Teaching Ideas and Units - Beaut Ideas

Introducing Poems

This is a set of strategies to help students of all ages get to know and appreciate individual poems.
As well as assisting students to make meaning from poems, the strategies help to develop
an understanding of style. They also offer support for students’ own poetry writing.
Many of the strategies originally appeared in Approaches to Poetry,
published by The Department of Education and TATE.

Freewheel jottings
Asking questions
My thoughts — your thoughts
Cloze
Choosing a title
Poems in pieces
Prose to poetry

Freewheel jottings

Encourage the students to

• have a pen and paper handy
  
• listen to a reading of the poem
  
• read it themselves two or three times
  
• record initial impressions, such as…

• discuss the poem with a partner, small group or class
  
• expect to come back to the poem in a later lesson.

Asking questions

After reading the poem, students can form groups to make a list of the questions the poem raises in their minds. Some of the questions may be answered within the group and those that remain can be discussed by the class, assisted by the teacher.

Below are examples of some questions students developed while exploring James Joyce’s ‘On the Beach at Fontana’, contrasted with the questions posed by an English textbook. It’s interesting to see that the students’ questions go far more deeply into an exploration of the poem and its nuances of meaning than the textbook questions.

My thoughts — your thoughts

Read a poem to the class. Divide the students into groups of three and ask them to do the following:

• write their first reactions to the poem;
  
• without talking, exchange notes, read and jot down a response to the thoughts of one of the others;
  
• exchange again and respond to the other group members’ comments;
  
• return responses to the originator and discuss the poem as a group;
  
• develop a considered response to the poem in the light of comments made by all members of the group.

Cloze

Because cloze activities encourage the reader to look closely at language, they have particular value in the study of poetry.

• Choose a poem and blot out some of the words. Deletions can be made to focus attention on rhyme, metre, meaning, syntax, diction, according to the purpose of the lesson.

• Divide the class into groups and ask each group to reach a consensus about the most appropriate word for each space.

• The class as a whole then discusses each suggestion, possibly coming to an agreement about a final version.

• The class’s version is compared with the poet’s version and the class discusses the significance of the differences.

The same activity can be a way of introducing a different perspective on a poem studied at an earlier lesson. Deletions could draw attention to a poetic device, to the atmosphere evoked by certain words, and so on. Students’ own poems can be used too. Suggestions from others may help a writer see how a poem can be developed or help to confirm original choices. If there are computers available, cloze can be used in this way in conjunction with electronic read-arounds. Students can delete words or indicate spaces where they would like suggestions, and readers can suggest options for them to consider.

Choosing a title

Give an untitled poem to the students, and ask for suggestions for an appropriate title from individuals or groups. Discussing possibilities and comparing them with the original gives the students opportunities to discuss the poem’s meaning and to think about the ways in which a title functions in a poem. This activity often helps students to be much more selective and creative in writing titles for their own poetry.

Poems in pieces

This activity focuses on interpretation of poetry, but it can also help students to explore linguistic structures and features.

A poem is cut up and students arrange the pieces to form a coherent whole. In the early stages, and sometimes for particular purposes such as the study of the development of ideas or changes in mood, the pieces can consist of whole stanzas or sections. Later, part of a poem can be cut up into single lines.

The students compare and discuss their final versions, considering the differences between versions. They also look at the original poem and discuss the reasons why the poet chose a particular sequence.

Prose to poetry

Working with a prose version. The students are given a poem written unpunctuated and without line breaks. They are asked to rewrite the poem with appropriate line breaks and to insert the punctuation they think it needs. It is easier to start with rhyming poems.

The main purpose is to tease out the meaning of the poem, but this activity also helps to give students a firm sense of form. When rhyming poems are used, students focus attention on the different rhyming patterns and the different metrical arrangements to be found in different poems. From their discussions they may learn that form helps to communicate the meaning: it is not just a structure imposed on the writing.

Working with a prose paraphrase The students are asked to write their own poems based on the paraphrase. There is something powerful about the act of grappling with some of the same challenges as a poet and then seeing how the poet met those challenges. It seems to give students a keen insight into the way the poem works.

Below is an example of a prose paraphrase of Gwen Harwood’s 'In the Park':

There’s a woman sitting in the park wearing tired, out of date clothes. Around her are her three children. Two of them are whining and bickering and tugging at her skirt while the other one’s just drawing patterns in the dirt with a stick, aimlessly. Along the path towards her comes a man she used to love. He nods at her and it’s too late to try to looks as if she didn’t know him or care. They have a conversation, saying things like, ‘How nice,’ and ‘Time holds great surprises.’ She imagines that he’s thinking what a close shave he’s had, how nearly he got caught up in all this domesticity. It’s getting darker, the light is flickering. They stand there while she lists for him the children’s names and birthdays. As he turns to go, she says to him, ‘It’s so sweet to hear their chatter, watch them grown and thrive.’ But then when he’s gone she takes the youngest child on her lap and says to herself, ‘They have eaten me alive.’

Once the students have developed their own poems, they can compare them with each other and with the original. Putting them on an overhead transparency is one quick and easy way to share them with the class to open up discussion. Students are asked to discuss the differences between versions, focusing on emphasis, development of ideas, form or whatever seems most interesting and relevant for the class to pursue.

Below are some examples of poems based on the paraphrase above.

In the Park

Whining bickering children
Tugging her tired
Out of date skirt
As another aimlessly
Draws dirt patterns.

Out of the darkness
Emerges a former love
Uneasy — conversation
So sure of his thoughts
As she endlessly recites names

Getting dark
Light is flickering
His footsteps quicken
And she floats back into her memory.

‘It can be so sweet
To hear their chatter,
Watch them grow,’
Was her desperate cry

Until they pull you
Into despair
And eat you alive.

In the Park

She sits alone and outdated,
Suffocated by the wrath of her three children.
Her eye catches that of an old love
In return he nods like a gentleman of old.

It was too late, too late to look uninterested.
‘How nice,’ they laughed. ‘Time holds great
Surprises,’ they reminisced.
Birthdays, dates, names!
‘Children! It’s so sweet to watch them grow.’
Watch them grow and thrive.

He’s gone now. Gone.
Her children, her children
Have eaten her alive.
They have eaten her alive.