2021 Post #12 -- Instagram Poems of Empowerment

by Allison Marchetti

In the age of social media, most of us have been the recipient of an unkind message or comment. Deleting or ignoring these messages can help take away the sting, but oftentimes the hurt from words lingers. In her incredible new book of poems, What Kind of Woman, Kate Baer takes the raw material of Instagram haters and transforms their disparaging words into new poems that empower, embolden, and better serve the recipient than the original message.

Baer’s Instagram rewrites look a lot like the newspaper blackout poems popularized by Austin Kleon (Steal Like an Artist), but instead of using newspaper and magazine articles, she uses the direct messages she receives. For example, in the poem “I hope this finds you,” Baer transforms a message in which a follower encourages her to take a detox cleanse to shed her extra weight. Using the same words in the same order, plus the power of erasure, she dissolves the original message into just 12 words that speak the power of learning to love the bodies we live in. Another poem, “It is unbearable” turns a message that criticizes Baer’s work into a feminist overture.

How might these poems of transformation help our students who are barraged by digital messages that might not be serving them? Here’s how a study of Baer’s work might go:

Pull up Baer’s instagram feed and share some examples of her Instagram blackout poems. You can tell you’re looking at a blackout poem because the post will contain two slides: the first slide is the new poem, the second slide is the original message.

Invite students to discuss her work: what makes these poetic responses so powerful? How do you think Baer goes about choosing which words to keep and retract?

Invite students to pull up or remember a hateful message they or a friend has received. Alternatively, allow them to scroll the profiles of Instagram influencers in search of hateful comments -- sadly, there is no shortage of them.

Give students time to talk in groups about the original message and how they might go about transforming these messages of hate into poems of empowerment. Give students time to write, share, and write some more.

The next day, students can share the original message alongside the new poem in a gallery style walk (either virtual or in person).

Further Reading:

  

Allison Marchetti (@allisonmarchett) is co-author with Rebekah O’Dell of WRITING WITH MENTORS, BEYOND LITERARY ANALYSIS and A TEACHER’S GUIDE TO MENTOR TEXTS (March 2021). She is the co-founder of Moving Writers, a blog for secondary writing teachers. She lives with her family in Richmond, Virginia.

2018 Poem #11 -- Crossing Genre Borders

by Charles Moore

In my experience, and maybe in yours as well, our students do not connect to non-fiction on the same level that they do with poetry.

I decided to try to address this lack of connection by using poetry to show how connected we can be with our reading lives.

Our unit would give us the opportunity to explore the research process, and we began by reading reviews.  We looked at a video game review, a movie review, a piece by Leonard Pitts and this review  that weighs the merits of our current poetry culture.

The students can notice important parts of the articles and respond to them with their thinking but they could not even fake an emotional connection to the articles no matter how hard I pushed.

We talk about poetry often in my classroom.  It is easy for me to ask the kids to respond to a poem in their writers’ notebooks, and I see them pour their thinking on to pages.  The connections they make are incredible.  They are good at it.

So I began one day with this poem, posted on Instagram by Rupi Kaur:

We talked about the poem and they noticed how it drove their thinking on an emotional level.

We talked about that reaction. Specifically, we examined how texts other than poetry can have an impact on us.  We talked about trying to use this type of connection in our reading of non-fiction texts.  

As we reached back to non-fiction, we were able to make deeper and more meaningful connections to the text, and it showed in our writing.

Don’t be afraid to leverage poetry in the instruction of other types of writing.  No matter what we think of this current generation of learners, poetry reaches them like it reaches those that came before them. 

Further Reading:

Charles Moore teaches Senior English in League City, TX.  His daily poetry picks are the most fun part of his lesson planning.