2022 Post #19 -- What Do You Love?

 by Brett Vogelsinger

Alex Dimitrov's poem "Love" is pages long in The Best American Poetry 2021 anthology, but every stanza starts with the same two words:  "I love."  Some of these sentences are just three words long, while others spill into multiple lines of poetry.  

The poem was composed on Twitter, one little bit at a time, but read as a single piece, it has the momentum of a perfect piece of anaphora and a flow of ideas that feels a bit like an accordion to me, sometimes expanding on an idea, then contracting to a completely different one with the next "I love." 

To begin our poem of the day routine, I walk around the room showing my students the length of this poem, reminding them poems don't have to be short.  They can keep them rolling along for pages in their notebooks if they would like.  

Then I tell them, "I'm going to read the first twelve lines aloud, without you seeing this poem, and when I stop, just keep the ball rolling.  Start listing the things you love.  Ride the wave of this parallel structure Alex Dimitrov creates by starting line after line, stanza after stanza, with the same two words." 

The next moments in class are beautiful, silent but for the scratching of pencils in notebooks, and students never seem to finish before I stop them.  Within minutes, some students have even filled an entire page with a poem. 

Here is an example of what my student, Brooke, created:

This exercise is a golden opportunity to succinctly teach the power of parallel structure or anaphora because students have already built their own example of it, riding the wave of Dimitrov's original.  

Brett Vogelsinger is a ninth grade English teacher and NBCT at Holicong Middle School in Doylestown, PA. He is the founding editor of Go Poems, facilitates his school's literary magazine, Sevenatenine, and contributes monthly posts at Moving Writers. Follow him on Twitter @theVogelman.