by Brett Vogelsinger
Every teenager -- and most adults -- can be seen in their native habitats scrolling through their phones sometimes. While the term "doomscrolling" has emerged as an etymological outcropping of our lives over the past year, there can also be a pleasanter sort of scroll to try on your phone. Wandering through photos of better times you have almost forgotten about can bring a sense of warmth to a cold and lonely season.
Jonathan Potter's poem, "Self-Portrait with Wife" is an excellent example of the power words have when they are inspired by and create images.
Potter's poem seems simple enough, at first, a list of the details of an image of two people with photographic accuracy. But the words used to capture these images are powerfully suggestive of backstory and plot: "our bed of bliss," "the laundry basket empty," "your son's painting" and "the almost hidden books." What do each of these snippets suggest about these characters? What do they show but never tell us about the people in the portrait?
Challenge students to scroll through their own phone and find a "self-portrait" with another person. Capture the details in the photo with words, even the unintended details of the background, clothing, positioning, and light. Suggest some of the history of these two people without telling the reader about them. What might their footwear (or lack of it) imply, like it does in the poem we just read? What fragment of a story do the surroundings of these people tell, like that smudge on the mirror in Jonathan Potter's poem? Has anything been cropped from this photo, and what might this suggest to a reader, if we let them in on that secret?
Every developing artist creates a self-portrait at some point. Developing poets can too. Make it a self-portrait with a second person, and possible plots emerge at the edges.
Further Reading:
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.
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