2022 Post #3 -- Enough Ballrooms In You

 by Elizabeth Oosterheert

Culturally, we seem to find shipwrecks fascinating, whether the wreckage is actual or figurative.
Laura Lamb Brown Lavoie’s haunting poem “Titanic,” beautifully read by Sarah Kay, invites us to consider both–and not only to contemplate wreckage, but resilience.

There are myriad ways to invite students into this work and use it as a mentor for writing our own memorable poetry. Following are a few ways to dive into the waves with students and “swim” in a shimmering sea of words:

• Share this brief video about the decay of Titanic’s wreckage. This gives students a good frame of reference for the descriptions in Lavoie’s poem of elements like Titanic’s stalactite beard, and it also illustrates the loneliness that lingers around the ship’s remains more than a century after her demise.
• Provide students with a hard copy of the poem, and invite them to listen to this beautiful narration of “Titanic” by Sarah Kay, found on poetryfoundation.org and Ours Poetica.
• Discuss craft moves such as the use of sound devices, lists, and the development of dialogue between the narrator and Titanic, and what students notice about this unusual conversation. I created this hyperdoc for my students to enrich our discussion.
• This poem could serve as a bridge to other poems featuring conversations involving inanimate objects, such as Sarah Kay’s “Poem from a Toothbrush to a Bicycle Tire,” and a next step could be inviting students to try writing their own conversation poems. Encourage them to use some of the same powerful craft moves that they noticed in Lavoie’s poem. Interestingly, conversation poems also appear in Kwame Alexander’s beloved Newbery novel in verse, The Crossover.

Perhaps the most powerful aspect of “Titanic” is Lavoie’s reminder and charge to all of us to take the risk of being gouged open by love in a world that often feels sinister and isolating. In emptying ourselves sacrificially for the good of someone else, we become stronger.


Further Reading:



Elizabeth Oosterheert is a middle school language and theatre arts teacher in Central Iowa. Like the Titanic, she believes that sometimes, we have to sail into icebergs with courage and grace. You can find her on Twitter @oosterheerte, or on stage with her 8th Grade Theatre Troupe.

2020 Post #3 -- Sarah Kay and the Power of Lists

by Candace Brobst

Sarah Kay has the power to convince even the most jaded students among us that poetry isn’t so bad. She is both poet and hypnotist, and April is a time when teachers are perhaps more in need of the latter. To be honest, there are days in April where T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” doesn’t seem so bad.

I teach Seniors, by choice I might add, not because my school’s administration is trying to punish me. And by April, student engagement is waning. Seniors have grabbed the nearest scissors, and they are cutting their own umbilical cords to anything school related. Younger students are no doubt also feeling the restlessness of spring, the home stretch, whatever. I like to capture that I-have-something-to-say-before-I-go energy with Sarah Kay’s “If I Should Have a Daughter…” TED Talk.

The entire TED Talk (18 minutes) is a you-can-do-this tutorial and inspiration for writing performance poetry so if you have a whole period, keep going. Have students become the virtual participants in Kay’s master class. There’s even another great poem at the end.

But if time is short, and you are trying to follow Brett’s lead with this poem-a-day challenge, just play the poem (the first three and a half minutes of the TED Talk). Kay assumes the role of an imaginary mother giving advice to her imaginary daughter. In the spirit of the poem, direct students to become the sages (a.k.a. mothers 😉). Have them create a quick list, as in: “Things I Know to be True” or “I Wish I had Known…” From there, Pair-Share, throw ideas on the whiteboard, or make a Nearpod Collaborate! Board.

Seniors in particular can do this as a culminating reflection on high school. Start with a list they can ultimately use to write letters to younger versions of themselves, armed with what they now know… things like: “Don’t wait until Senior year to take that first art elective” or “Audition for the musical; you are going to meet your best friends.” One year, my school (graduating class around 1000 students) had Seniors write letters of advice to incoming Freshmen. Distributing them was a logistical nightmare (one we never repeated), but it may work better in smaller districts.  

Further Reading:

Candace Brobst (brobstc@parklandsd.org) teaches English and Creative Writing at Parkland High School in Allentown, PA. She very much enjoys receiving assignments from former students.

Postscript: OK, OK, this is Brett writing now and I need to explain the last line of that bio . . . Candace Brobst is my high school creative writing teacher and one of the MAJOR early influences. My love of reading and writing poetry owes so much to this wonderful teacher, and I feel so honored that she agreed to write a post to my blog project.