Five Tools for Approaching Poetry

What does this poor bunny have to do with poetry? See #2 below!

A poem is a petri dish for language. A poet takes a word, an image, a line, a thought—isolates it, and sees what happens. If you want to know how language works, one way is to study poetry. Instead of inundating the reader with pages of text, poetry presents mere lines—lines that I can read and re-read, lines where a poet has concentrated all her control over all the powers of language to transport a thought, feeling, or image from her heart or mind to mine. And so I call my poetry unit for 10th graders “Paying Attention.”

But what you want right now is some tools—not an apologetic or a motivational speech. Something to reinvigorate tomorrow or next unit or whenever you have poetry staring you and your students in the face. So here are 5 tools I’ve found effective in helping 10th graders grapple with and appreciate poetry: (1) performance poetry, (2) a protocol for poetry analysis, (3) annotations, (4) writing drafts patterned on mentor texts, and (5) looking at song lyrics as poetry.

(1) Performance poetry. I use Daniel Beaty’s “Knock Knock” for an introduction. Students who groan at the very word “poetry” are transfixed by the passion evident in the performance. The topics of mass incarceration, prejudice, inheritance, and overcoming adverse circumstances are relevant to students’ lives, prompting connections and conversation. The poem bears deeper examination of the poetic and literary devices that help convey the meaning. 

Here’s what I’ve done with it. 

• We watch it once, just looking for what catches our attention the first time through. Small groups discuss: What’s happening (summary)? What questions do we have? What words, phrases, images, or pattern caught our attention? What is our initial overall response? 
• Next we read a copy of the text and mark it up (see "Annotations," #3 below). What original observations are confirmed? What questions are answered? What additional words, phrases, images, patterns do we notice? How do our responses develop? Small groups share annotations.
• Finally, we watch it one more time and consider how multiple exposures to and discussions of a text deepen our understanding. (See also my blog  “Using Annotation as Assessment, Formative and Summative.") 

(2) A protocol for poetry analysis. This is not meant to kill a poem by dissection, but to give a little traction for gaining confidence in poetry reading. I’ve seen such acronyms proliferating on teacher threads recently, and you're free to use any one that you find helpful. This is one I created years ago, and it works well for me. I call it “rest in peace, long-eared rabbit” and draw a picture (see photo at top). Once students are familiar with it, they just call it RIPLER, but until then and long afterward, the picture is a great memory prompt. Out of the 6 letters, the first 3 have to do with simply questioning the text, the next 2 with special tools of language, and the final one with personal response.

• Read according to punctuation, not line breaks—avoiding the “round yon virgin” pitfall. In my younger days I had a mental picture of a plump Mary beside the manger due to singing “all is bright / ‘round yon virgin” according to line breaks rather than punctuation. 
• Identify the speaker and audience—“I” may be the poet, or may be a persona. “You” may be the reader, or a real or imagined other. Is every singer always singing about actual break-ups with actual people? Even without an actual “I” and “you” in the text, identifying the speaker and audience helps set the context.
• Paraphrase—Possibly by sentence (helps with #1) or by stanza.
• Listen to sound devices—rhyme, rhythm, repetition, alliteration, assonance, consonance, onomatopoeia…
• Envision images—both literal sensory images (usually sight, but also sound, smell, taste, touch) and figurative (metaphor, simile, personification) (*See extra: Pictures and videos below.)
• Respond—After reserving judgment and trying to just listen, working to figure out what the poet was trying to say, how he was trying to say it, and in what ways the “how” impacted the what—now: What are your thoughts/feelings in response?

(3) Annotations: For every poem we read, students have a copy they can write on. I call it “putting my brain on paper.” I just write down what my brain does as it grapples with the text. RIPLER is a great place to start, and anything else my brain comes up with: connections, questions, pictures, vocabulary words, other literary techniques I notice, like paradox or parallelism. At the beginning, I model, using a document camera. Student can do it in groups on enlarged copies. (When each student uses a different colored pen, all students are accountable to contribute!) And individuals can do it. In fact, I use this as both formative and summative assessment. (For more, see my blog “Annotations as Summative Assessment: What Can They Really Do?”) (For my full summative assessment prompt, see this link.) 

*Extra: The sounds of words. To have fun with and foster just enjoying the sounds of words, I play a recording of Dr. Demento’s radio skit “Bulbous Bouffant.” If you’re not familiar with it, it’s 4 minutes of word-nerd hilarity that not many non-word-nerds can resist. We just enjoy it, discuss words that are new to some, propose our favorites, and suggest any other words we find cool or funny just from their sound. 

**Extra: Pictures and videos. Use a Google search and projection to cultivate a response of actually conjuring up images and sounds. When we read “In Flanders Fields,” what do poppies look like? What does a lark sound like? When we read “The Guitar” by Federico Garcia Lorca, what does classical Spanish guitar look like? Sound like? 

(4) Poem drafts patterned on mentor texts. Doing deepens learning, so every time we read and discuss a poem, the students and I practice doing ourselves what we just watched a professional do. I pick a cool move the poet made with language, and challenge us to try it. It’s the scrimmage after studying the game. Sometimes we are surprised at how effectively we can communicate, and sometimes we learn that it is harder that it looks, but we always understand language and appreciate the skill it takes to wield it well better at the end. (For more, see my blog “Learning by Doing: Poetry”) 

(5) Song lyrics. This is my final assessment—what the whole unit is building toward, the transfer of skills I really want students to be able to do. Essentially, it’s a poetry analysis paper, with the analysis practiced upon student-selected song lyrics, with a hypothetical audience and purpose created by couching it as a school literary magazine article. Here’s the introduction: “As a teen who is much more aware than the average of the power and beauty of language all around us, you have a challenge: it involves kids who think poetry is irrelevant and miss half of the artistry of the lyrics they listen to, and adults who think modern songs are mental fluff and no one’s written good poetry in the last 100 years. Your goal is to convince kids (and adults) that poetry is not dead, lyrics can be powerful poetry, and being able to analyze them as such will deepen their understanding and appreciation of the songs they listen to every day, of truth, and of the power of language.”  (See here for the full prompt.)

The next thing I want to try is blackout poetry--I've heard so many good reports about its effectiveness.

What tools do you find effective for helping students appreciate poetry?