-athon, which meant that I have been overwhelmed with grading this week. My time on blogger was definitely curtailed, and I missed reading all your posts. I am nearly caught up --- just 34 Brit Lit "Knightly Tales" to read and grade and then I should be good until Thanksgiving. So hopefully I will be able to spend a lot more time in the blogosphere.

One of the benefits of being an English teacher is that even when I am working I am flooded with bookish thoughts. I will begin a poetry unit with both my English 1 and Brit Lit classes over the next couple of weeks. Now poetry is my nemesis. It is not necessarily that I do not like it, but more that I have not been taught to appreciate it. I am trying to remedy this over time, but my confidence is fairly low in teaching this material. I did come across two resources, however, that I very much enjoy and thought I would pass those along to you. One is book that I found while surfing the internet. It is called Creating Poetry by John Drury. While the book focuses on the writing of poetry, I was able to translate that information into how to enjoy poetry. There are also several writing exercises per chapter that I feel can be used for any creative writing endeavor --- not just poetry. I plan to add this book to my personal library collection.

In working on these poetry lesson plans I was reminded of two great poems by Billy Collins that I like to use in the first class. Both poems are found in the collection, Sailing Alone Around the Room, and they are An Introduction to Poetry and Workshop. I totally sympathize with students because we often feel that we just don't "get" poetry. It is so concise and filled with puzzling symbolism, that once we have read a poem we aren't sure what it was all about. I had a professor tell me one time that the sole purpose of reading poetry is not to "get it" --- but to also pay attention to how you feel once you have finished reading it. We do not necessarily have to understand the poem as a whole, but perhaps just relate to a word - or a line - or stanza within the poem. In this way, each time we read a poem we may feel or experience or discover something different. I found great wisdom in this teaching, and it has freed me to read poetry on a personal level. I may not respond to the poem in the same way the scholars do -- and that is o.k. If interested, here is one of the poems:

An Introduction to Poetry:

I ask them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light

like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem

and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room

and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to water-ski

across the surface of the poem

waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with a rope

and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose

to find out what it really means.

While this academic unit of study will focus more on the formal aspects of poetry --- scanning for rhyme scheme and meter; poetry forms and patterns; and the analysis of a poem using the TPCASTT system --- I want the students to realize that poetry did not die at the end of the 19th Century; it is still alive and well and being performed today. In perusing YouTube I found various clips from Slam Poetry contests, and I hope to perhaps show one of these clips in the classroom. A personal favorite, although I am not sure that I will be able to show it in my very conservative classroom, is entitled What Teachers Make by Taylor Mali. It is definitely worth viewing: