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 #13 -- A Poetry Sampler

by Zach Sibel

Last year on Go Poems, I wrote about teaching poetry like an appetizer, giving students a number of poems to choose from to discover which taste best to them. With the success of last year’s “rappers as poets” sampler, I thought that this year I could tackle some more classic poetry, the Romantics.

Simply saying the word “romance” in a middle school can send a class into a frenzy of “Ewwww!" This, like many dislikes, is usually rooted in miseducation or misunderstanding. I decided to accept the challenge of “making old poetry cool again” and get students to realize that they can relate to these “old guy poets,” as one student so eloquently put it.

I start by asking students what they think “Romance” is and what it means. Here you get your standard “love” answers. I explain to students that romance in the Romantic era was more than that; it was a retreat to simpler means and the appreciation of nature. I ask students to think about the last time they took a walk -- just to take a walk -- or went outside with no rhyme or reason. After that, I pass out their Romantic packet, which features poems from Wordsworth, Blake, and Whitman; I ask students to read through them, picking one to annotate.

Giving student choice allows them to get more into what they are reading. By creating a sense of context with the explanation of the Romantic period, students are able to understand the poetry a little bit better. While analysis is nice and at times impressive, the best part of this is the opportunity for readers response. By giving choice, students do not feel forced to connect with a text; they feel that they can be more honest in the connections that they have, moving past what they think the “right” answer is and closer to what resonates with them.

Some questions you might want to ask are, “What do all these poems have in common?” or even “What seems ‘romantic’ about them?” I have come to realize in the past few years that these types of conversations about poetry spike greater interest than simply talking about figurative language or form.

The Fly

William Blake

Little Fly

Thy summer's play,

My thoughtless hand

Has brush'd away.

Am not I

A fly like thee?

Or art not thou

A man like me?

For I dance

And drink & sing;

Till some blind hand

Shall brush my wing.

If thought is life

And strength & breath;

And the want

Of thought is death;

Then am I

A happy fly,

If I live,

Or if I die.

My Pretty Rose Tree
William Blake

A flower was offered to me,

Such a flower as May never bore;

But I said 'I've a pretty rose tree,'

And I passed the sweet flower o'er.

Then I went to my pretty rose tree,

To tend her by day and by night;

But my rose turned away with jealousy,

And her thorns were my only delight.

Other poems included in my sampler this year:


A Slumber did my Spirit Seal by William Wordsworth

O Captain! My Captain! by Walt Whitman

O Me! O Life! by Walt Whitman

Further Reading:

Zach Sibel is an 8th grade English teacher at Tohickon Middle School and a lover of poetry, hip-hop, and all things writing. For more about my class you can find me on Twitter @MrSibelENG . Please don’t hesitate to reach out!