2019 Post #3 -- Near Rhyme

by Brett Vogelsinger

Gabriel Fried's poem, "Twilight Field" establishes a delightfully creepy mood with simple langauge and one short stanza:


Twilight Field

The spirits play a children's game;
they pose as trees in clover.
I look. They stay. I look. They stay.
I look again. They're closer.


The second read of this poem demands a choral reading from the class, which adds to the sinister overtones.  And if a student just happens to be open the door and come in late as you read the last word of the poem together as a class . . . well that's just perfect!  For me, this poem catpures that feeling we can sometimes experience when alone with nature, that something is watching us or drawing near, for in nature, we are never entirely in solitude. (Note: The Dr. Who fans in your class will impulsively want to point out a connection to The Weeping Angels at this point as well!)

I use this poem on days when I want to maintain my Poem of the Day routine, but I have limited time.  I write this statement on the board: "This poem has an excellent example of 'near rhyme.'"

After two readings, I ask students to defend this statement, even if they have never heard of "near rhyme" before.  In each class, someone is able to infer what that term must mean, and the student points out that "clover" and "closer" seem to rhyme, but do not excatly rhyme, and the repeated "a" sound (assonance) in "game" and "stay" create a similar effect.

While I do not make it a formal homework assignment, I invite students to pay attention to the lyrics the next time they listen to their favorite music.  Where in the lyrics can they spot an example of near rhyme?  Songwriters often employ near rhyme in order to fit the needed ideas within the rhythm of the music without compromising the overall rhyme scheme.  Put to music, near rhymes sound even more like real rhymes.

While literary terms can be dry when learned in isolation, taught in the context of a quick, enjoyable poem and favorite music they seem far less daunting.

For another Gabriel Fried poem to share, see this post from last year's 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 six years and is the creator of the Go Poems blog to share poetry reading and writing ideas with teachers around the world. Find him on Twitter @theVogelman.

2018 Poem #20 -- Pairing Poems

by Michelle Ambrosini

When I have paired a poem with another poem or with an image, my seventh grade students have shared prolific responses. Pairing “Always” and “Hope is the thing with feathers” allows students to enter the discussion of a big idea using both modern and classic text. By inviting students to sketch Dickinson’s “thing with feathers,” I ask students to make meaning through drawing as well as discussion.

Always

There will always be the waves

rushing in, tumbling out; 

the moon, the fog, the orange

of the morning sun. 

Sadness is not forever.

But let hope be. 

Let it sit by seaside towns,

drift among villages, 

wander in cities. Let it linger

in schools and shipyards

and factories. 

Let it call to you with the scent 

of cinnamon, the taste of mint,

the faraway chant, the chime 

of the clock.

There will always be the babble

of streams, birdsong, 

the whisper of wind. 

Sadness is not forever. 

But let hope be. 

Rebecca Kai Dotlich

Hope is the thing with feathers

Hope is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.

Emily Dickinson

First, students read aloud “Always” by Rebecca Kai Dotlich in pairs -- alternating stanzas or one as the first reader. (I have not yet shared Emily Dickinson’s poem “Hope is the thing with feathers”.) The first question I ask is “What do you notice?”

Students turn and talk and then we share our observations as a whole group.

Students notice the poet’s use of repetition of words: the first and fourth stanzas end with “Sadness is not forever. But let hope be.” They notice the pattern the poet employs in various lines. “There will always be …” starts the first and fourth stanzas. “Let it …” is repeated in the second and third stanzas. Another pattern students notice is the listing of three words or phrases: “the moon, the fog, the orange”; “sit by seaside towns, drift among villages, wander in cities”; “schools and shipyards and factories”; "babble of streams, birdsong, the whisper of wind”. The rhythm the poet creates using repetition demonstrates how rhyming is not needed to create poetry’s mellifluous sounds.

Next, we discuss the poem’s message. If students need prompting, I ask them to consider the title and the repetition. Thanks to the repetition of the final lines of the first and fourth stanzas, students recognize that the poet is contrasting sadness from hope, urging readers to stay hopeful. When students consider the title, they connect this message to the poet’s imploring that remaining hopeful happen “always.” Moreover, as the second and third stanzas describe, staying hopeful happens everywhere and in everything--“by seaside towns... among villages...in cities...schools and shipyards and factories” and “with the scent of cinnamon, the taste of mint, the faraway chant, the chime of the clock.”

Now, I share Dickinson’s ““Hope is the thing with feathers.” Students read it aloud in pairs. Again, I ask students to point out what they notice. Given our recent discussion of Dotlich’s poem, students focus primarily on Dickinson’s metaphor for hope: “the thing with feathers.” They point out the lines that extend the metaphor: “perches,” “sings the tune,” “never stops,” “sweetest… That kept so many warm.” Then, I purposely ask students to sketch a bird in the margins of their paper, thinking about the parallels between a bird and hope as Dickinson describes.

The conversation grows to encompass Dickinson’s message about hope. Students notice the connections between Dotlich’s and Dickinson’s messages. Both promote the beauty of hope and highlight its ubiquity. I introduce the words ubiquity and ubiquitous because both poets show the sentiment that hope is ubiquitous. Dotlich shows this through repetition and pattern and Dickinson shows this through the extended metaphor. Students notice slight differences between the poets’ messages, too. While Dotlich urges readers to remain hopeful despite sadness as “advice” (according to one student), Dickinson “testifies” (again, a student’s observation) that hope is pervasive--in the “chillest land” and “strangest Sea.”

Since students have recently read Pandora’s Box during the Greek mythology unit, they draw connections to the ancient Greeks’ story and how hope remains in the box despite the release of all the world’s evils. We had discussed Greek myths as ancient people’s way of making sense of circumstances they did not understand. Both Dotlich and Dickinson share their understanding of hope in their poems. During a quick write session, I ask students to write about hope--a sketch, a poem, a memory. Students respond in a variety of ways--describing a time they felt hopeful or hopeless, drawing their own metaphor for hope, creating a character who brims with hope. 

Further Reading:

Michelle Ambrosini teaches seventh-grade English at Holicong Middle School in Doylestown, PA.

2018 Poem #8 -- The Power of Poetry

by Travis Crowder

So often, I find that students have a tenuous relationship with poetry. I expose students all year to poems, showing them how to unpack, create, and write about the things that are meaningful to them, the things that interest them. Most often, I find that students will grapple with more difficult poems if they have been given the opportunity to write their own.

Writing their own poetry, though, requires patience and guidance, especially if you work with reluctant readers and writers. I find that many students love writing in non-traditional formats, especially concrete poetry. I introduce nontraditional poetry early in the year, and as the year progresses, I give students chances to write poems that break traditional forms. I love using Allan Wolf’s writing as a starting point because he is an accessible poet, but he also deconstructs traditional forms to engage readers.  

I ask students to jot down these questions…

1. What do I see?
2. What do I hear?
3. What do I feel?
4. What do I smell?
5. What do I think?

...and begin adding their thinking.

Afterward, I display "Don't Be Afraid" by Allan Wolf. It is a segment from Immersed in Verse, a beautiful book of lyricism that invites any writer into the world of writing poetry.

Image taken from Allan Wolf's website, linked above. 

For a few minutes, we discuss how Wolf modifies font size, style, and spacing to match topics and ideas within his poems. Students are always mesmerized by the variations in style and are eager to create their own.

So I let them. And they use the things they saw, heard, felt, smelled, and thought as the foundation for their poems.   

I give them time to play with language, with style, with spacing, and with imagery, much like the poem from Allan Wolf. It is here that students begin to understand purpose, tone, and how poetry can push us past the ostensible. Give them a chance to create. And be prepared to stand in awe of their creations, such as the examples below:

Further Reading:

Travis Crowder is a 7th grade ELA teacher in Hiddenite, NC, teaching ten years in both middle and high school settings. His main goal is to inspire a passion for reading and writing in students. You can follow his work on Twitter (@teachermantrav) and his blog: www.teachermantrav.com/blog.

2018 Poem #1- What's It All About?

by Brett Vogelsinger

Some poems are so simple and beautiful that overthinking them, as English teachers are prone to do, can risk losing the potent, raw effect of the words.

I first discovered Nikki Giovanni's poem "Quilts" in her illustrated children's book I Am Loved.  I was next to my sons, reading them the book at bedtime, when the poem suddenly seized me, choked me up, sent chills down my spine.

To allow students to have this experience with poetry, it is sometimes necessary to minimize our intervention and discussion of the poems.  We must also unabashedly share our own unexpected emotional responses to a poem.  For me, it was the closing lines that move me the most:

        When I am frayed and strained and drizzled at the end
         Please someone cut a square and put me in a quilt
         That I might keep some child warm

        And some old person with no one else to talk to
        Will hear my whispers

        And cuddle
        near.

So when I share this poem with students, I tell them it is new to me, and the first time I read it, it almost made me cry in front of my sons.  I do not try to explain why this happened, just share that it happened, and that I hope they find a poem like this in their lives at some point, maybe even in the course of our class.

After hearing the poem twice, read aloud the first time by me and the second time by one of my students, I asked the class only one question: "What's this poem about?"

This simple but excellent question about poetry invites divergent thinking early in the class period.  In this case, students brought up that the poem is about aging, usefulness, love, timelessness, change, and comfort.  The question avoids killing the poem with over-analysis, and the student observations are varied.

Try this with "Quilts," or with a poem of your own choosing that speaks to your heart.

And welcome to our second year of Go Poems.  I hope you find some intriguing ideas for reading daily poetry in your classroom.

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.

Go Poem #27 -- Wreck This Poem

by Brett Vogelsinger

As teachers of poetry, we have likely all spoken about the value of each word in a poem.  It is no hyperbole to say that each word in a poem carries more weight than each word in an essay, short story, or novel.  But to make this fact have a bit more impact, and in the spirit of Keri Smith's wildly successful creative journal series, it can be fun to experiment with "wrecking" a poem.

Anne Porter's Poem "Wild Geese Alighting on a Lake" is a poem that students can easily identify as tranquil in its mood.  I challenge students to wreck the poem in their Writer's Notebooks by drastically altering its mood.  They must do this by changing only five words.

Fair warning: if you try this in class, a fair amount of students will kill off those geese.  Nonetheless, the outcomes are remarkable.  A poem that is nearly the same can be so, so, incredibly different when the writer (student) alters just five of the writer's (poet's) words.  Your class is guaranteed a few laughs along the way, and we can only hope that Anne Porter would forgive and maybe even applaud the kids' irreverent ingenuity.

An interesting extension might include a discussion of the connotations of those five changed words, for it is the associations of the individual words that help to craft the mood in a poem.

Further Reading:

Living Things: Collected Poems by Anne Porter

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.

Go Poem #22 -- Mood Music

by Lisa Levin

Musician Jeff Tweedy recently turned Carl Sandburg’s poem “Theme In Yellow” into “an airy, idyllic folk song” that appears on Brooklyn musician David Nagler's tribute album, Carl Sandburg's Chicago Poems.

The poem describes a midwestern October and is filled with images of "prairie cornfields / Orange and tawny gold clusters" and children "singing ghost songs / And love to the harvest moon" while gathered around a pumpkin (or someone pretending to be a pumpkin), who serves as the poem's speaker.

I project the text of this poem on the screen while my students listen to the song. I tell the students very little beforehand, except that they should try and ascertain whether the poem develops a story from the images the poet creates. After the song, I ask a student to volunteer to read the poem to the class. Next we discuss the literary element of mood. Students define the mood of the poem and then provide lines from the poem as supporting evidence. It was interesting that half of the students found the mood to be peaceful and half found the mood to be sinister!

Lisa Levin teaches ninth-grade English at Holicong Middle School in Doylestown, PA.

Further Reading:

Go Poem #12 -- Advertising With Poetry

by Brett Vogelsinger

Today's post offers two poems for the price of one.  Both are in video format, for the poems have been adopted by companies in hopes of making their brand appeal to the hearts and minds of customers.

First, we have Charles Bukowski poem "The Laughing Heart" found in a Levi's commercial.

Second, we have Maya Angelou's "The Human Family" found in an iPhone commercial.

Using one or both of these poems, discuss these questions as a class:

What does the company seek to communicate about their brand using this poem?  What associations do they want you, the audience, to make with Levis or Apple?  What connotations are they developing for their brand? 

What are your thoughts on using poetry for the purpose of advertising? Does it devalue the poem that someone besides the author is using it to make money?  Or does it bring poetry, framed professionally with images and music, to a vast audience, making poetry more approachable?

It may be worth noting that both of these commercials were produced after the death of the poets who wrote the poems, so someone other than the original poet had to give permission to use the poem in this manner.  If you were responsible for the copyright of a famous poet's work, what questions would you ask before granting permission to use the poet's work in a television commercial?

Brett Vogelsinger teaches freshman English students at Holicong Middle School in Doylestown, PA where he starts class with a poem each day. Follow his work on Twitter @theVogelman.

Further Reading:

Go Poem #11 -- Experiencing a Poem

by Pernille Ripp

My classes read the poem “Hugging Jose” by Jason Reynolds because they love the work of Jason Reynolds, and also because it shows poetry from a different standpoint.  Not the traditionally viewed version of poetry, but instead one that is written to evoke emotion and help students connect to the form of poetry.

I read it aloud while the students follow along and then in small groups I have them discuss the following questions:

Who is the person writing it?

Who is he writing it for and why?

How can you relate to this poem?

How do you feel after reading this poem?

A big part of our focus whenever we discuss poetry is looking at how language is used to evoke emotions and so we do not analyze poetry in the traditional sense, but instead reflect on what mood we are in as readers after experiencing a poem.  Which words are powerful to us and why?  The answers vary from group to group, and I think this is so important to emphasize with the kids; there is no right answer but instead answers based on our experience.  

I wrap the lesson up by asking about the end message -- the final two lines of the poem -- what does Jason Reynolds want us to walk away with?  This poem speaks to many of my kids, not all, but I think it offers a way to show them that poetry might be more raw than they assume.

Pernille Ripp is a seventh-grade language arts teacher from Madison, WI. Follow her work on Twitter: @pernilleripp

Further Reading:

Go Poem #5 -- Clear Rhythm, Ambiguous Mood

by Joy Kirr

I was first introduced to the poem “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke when Michael W. Smith (co-author of Literary Elements: How to Teach What Really Matters About Character, Setting, Point of View, and Theme) came to our middle school. We use it in our 7th grade ELA class just the way he presented it to us.

I have students read the poem once to themselves.

Students read the poem a second time silently, annotating something new that they notice the second time around.

Students listen as the teacher reads the poem aloud this time, taking note of the rhythm. The teacher opens discussion with this question: Does the rhythm remind anyone of anything?

Students note what they feel is the overall mood of the poem on this sliding scale, what Michael Smith calls a “semantic differential scale”:

The students circle or highlight three words from the poem to support their choice, and as a class we discuss, “What words contribute to the mood or atmosphere of the poem?”

Students can now take the time to move their mark on the sliding scale or not, depending on the evidence they hear in the discussion.

We use this poem to practice fishbowl discussions, so you could extend the sliding-scale question into a discussion of why it is considered “warm” or “cold.” I find I change my mind often during fishbowl discussions, depending on the background information students bring to the table.

Joy Kirr currently teaches 7th graders in Arlington Heights, IL and blogs at http://geniushour.blogspot.com. Follow her on Twitter +Joy Kirr 

Further Reading