2021 Post #15 -- Moving Advice

by Ken Bui

Langston Hughes’ “Mother to Son” is an uplifting poem centered around a mother imparting wisdom and advice to her son. It’s about adversity. It’s about grit. It’s about courage. When I share this short poem with students, I always admire how much conversation can stem from its mere 20 lines.

Fittingly – seeing as the poem features the image of a staircase – invite students to think about all the ways the speaker “moves” and “shifts” through the advice to her son. To do so, consider the following questions or quick activities to frame the conversation your students could have:

• What is the mother’s advice to her son?
• What imagery or figurative language drives that message?
• Alternatively, can students complete a quick doodle of any of the images that catch their attention?
• How do verbs capture not only the mother’s movement, but the movement of the poem’s lines?
• How do punctuation and line breaks contribute to the pace of the mother’s story/advice?
• Or alternatively, where does the poem pause? Slow down? Quicken or build?
• Consider if and where the speaker shifts the language. If you had to break up the poem into three parts or stanzas, where would you do so and why?
• Have students draw lines to divide up the poem!

While students appreciate and discover how the speaker “moves” through the poem, they may also be “moved” by its tender yet frank sentiment on perseverance. 

Further Reading:

Ken Bui is an English teacher at Central Bucks High School South in Warrington, Pennsylvania. He enjoys teaching a variety of courses such as English 11, AP English Language & Composition, Creative Writing, and Debate. He is also a contributing writer for Moving Writers. You can find him on Twitter @kenbuiCBSD.

2021 Post #2 -- Poetic Definitions

 by Brett Vogelsinger

Gerard Manley Hopkins is one of the few poets whose work rings in my head every now and then ever since I first encountered his work in college.  Every year in April when the world is flourishing back to life, I hear the words "when weeds in wheels shoot long and lovely and lush" and the sheer abundance of alliteration in his description of spring makes my heart sing a little.  

"Pied Beauty" is another poem that sticks with me years after first reading it.  I remember my professor elaborating on this poem -- a celebration of things that are speckled and spotted, not black-and-white, cut-and-dried -- about how remarkable it is that a Catholic priest wrote this poem, in a time when there was little tolerance of ambiguity.  

Since the poem is in the public domain, I can present it here: 

Glory be to God for dappled things—
   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
       For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
   Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
       And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
       With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                                     Praise Him.

The Hopkins Poetry website attaches the images of a speckled trout and a brindled cow to the poem, helping students to observe the pattern of each of the things Hopkins praises. 

In truth, the word "pied" always threw me off a bit in this poem. I figured it must be related to the word "piety," given the references to God in the poem, but in reality, it simply means this: "having two or more different colors; synonyms: variegated, multicolored, tabby."  

So after sharing the dictionary definition of this term with my students, I might say, "wouldn't it be fun to create our own, poetic definition of a word in addition to the dictionary definition?  We can take the real definition and make it sound more like a poem.  Or even imagine a different shade of meaning.  For instance, I might take this definition of "pied" and write something like this . . ."

pied (adj) -- defying a simple category or binary, complicated and beautiful and stronger because of its ambiguity

Have students select another word from this poem -- adazzle or fickle or fallow -- perhaps words they do not know too well.  Google search a dictionary definition to copy into their writer's notebooks, but then create a poetic definition for the word too, a variation, a speckled kind of denotation based on their understanding of the poem.  How is it different, maybe even better than the first?  

If you really feel like going deep: What would Gerard Manley Hopkins think of us expanding the definition of a word, and how can you tell this from the poem? 

Further Reading: 

 

Brett Vogelsinger is a ninth-grade English teacher at Holicong Middle School in Bucks County, PA.  He has been starting class with a poem each day for the past ten years. He is the creator of the Go Poems blog and the author of Poetry Pauses: Teaching With Poems to Elevate Writing in All Genres.   Find him on Twitter @theVogelman.

2019 Post #1 -- Deleted Scenes from "Famous"

by Brett Vogelsinger

Welcome back teachers, poets, writers, and students to our first post of the 2019 National Poetry Month season!  Subscribe now via email so you can catch every post and add new selections to your repertoire of poems to share with students.  On this site, you will also find engaging methods, questions, and media to provoke powerful thinking in your classroom.

Naomi Shihab Nye is a familiar name to many teachers who share poetry in their classrooms. Her poems are accessible and profound. They balance provocative, relevant commentary on our world with a sense of joy and possibility that children need to hear in their reading at school.

Her poem "Famous" is one of her best-known poems, but the title is slyly misleading. Instead of celebrating fame in the red-carpet sense of the word, it turns an eye on commonplace things "like a pulley . . . or a buttonhole . . . because it never forgot what it could do."

After reading the poem with students, discuss this question: "What is she doing here with the title and the concept of fame?"  Then, in their notebooks, invite students to create an imaginary "deleted scene" from this poem that fits the spirit of the original.  They might begin with her refrain "The _______ is famous to the ________" to shine a light on a different sort of fame. The opening lines of the last two stanzas also work well for this prompt: "I want to be famous to _______" or "I want to be famous in the way ________." My students wrote about the "fame" of jeeps, staples, touchscreens, pen caps, and tree trunks in their notebooks, to name a few.

When you visit the link to today's poem, be sure to watch the film adaptation of Nye's poem at the bottom of the page.  The creative pairing of video imagery with lines from the poem could spark a discussion all of its own.  In a later post, we will look at another video from the Poetry Foundation's Poem Movie collection.

Further Reading:

Brett Vogelsinger is a ninth-grade English teacher at Holicong Middle School in Bucks County, PA.  He has been starting class with a poem each day for the past ten years. He is the creator of the Go Poems blog and the author of Poetry Pauses: Teaching With Poems to Elevate Writing in All Genres.   Find him on Twitter @theVogelman.

2018 Poem #19 -- Student-Led Observation and Conversation

by Rose Birkhead

Hanging Fire by Audre Lorde is a perfect fit for a fourteen-year-old adolescent student!

On the day I shared this poem with my students, I rearranged the desks to form a circle. The students knew from the beginning of class that today was going to be different, and it brought a new energy to the classroom. I highly recommend rearranging the furniture to promote conversation!

I used the text rendering experience to work through this poem, and also had students write a short comment to connect with the poem, an idea in their head, or an emotion on their heart, the Book-Head-Heart from Kylene Beers & Robert Probst.

First, I read the poem aloud to the students and had the students close their eyes, or put their heads down so they could take in the poem. On second read, I passed around copies of the poem for each student, and displayed it on the board. During the second read, I asked students to underline a sentence that stuck out to them. I read the poem aloud again, and asked them to box a phrase. Finally, I had the students read the poem to themselves, and asked them to circle one word that stood out to them. We shared our sentences, phrases, and words in the traditional text rendering protocol; then I had the students have a full class discussion about the poem for five minutes. After the discussion, students wrote down a new learning from the whole class discussion.

This activity probably takes 15 minutes. The poem has so many layers of meaning, and I was impressed with how the text rendering helped students naturally make connections with the poem. During our whole-group conversation, I held back my thoughts and let the students run the conversation. Their discussion was rich and powerful. The short write after the conversation allowed students to go back and see how/if their thinking changed, and their writing was expressive and personal. Enjoy this age-appropriate poem about being an adolescent.

Further Reading:

Rose Birkhead is a Reading Specialist in Holland, PA. She teaches 7th and 8th grade literacy classes and strives to create a positive learning environment where her students feel successful on a daily basis.

2018 Poem #14 -- Voice of the Past

by Brett Vogelsinger

There is always something special about hearing a poet read his or her own words, and perhaps something extra special about hearing a recorded poet read these words posthumously.  This act reminds us that even the poems that end up commonly anthologized and in the canon are meant to be heard aloud, that they speak from the past most eloquently when we breathe life into them.

Langston Hughes poems frequently surface in student anthologies.  In this video, students have the chance to hear Langston Hughes talk about the experience that led him to write "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" as a young man just out of high school, and then he reads the poem aloud.

An intriguing video to pair with this: a contemporary high school student recites the same poem in the twenty-first century for the Poetry Out Loud competition: 

Three questions to discuss with students after sharing this poem:

• How does knowing the background of the poem and hearing it in the writer's own voice affect our experience with the poem?  
• How does listening to a poem written nearly one hundred years ago give voice to the past? 
• How does the content of the poem give voice to the poet's past? 

Further Reading:

Brett Vogelsinger is a ninth-grade English teacher at Holicong Middle School in Bucks County, PA.  He is the faculty adviser for the school literary magazine, Sevenatenine.  Besides his annual blogging adventure on this site, he has published work on Nerdy Book Club, The New York Times Learning Network, and Edutopia and you can follow him on Twitter (@theVogelman).