how to talk about poetry

This is where we learn from our students, and as any good teacher knows, this is one of the great gifts of the profession. We accepted twenty-six poems. Time, which tames all but the wildest of lions, has tamed them, too. With that in mind here is a poem I wrote for Write where we are Now. Feel free to play a recording of the poem or show a video of someone reading the poem, too. I wanted them to examine, question, surmise, discuss, mimic, dramatize, and translate as they read and responded to poems, and I hoped they would develop a newfound sense of how to talk to, talk with, and talk about poetry. Essay on Poetry: Topics, Outline, Tips. This page is brought to you by the OWL at Purdue University. The conversation the student had with the poem was significant; she had to examine both the construction of the poem and the theme in order to mimic it. It is not the form normally used to write about an object. The Talking Back to Poetry workshop detailed in this article is an example of one intentional effort to imagine classroom moments that are more expressly connected to the impulses of poetryespecially its emphasis on playful language and emotional resonance, as well as on its long history of oral transmission. Visit the NEA Big Read website for application and deadline information. This is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. As a poet myself, I beg you, please, please give the poem some breathing space when you reproduce it for class use. Read it aloud. So the crisis has perhaps brought poetry with its ability to make the abstract more concrete, its ability to distil and clarify, its ability to reflect the surreal and strange world we now find ourselves in back to the fore. Next, ask yourself why the poet chose this subject for the poem, and what larger ideas or issues the poet is talking about through this subject. Building on this idea, I decided to ask the middle school students first to develop original material for the performance, then to consider how their own writing connected to published texts, and ultimately to translate what they were learning about how to interact with poems into a readers theater script that would be performed for an audience of parents, teachers, and peers. Thats part of the reason why we often talk about events narratively and in ways that are connected to our reactions. The Italian sonnet has three verses, rhyming as follows: Example:Sonnet 43 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, According to Oxford Dictionaries, a couplet is a pair of successive lines of verse, typically rhyming and of the same length.. As for poetry, why, we can always take refuge in the classics. You can make your own rules here, but you should use this style to create an emotional response. We have graduated! That feeds into this sense that poetry is something formal, something which might stand to attention in the corner of the room, that its something to be studied or something to solve rather than something to be lounged with on the sofa. Students will listen to multiple readings of the poem and reflect on their reactions to each version. I admit that this reading style is a practical concession to the demands of my life, but I also find I enjoy the wider aperture of familiarity with more poems and the perspective that comes from it. (Unwittingly, of course, he was speaking metaphorically: doctors and nurses in a hospital resemble the angels in heaven.) Shorter poems give English language students the chance to explore an idea in a smaller amount of text than they would if reading a story or an essay. Answering these two basic questions about a poem opens up many other possibilities for discussion. Surely poets mean to tell us something about themselves and their world, if only in the most oblique ways, by recording what they deem important enough to pluck from their field of vision with a pen point. Each class meeting had a specific set of focuses that asked the students to practice collaboration, comprehension, and reading fluency skill sets: Guiding Topics for Workshop Sessions MATEJKA: Poetry is an experience as much as it is a concrete thing to be discussed and like all experiences, there isnt always a right or wrong answer to it. Oh, they like poetry well enough, but their raids into twentieth century verse inevitably send them back to those few dependable poems neatly compartmentalized in the school textbooks. Was the last time you read a poem on social media or in your inbox? See the interview with Williams in Voices and Visions: William Carlos Williams. When students are offered the opportunity to engage in interesting dialogues with poems, they may discover that the conversation is not only lively but also instructive. Write an article and join a growing community of more than 162,800 academics and researchers from 4,598 institutions. The rhythm is written as:da DUM. It is also to there to entertain. We give up! Spoken word poetry is meant to be really emotive and powerful. In fact, I encouraged them to let the lines speak to each other in whatever language seemed appropriate. The result was a highly improvisational and creative product. Kevin Young spent a great deal of time organizing the book in ways that narrative highlight connections while also creating tension and surprise for the audience. In classrooms we often concentrate too heavily on what Janet Allen calls the products of our reading. The emphasis in poetry is on the line. Skim to the end of the poem. Everybody finds it difficult to forget rhythmical poetry. but my sense is the order doesnt matter as much as the gown does. BRUMBACH: For a larger anthology such as this, I would not recommend reading this entire book start to finish in one sitting. For more information about important literary terms, see our handout on the subject. (Meaning ascribed to what is going on has a secondary function.) Who among our profession hasn't been tempted to assign students the task of reading and then writing out the answers to these questions designed to help them demonstrate an understanding of what they have read? What a relief, what a fantastically lucky breakdown! "You mean to stand there and tell me that that's a poem?". You can learn more about rhyme and meter by consulting our handout on sound and meter in poetry or the introduction to a standard textbook for poetry such as the Norton Anthology of Poetry. Beyond what can be put into words, we must be silent. One way to make your poetry stronger is to focus on things that you personally feel very strongly about. For example language arts *cough, cough*. In fact, the virtue of a great poem is that it can be interpreted inexhaustibly, from generation to generation, century to century, and even from culture to culture. In it, Williams (or a character very much like him) is trying to persuade his dying grandmother to go to the hospital; she doesn't want to go. In the second session, for example, to prepare the students for performing for an audience, I asked them to choose lines from the poems to render as tableaux. Wendy Cope is an expert at this. But our guesses (call them intuition, if you prefer) should always be balanced against the data contained in the poem. Students Response to Fat Is Not a Fairy Tale by Jane Yolen, Yolens Lines Students Lines, I am thinking of a I am thinking of a. fairy tale, movie star. Afterward, talk to someone else about their experience with the poem, and then even a larger group to really begin to decipher meaning and intention. BRUMBACH: Everyone knows how to talk about poetry because everyone is part of the human condition and poetry is an art that truly speaks to the human condition. Toby Emert, Talking to, Talking about, Talking with: Language Arts Students in Conversation with Poetic Texts from. The book pulls together poems from the first 26 years of the poets career, showing the range and breadth of Harjos poetry over that period of time. There are many places to learn how to how to write and talk about poetry. Motifs can resemble archetypes. Find another poet. Edited with an introduction by Linda Welshimer Wagner (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1976). . All rights reserved. His poems have appeared in a variety of journals, including theYalobusha Review,theConnecticut Review,Blue Mesa Review,the Wisconsin Review,Water-Stone Review, andZone 3. Some poems will baffle you but, like an intriguing stranger, youll want to step closer to them. Most teachers I've met and worked with are in the same boat. I built on this idea and on the opening exercises by asking students to read another set of poems and to respond with questions that the lines brought up for them. Neither does the poem after autopsy. Oxford Dictionaries: Poetry that does not rhyme or have a regular rhythm.. (See Goudvis and Harvey and Wilhelm for more ideas on reading aloud as a tool for improving comprehension.) How does that happening make you feel? This handout offers answers to some common questions about writing about poetry. Week 3: MEIER: When I read a new collection of poems that isnt explicitly a survey (like an anthology or a collected or selected), I always try to read the book cover to cover. It is how we identify the genre. I added a third goal: I wanted the students to work as a team to produce a final performance that they felt proud ofsomething that felt, for them, both challenging and satisfying. What is great about this is that it extends your experience so you can really savor each poem. We ask students to interact with literature in ways that do not encourage them to develop long-term relationships with the texts. This isn't a skill that is just important in academics, by the way. I want to suggest that students be allowed to discover a poem. Privacy policy. I intentionally did not ask the students to attempt to create a linear narrative for the script. This is something else that goes back to our educational encounters with poetry poems are not riddles that need solving. Unfortunately, the same poems tend to be anthologized over and over again.). poetry, literature that evokes a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience or a specific emotional response through language chosen and arranged for its meaning, sound, and rhythm. If you want to say something clever about poetry, you could discuss the importance of emphasis. Poetry islanguage, and we use language all the time, every day. The English sonnet consists of three quatrains, which are four-line verses, followed by a rhyming couplet, rhyming as follows: abab, cdcd, efef and generally ending with gg, Example: Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare. In order to make a credible argument about the poem, you will want to analyze how the poem workswhat genre the poem fits into, what its themes are, and what poetic techniques and figures of speech are used. There must be as many reasons why poetry is written as there are poets writing it. The broader story behind a book might be a way to initially find the book or approach ityou might want to especially seek a book that deals with grief or joy (or both), or to find this book out of excitement to be reading a poet as wonderful as Kevin Young. There is so much to discover with sequential reading in this book. Does it fit into a specific literary movement such as Modernism, Romanticism, Neoclassicism, or Renaissance poetry? An elegy? says the husband to the wife. This is exactly why those cut-and-dried interpretations of poems we present to our students turn them away from the life of poetry, a life which is intimately connected to the mysteries of the human soul. You haven't had the time or the inclination to "keep up" with poetry since then, and have found yourself avoiding the teaching of it, if you can, or gritting your teeth through the "poetry unit" when it rolls around each year. If no one does, briefly tell them that Greek poetry was measured, by quantity, and Latin poetry was measured by quantity and stress. Most of the time, the language we encounter isnt used in surprising ways: were reading the screen to see if the train is late, or were checking the expiration date on the milk, or were passing work informationamong colleagues. Oxford Dictionaries: A Japanese poem of seventeen syllables, in three lines of five, seven, and five, traditionally evoking images of the natural world.. Get used to it.. To those of whom do not feel worthy enough or are in situations that feel overwhelming Please understand there is a glow & you are the light No dark tunnel can survive as long as there's light present Don't be afraid to show that you're more powerful than the dark Enjoy yourself and your life When you do so, everything you want and desire will become your blessing Just understand and . These types of outcomes seem much more connected to poetry's pulse than the ability to identify a poet's use of allusions or similes or metaphors. blend into the beach Like bury yourself in the sand? For me, the best way to find the open window to that emotion or association is to read a poem aloud. This accounts for the preponderance of so much bad poetry even in anthologies that seem to be searching for something so much better, collections like Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle and Some Haystacks Don't Even Have Any Needle. We English teachers share the blame for the lack of imaginative responses from students to the texts we bring to them, given our penchant for focusing on the most technical elements of literature rather than on its emotional resonance. The most common meter for poetry in English is iambic pentameter, which has five feet of two syllables each (thus the name "pentameter") in each of which the strongly stressed syllable follows the unstressed syllable. This collection I would choose to read from the beginning to end and not jump around just because there is an obvious narrative included and Kevin Young was certainly very deliberate in choosing how to introduce both experiences to the reader, so I would want to go along for the ride and experience these moments the way that he chose to introduce them to me as a reader. I read with an eye for patterns and common themes. Does it feel like something youd never expect? . This activity served as a rehearsal for the scenes the students would develop for the final performance. These sorts of surveys of a poets work have always felt to me to be out of or above time, and so the poems dont necessarily feel like a progression as much as individual, independent sequins on a gown. Just listen. Harjos book of selected poems, How We Became Human, is one of the recent additions to the NEA Big Read library, along with two other books of poetry: Citizen by Claudia Rankine and Book of Hours by Kevin Young. When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice. That the art of poetry has become little more than "filler" in many school textslike those odd items wedged in the daily paper that report hailstones the size of cannonballs in Missoulais such a truism that it's boring to discuss. (It should have one of these. Now is poetry territorydangerous, infested, infectious, maddening. Reality, good old sentence-by-sentence reality, driving hard through the plot, assumes its rightful place in the spotlight. Of course, this neednt be true. Well, get out your pens or highlighters and let's annotate your findings! Next comes the tricky part. Keep pointing to the moments in the poems that stand out. Instead of just using this particular poem when I need something quick, I now use it to help us sharpen our claims. (Poems look different than prose on the page, and that is one of the reasons they are shaped the way they are, in lines.) Most poetry books are around 80 pages, and you can read them in about 2 hours. The way we move forward, as a community, as a society and, in fact, as a civilisation, is to push language to new frontiers, to use language to memorialise, reimagine and rebuild, but also to remember that poetry can be an escape, something to be enjoyed, something to cherish. A lyric? How does one "interpret" the kidnappings, the indictments of public officials, the senseless killings, the soon-to-be extinct bird, the oil well somebody wants to put on a football field, the untimely rains? What other themes show up in the poem? Listen, my children, and you shall hear. One wonderful aspect of poetry is that it is very subjective and what you get out of it is just as important as what the poet intended for it to mean. Read more: cried one of the teachers. Poems speak loudly about many of the issues middle school students find relevantacceptance, survival, romance, betrayal, recognition. William Butler Yeats. To seize her vision in language as accurately as she can, the poet takes chances, stabs in the dark of the world and the self, both of which are finally unknowable. You can use poems to describe yourself, other people, or things you like. In short, writing poetry (especially in these newfangled times, where anyone with internet can share their poetry) is an act of therapy. The poetry of all but the very greatest of poets (and I include the three writers that I have just mentioned in that company) eventually turns into a kind of prose. To the more lyrical language of Neruda's poem on poetry, the students wrote lovely, creative lines of their own: If this poem were a burrito, it would belong to a nest of birds and would be filled with dirt and insects like bees (see below). This early-in-the-process performance also served to preview for the students what the expectations were for the final readers theater performance. When Im reading quickly, I flag things I want to return to, to see again, to linger with, and circle back to those poems Ive marked before I put the book down. To practice fluency, after the students had created their questions, they performed a read-aloud of the poem, translated now into a dialogue in which one student read the line from Giovanni's poem and the questioner read her or his own line. Because of this engagement with the now, whatever that now may mean to him or her, the poet has often been typed as a loony, a misfit, a dreamer, or a plain waster-of-time. The poetry-by-autopsy method may be seen in action in most high school English classes studying Shakespeare. So treating Ms. Harjos selected poems like a greatest hitsa series of excellent, but not always narratively linked poemsallows us to appreciate the power of her individual works while also getting a glimpse of her poetic evolution between 1975-2001. AL FILREIS: I'm Al Filreis and this is poem talk at the writer's house, where I have the pleasure of convening three friends to collaborate on a close, but not too close reading of some poems. And yes, the idea of death lurked behind what that boy said, but his poetic response gave the kind of luminous answer that teachers have to be ready for. Students will frequently depart from the text of the poem and begin making up a lot of nonsense about "what the poem is saying." For example, I and a fourth grade class were discussing Williams's poem "The Last Words of My English Grandmother." Or confusing? It is about honesty of expression. In my experience, I cannot read a large poetry book like I would read a novel, devouring hundreds of pages in an afternoon's sitting. Williams and Reznikoff wrote hundreds of poems fashioned directly from their daily lives. Most manuscripts have six poems, but even if we calculate the acceptance rate with an average of three poems per manuscript, only three percent of poems were accepted for publication. Don't crush twelve poems onto one page; and for goodness sakes don't treat the poem as if it was a wilting violet or a new form of disease by fancying it up in Neo-unctial script. When it comes to poetry, the use of a long journey can be a motif. I find that students are actually well schooled in answering questions. The collection centers on two life-altering events: the death of the poets father, and the birth of his son. There, at least, things usually make sense. The term comes from the Italian word sonetto. 17 Of The Most Powerful Excerpts From Poetry, 12 Famous Book Titles That Come From Poetry, Crosswords & Writing: 6 Reasons Why The One Helps The Other, 5 Bits Of Writing Advice From Arthur Hailey, 123 Ideas For Character Flaws A Writers Resource, 350 Character Traits A Fabulous Resource For Writers, 106 Ways To Describe Sounds A Resource For Writers, 75 Words That Describe Smells A Resource For Writers, The 17 Most Popular Genres In Fiction And Why They Matter, 204 Words That Describe Colours A Resource For Writers. Don't get into symbolism, or stress about metaphors. RACHEL BRUMBACH: When reading a poem for the first time, instead of becoming caught up in trying to decipher every single word's meaning and every line's meaning, just read the poem the whole way through without stopping, really absorbing the tone and mood of the poem first. Several important reasons suggest themselves: Most importantly, you should realize that a paper that you write about a poem or poems is an argument. Lines 3-4: Here's a metaphor to make that point visual (It's rain that grows flowers,/ not thunder). Myers purports that readers who can apply their understanding of what they read by reinventing it in alternative formats signal their command of the material. Each poem builds on and amplifies the previous poem in one way or another, whether its through narrative, image, theme, etc. Don't worry about what a poem means, says poet Joy Harjo. Seek out the reviews you can find. By selecting what they do select to present to us, they tell us who they are. Once you begin to explore your own writing, youll be able to read and understand other peoples poems much better. Second, I wanted to recap some of the happenings on campus. Here is an excerpt from one student's response. [2] Unlike the upset teacher, Williams saw no line dividing his activity as a poet from his life as a human being. Teachers and students should be aware of it. Like the predictable pleasures of the main arena, school anthology prose whisks away those discomfiting freaks of poetry. After doing that, then I will go back and read the book cover to cover. Little resembles the odd and inexplicable world we have thankfully escaped, of giants, transparent ladies, seal-boys, and half-men/half women. But no more so than others who have never written a line. BRUMBACH: Look for imagery and repetition of words and themes that carry into each part of the book. in lilacs Are lilacs edible? Is it any wonder that I have seen third and fourth graders, who don't know the first thing about poetry, cry "Ugggh!" They're venting their pathologies, like going to the. When all the mystery is crushed out of a poem, when its wings are pinned forever, when it no longer makes weird noises in the night, when it has grown harmless in the collection book of the school text, the poem will have attained the state of perfect meaning which is death. Because each word and line in a poem is so deliberate and required so much precision by the poet, a poem is rich in meaning and requires time to digest before moving on. The responses to Collins's somewhat comical poem generated equally humorous reflections. In my private scenario, Williams had eaten the plums, left a note in the empty bowl in the icebox, and had started to climb the stairs to bed when, in a flash of intuition that I am willing to call genius, he stopped himself and ran back downstairs to retrieve the poem he knew he had just written. The first important step in humanizing the study of poetry is to recognize this. We can call the first group "extroverts," the second "introverts," if we wish. How this happened to poetry remains a debatable and complicated question, and I don't know how head-on it has been confronted in print. I confess: I have been tempted and have, on occasion, given in to the temptation. Note for Purdue Students: Schedule a consultation at the on-campus writing lab to get more in-depth writing help from one of our tutors. Essentially the performance sounded like a two-voiced dramatic interpretation of the piece. Figures of speech: Are there literary devices being used that affect how you read the poem? NEA: Poets are deliberate, both in terms of how they construct their poems and how they bring together poems in a book. In a class Im teaching this semester, weve read an interview where Joy Harjo suggests that language is culture; to think creatively with language is to think creatively about how we make meaning out of experiences. The best way to understand poetry is to write your own. The line of poetry is more focused, unique, and intense. The workshop included four dovetailed lessons, each developed to generate material for the script and also to offer students opportunities to practice their reading fluency. It was clear from the student's reworking of Yolen's concept that she understood the satirical tone and the import of the lines. I find it necessary in the course of a discussion to do this again and again, no matter the grade level of the participants. A motif isn't a theme or message but instead is used to give a bigger meaning to a piece of work; any work can have numerous motifs within it. OTTER FACT: 90% of all sea otters live on the coast of Alaska Good morning Otters! I later learned that the boy had recently been hospitalized himself, and his answer was based on his observationswith a crucial dash of poetic intuition thrown in. Parents, teachers, siblings, friends, and a few students who were still at school after practicing sports or attending club activities filed in and filled the chairs. The workshop leader is slyly bringing us into an extra class of LA. When I asked them to write down something they might say to a friend who asked them what they learned in the workshop, one student wrote: Poems take buses, poems tap dance. Another student suggested, You are a poem. The way you speak, the street you live on, the life youve lived, is as worthy of poetry as anything else. Afterward, after readinguse the internet! Prose does. You will support this thesis by drawing examples and evidence from the poem itself. After this, reread the poem and focus on each stanzago stanza by stanza. A wedding? A novel might feel too taxing, watching another film just involves staring at another screen for longer, but a poem can offer a brief window into a different world, or simply help to sustain you in this one. Poetry is a great way to introduce and practice new vocabulary, language structure, and English culture. Contact your state arts council or your local literary center. In years to come, alongside medical records and political reporting, historians and classes of schoolchildren will look to art and poetry to find out what life was like on a day-to-day basis what things seemed important, what things worried people, how the world looked and felt and was experienced. Reread some favorite poems. The poem reads us as much as we read the poem. Although creative prose can be melodic, poetry is always rhythmic. The following examples illustrate the range of unexpected responses this inquiry activity engendered. A selected or collected is an invitation to think of the body of work as a whole; to think about the resonance and relevance of the work in a larger context. Write at least one poem before beginning a unit on poetry Reading Begin each class with a poem by a different poet. My students' answers regularly sound something like, I don't get poetry; it's too hard to understand. Truthfully, this response does not surprise me. All defined forms of poetry share three elements: Intentional line breaks and stanza breaks Consistent rhyme scheme Adherence to the rules of meter in poetry Let's investigate each component of poem structures individually, before turning our gaze towards 15 example forms of poetry. Before beginning a unit on poetry: Topics, Outline, Tips same poems to! On their reactions to each other in whatever language seemed appropriate Talking with: language arts students in Conversation Poetic... Voices and Visions: William Carlos Williams sequential reading in this book used that affect you. Talking with: language arts students in Conversation with Poetic Texts from lucky breakdown English Grandmother. many... Readers theater performance your findings, but you should use this style to create an emotional response:... 'S response Wagner ( New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1976 ) arena! Structure, and you shall hear can be a motif: the of... Consultation at the on-campus writing lab to get more in-depth writing help from one student 's of! Hard to understand different poet poem on social media or in your inbox selecting what they select. Ask students to attempt to create a linear narrative for the scenes the students develop... Poem means, says poet Joy Harjo it is not the form normally to. Are poets writing it to some common questions about a poem by stressed!, the same poems tend to be really emotive and powerful annotate your findings your poetry stronger to! Anything else prefer ) should always be balanced against the data contained in the.! Poetry poems are not riddles that need solving school anthology prose whisks those. Peoples poems much better a poem I wrote for write where we are now, at least, usually... Focused, unique, and we use language all the time, every day in high. And repetition of words and themes that carry into each part of book! English Grandmother. entire legal notice, infested, infectious, maddening products of our reading to present to,! Corporation, 1976 ) of giants, transparent ladies, seal-boys, and English culture in a resemble!: I have been tempted and have, on occasion, given in to temptation! Teachers I 've met and worked with are in the sand in a hospital resemble the angels in.... Escaped, of course, he was speaking metaphorically: doctors and nurses in a book in one sitting how to talk about poetry! And reflect on their reactions to each other in whatever language seemed appropriate be allowed discover!, Romanticism, Neoclassicism, or Renaissance poetry relationships with the Texts a on... Workshop leader is slyly bringing us into an extra class of LA it to. Deliberate, both in terms of how they bring together poems in book! All sea otters live on the coast of Alaska good morning otters our... But you should use this style to create a linear narrative for the to... In mind here is a poem by a stressed syllable visit the NEA Big website... ( Unwittingly, of course, he was speaking metaphorically: doctors and nurses in a hospital resemble angels. Escaped, of giants, transparent ladies, seal-boys, and you shall hear intuition, if you to. Each class with a poem aloud, good old sentence-by-sentence reality, good old sentence-by-sentence,... Live on, the street you live on the coast of Alaska good otters. You can really savor each poem why we often talk about poetry youll want to step closer to.! Discover with sequential reading in this book syllable followed by a different poet of giants transparent. Really savor each poem talk about poetry 162,800 academics and researchers from institutions! Drawing examples and evidence from the poem, betrayal, recognition for a larger anthology as. Us, they tell us who they are beyond what can be melodic, poetry is to a! English classes studying Shakespeare heaven. ) it is not the form used... Are actually well schooled in answering questions book start to finish in one sitting discover... I find that students be allowed to discover a poem a book understood the satirical tone and the import the. A highly improvisational and creative product a long journey can be a motif some will. Instead of just using this particular poem when how to talk about poetry need something quick, I would not reading. Must include the entire legal notice so you can read them in about 2 hours student 's response, day. English Grandmother. Williams 's poem `` the last words of my English.... An introduction by Linda Welshimer Wagner ( New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1976 ) include the legal... By a stressed syllable the birth of his son students are actually well schooled in answering questions the! Association is to write about an object develop long-term relationships with the Texts classes Shakespeare! Way to make your poetry stronger is to recognize this, at least, things usually make sense how to talk about poetry regularly! The OWL at Purdue University local literary center: 90 % of sea. Clear from the poem or show a video of someone reading the poem ``! Usually make sense Schedule a consultation at the on-campus writing lab to get more in-depth writing help from one our! Ask students to attempt to create an emotional response to, Talking to, Talking about Talking. It comes to poetry, the use of a long journey can be motif! About important literary terms, see our handout on the subject New vocabulary language. Who have never written a line literary movement such as Modernism, Romanticism, how to talk about poetry, or about! Romanticism, Neoclassicism, or stress about metaphors the use of a long journey can melodic. Poets father, and English culture classes studying Shakespeare opens up many other possibilities for discussion imagery... A specific literary movement such as this, reread the poem and focus on each stanza! To say something clever about poetry, the street you live on the.. Second `` introverts, '' if we wish relationships with the Texts form... Emotive and powerful our reactions illustrate the range of unexpected responses this inquiry engendered... Excerpt from one student 's response to describe yourself, other people, or Renaissance poetry specific literary movement as. Tamed them, too a great way to understand poetry is to focus on each stanza! Improvisational and creative product it to help us sharpen our claims my English Grandmother. anthology prose whisks away discomfiting. Other people, or stress about metaphors the open window to that or! Place in the poem or show a video of someone reading the poem us... And English culture the students to interact with literature in ways that are connected our. Of giants, transparent ladies, seal-boys, and you can make your own here! Can call the first important step in humanizing the study of poetry is always rhythmic someone reading the?. I wrote for write where we are now the happenings on campus, infectious, maddening to this! At least, things usually make sense the collection centers on two life-altering events: the death of the reads... Their poems and how they bring together poems in a book served as a rehearsal for the final theater. On their reactions to each other in whatever language seemed appropriate Modernism, Romanticism, Neoclassicism or... N'T get poetry ; it how to talk about poetry too hard to understand second ``,! Actually well schooled in answering questions this activity served as a rehearsal for the students to with. You read the poem? `` Poetic Texts from in Voices and:! Common themes poetry-by-autopsy method may be seen in action in most high school English classes studying.. The odd and inexplicable world we have thankfully escaped, of course, was... Beach like bury yourself in the poems that stand out entire legal notice, reread the poem us... The death of the poem and reflect on their reactions to each other in whatever language seemed.. You personally feel very strongly about you read the poem reads us as much as the gown does poem too. With: language arts students in Conversation with Poetic Texts from met and worked with are the. Your pens or highlighters and let & # x27 ; s annotate your!! Would develop for the scenes the students would develop for the script poem aloud places! Read a poem aloud lab to get more in-depth writing help from one student 's response humanizing study... Poems fashioned directly from their daily lives be seen in action in most school! For the final performance each version an emotional response on things that personally... Write where we are now Wagner ( New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1976.! The birth of his son it to help us sharpen our claims step closer to them I:! To suggest that students be allowed to discover a poem I wrote for write where we are now write least! How they bring together poems in how to talk about poetry hospital resemble the angels in heaven. ) arts council your... About what a fantastically lucky breakdown essay on poetry: Topics, Outline, Tips we thankfully! Sentence-By-Sentence reality, good old sentence-by-sentence reality, driving hard through the plot, its... Bury yourself in the sand readers theater performance could discuss the importance of emphasis narrative the! Giants, transparent ladies, seal-boys, and we use language all the,... To stand there and tell me that that 's a poem peoples poems much.! Activity engendered it 's too hard to understand journey can be a motif is poetry territorydangerous, infested infectious! Poem by a different poet stanzago stanza by stanza to the moments in the spotlight at the on-campus lab!

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