Matching Tracksuits

Fun in Fours

Results For "poetry"

Stage Fright

Thursday 12 November 2009

Ron sits in the front row and raps. Sometimes it’s an audible mumble, but it’s often just a whisper.

Harvey likes to turn his desk into a drum set. He’ll beat, thump, scratch — he’ll get more sound out of a school desk than one would think possible.

Keeping them quiet is a recurring task. It’s not a constant battle, but I do have to ask them a few times a week to stop the disruption.

Working on poetry and teaching meter, I was having students gradually move from dryly reciting the poem (“Cat!”, from yesterday) to rapping it. The idea was to get them to create a rap and “a beat” and point out that it all depends on the pattern of stressed syllables in the poem. I asked Ron to rap; with a nervous laugh, he eventually begged off. When a student finally volunteered, I turned to Harvey to supply the beat. He too said he’d rather not.

Another ironic moment in the classroom.

Choral Cats

Wednesday 11 November 2009

Photo by Hannibal Poenaru

Photo by Hannibal Poenaru

We’ve started a poetry unit; as I always do, I began by asking students to do some free writing to answer a simple question: “What is poetry?” Inevitably, the first or second response mentions “feelings.” If I’m lucky — as I was today — they make broader connections, such as “music” or “enlightenment.”

Teaching poetry to adolescents is a trick. Boys don’t like it because, at this age, “feelings” are not something they generally care to delve into. Poetry has to seem alive and less academic. Today I rediscovered that a poem that is strongly rhythmic and filled with fun sound devices (onomatopoeia, alliteration, a bit of assonance) combined with some choral reading makes for a great start to a poetry unit.

“Cat!” by Eleanor Farjeon fit the bill perfectly.

Cat!
Scat!
After her, after her,
Sleeky flatterer,
Spitfire chatterer,
Scatter her, scatter her
Off her mat!
Wuff!
Wuff!
Treat her rough!
Git her, git her,
Whiskery spitter!
Catch her, catch her,
Green-eyed scratcher!
Slathery
Slithery
Hisser,
Don’t miss her!
Run till you’re dithery,
Hithery
Thithery
Pftts! pftts!
How she spits!
Spitch! Spatch!
Can’t she scratch!
Scritching the bark
Of the sycamore tree,
She’s reached her ark
And’s hissing at me
Pftts! pftts!
Wuff! wuff!
Scat,
Cat!
That’s
That!

Starting with an animated reading, we moved to a semi-choral reading, with students reading the italicized portions. Then a few students took a try at reading this verbally challenging poem. By then, it was easy slide into a discussion of onomatopoeia and verbal rhythm.

A successful lesson that leaves me eager to return tomorrow.

Photo by Hannibal Poenaru

Measured Words

Thursday 5 November 2009

Lesson PlanningRobert Frost reportedly said, “Writing poetry without rhyme is like playing tennis without a net.” The same could be said of meter-free poetry.

We’ve been working on poetic meter in English I Honors, and yesterday I sent them packing with deceptively simple homework: write a sonnet.

“What’s a sonnet?” they thought. Fourteen lines of iambic pentameter — da-Dum times five.

One by one they filed in today, and one by one they declared, “That homework was a nightmare!”

We took some individual lines and examined them, adding words and massaging the lines until they were roughly iambic pentameter. The homework for tonight: rework the first four lines so that they are all the proper meter. Just before the bell, I reminded them of the next hurdle in sonnets: “Remember, we’re working on English sonnets, so ultimately we’ll be having an a-b-a-b rhyme scheme for this first quatrain.”

The moans were overwhelming, but at the very least, they have a newly found respect for Shakespeare: “He wrote 154 sonnets.”

“Did he not have any friends?” one young man asked.

Thoughtful

Sunday 8 February 2009

What I was getting at in the last post is simple: most inspirational writing requires no mental unpacking. It tells; it doesn’t show.

Nell Maiden (who, I recently and sadly discovered, died in 2003)  shows:

Prayer, September 29

Lord,
if it’s going to happen,
pack it in an earthquake.

Give me epiphanies that blind,
that trip or wring
and tear but leave no doubt.

Deliver me from diurnal grinddown,
from innuendos, suspicions,
from mere cells quitting.

Let it be fatal and instant.

Or stripe it with rainbow.
Call me to action with purple.

Lord, let me know.

I sleep in lieu of deliberation.

I’m strung staccato.

I’m insensitive to puns, hair growing,
the lampshade wearing thin, that shy kiss
that hardly costs a breath.

Lord, grant me moans.

And when it’s over, give me
a moment to realize and leave
me breath enough to say:
yes, yes, yes.

Amen.

That is what I mean.

But most Evangelical believers don’t seem to be interested in things that have multiple meanings, especially when it comes to belief and faith. They seem to be less interested in instant epiphanies than instant religious gratification: microwave dinners for the soul.

I don’t want my soul filled up with cliches.