Poetry and the Standards?

by Sandina Alexander, Manchester High School, Manchester, Ohio

Years ago, and I do mean years, my principal asked me if I would be interested in teaching an elective class that would be fun and give the students something easy to take, something like poetry. I'm thinking "easy?" "poetry?" Now, I'm not sure poetry and easy can be used in the same sentence. But, hey, I write poetry, so why not teach others? How hard can it be? Read a few poems to my students, practice the key elements of poetry, and they will create beautiful poetry, right?

Well, the only element they seemed to grasp was how to rhyme. They could rhyme almost any word. It didn't matter if the words made sense or not as long as the last words rhymed. Okay, so that's not too bad. We would work on different rhyme schemes, then work on making sense out of the words.

We read limericks and then wrote limericks. As long as we didn't go over five lines, we were doing fine. Then I introduced stanzas to their vocabulary. Now they were writing eight lines, then twelve, then sixteen―all revolving around being in love, a loved one, or a broken heart, or they whined about not having anything to write about. They were becoming frustrated, and so was I.

I wanted my students to experience poetry. That doesn't mean just read it or try to interpret a meaning from it. We have to get to know poetry―what it is, how it functions, what it says, where it hides, what it eats. What it eats? Poetry doesn't eat or hide. Does it? In my poetry class it does!

One day, after reading my zillionth heartbreak poem, I remembered something one of the Miami OWP (Ohio Writing Project) groups would say when we were lost for topics for our poetry. I firmly told my students, "There's poetry in everything. It just hides sometimes, and you have to go looking for it." We were going to have to go on a scavenger hunt for poetry. "But I can't write poetry!" was the response that resounded throughout the classroom. "Let's find it first, and then we will worry about writing it," I replied.

At the beginning of each semester I have students tell me they can't write poetry. So I begin teaching my poetry class by having the students tell me why they can't write poetry. Of course, they must write it in a poetic form. One easy form is the list poem. I walk them through the prewriting part. We make a list on the board, and then I create a poem on the overhead for them. They begin their poems with "I can't write poetry because...," and they make a list of at least eight reasons. When they finish, they have a poem. These are shared during class the next day.

The next assignment looks for poetry―where poetry hides. This one begins with "Poetry hides..." Most students will make a list of places where poetry hides. Their responses include the usual places: your heart, your mind, but some will venture on the wild side and be creative. It hides in the refrigerator, beneath the bed, in a box. Then I read them an example of a poem that I have written or one by a student from the previous semester. They return to their poems ready to expand the hiding places. The heart becomes "a broken heart flooded with tears"; "the mind spews an avalanche of memories." Poetry hides "in the back of the refrigerator behind the ketchup and mayonnaise jars, in the lone pickle floating in its jar," "beneath the bed chasing the dust bunnies in circles," "in a box filled with faded pictures of family members lost forever." Students begin asking for a thesaurus, and I find them using similes and metaphors and even extended metaphors. They begin using adjectives and adverbs and searching for language that will express what is in their minds. I pull some of their metaphors and similes out of their pieces, and we discuss how and why we use adjectives and adverbs. We discuss the difference between action verbs and state-of-being verbs, active and passive verbs. We learn about prepositional phrases. We learn the difference between phrases and clauses. Then we write poems beginning each line with one of those parts of speech. (Oops! Did we just do grammar lessons?)

I try to incorporate fun projects for them to do. Some are done individually, and some are done as group projects. In the past the students have made poetry bracelets, personal poetry books, a poetry quilt, and a theme anthology titled Utensils. One day I took the students to the art room, and they painted on a canvas. The next day they wrote poems in relation to their paintings. These were then displayed at the county arts festival. I have also been publishing the students' work in anthologies for years. We do our own publishing. An art student usually designs the cover (occasionally this is also one of the poets), and we sell the booklets to cover the costs of publication. Most of the time we run out of copies. The other students love reading them.

I started publishing students' works during my student teacher experience many years ago. I had a unique experience because I had to do my student teaching during the summer and the students were there because they wanted to be. During the last week, my cooperative teacher had me design a unit on anything I was interested in, so I chose poetry. I had been writing poetry since I was... well, a long time before student teaching. The students seemed to enjoy the booklet, and it has become a treasure for me to return to thirty-one years later.

I want students to enjoy writing whether it is poetry or prose. They don't mind writing something short, and so we keep it short. Once in a while students will realize that even prose can be poetic, and they carry their learning over into the regular language arts classes.

I try to expose them to different types of poems by bringing in examples and having them bring in examples of their favorite poems. We discuss rhyme schemes, rhythm, what feet and meter are, and how to use them in their own writing.

We do a lot of "copy poems" until students become comfortable with white space and line breaks. One of the poems I like to use in my American literature class is George Ella Lyon's "Where I'm from..." poem.* Every year students amaze me with their interpretations. I could ask them to write an essay on where they are from, but I doubt the results would be as powerful as the poems.

As far as teaching poetry or writing poetry being "easy," it's not. But poetry is powerful. Students write. They read. They learn.**  Poetry sneaks up on them and teaches them so much, and when they learn, that is power. Notice that during this whole article, I didn't mention the standards. I didn't mention them in class either, but we met many of them. The students didn't even realize it. As a matter of fact, I was having so much fun, I didn't realize it either.

**Read opinions about poetry expressed by three of Sandina's students in the Student Voices section.

Sandina Alexander has been teaching language arts for thirty-one years in the Manchester school area. She received her bachelor's degree from the University of Cincinnati and her master's from the College of Mount Saint Joseph. She has published a book of poetry titled Aint Got No Poetry, and she enjoys writing in what little spare time she can find.

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Editor's Note: We would love to share your students' poems with our readers. Send us your students' content-area and nonfiction-based poems, and we will publish them in a special place on our AdLIT blog. (You will also need to send us written parental permission to publish them.)