4 Reasons to Start Class With a Poem Each Day
For each school
day of the past three years, I've started my ninth-grade English class with a
poem. When I first made this commitment, I feared that I might not have the
stamina (or enough engaging poems) to sustain us for the full 184 days of
class. And I wasn't the only skeptic. Each year, I get a few sideways glances
and furrowed brows when I explain our daily opening routine for class. But
before long, students are starting English class with Billy Collins and Mary
Oliver and Robert Pinsky, Rumi and Basho and Shakespeare. These voices,
contemporary and classic, have helped define my classroom culture to such an
extent that on the rare occasion when I postpone the “Poem of the Day” until
later in the class period, my students interrogate me about it. I confess that
it makes me smile.
So if this year's National
Poetry Month inspires you to give daily poetry a go in your classroom, maybe
even just for the month, consider these four reasons why starting class with a
poem each day will rock your world. Just for good measure, I've included a few
poem suggestions as well.
1. Poems Are Short
Time is a teacher's most
valuable currency, and though it sounds cliché, there is never enough. In fact,
a teacher's first reaction to the idea of beginning each day's class with a
poem might even be, "Where will I find the time?"
But remember, poems are short.
Not all poems, but I never committed to starting class with pages of Milton's Paradise
Lost. Even the shortest poems can lead to potent discoveries.
After we read a short poem
twice, I invite the students to engage in what I call microanalysis through an interpretive sentence
frame. They fill in the blanks in my sentence: "When the poem says
_______, it suggests that _______." Students can find plentiful
interpretations in just a few lines of verse. And the best part is that a short
poem can be read, dissected, and discussed in just a few minutes, providing an
excellent warm-up in a lesson on close reading.
Other times, I lead a lesson
on word choice with a poem that is less than 15 lines long, like Carl
Sandburg's "Fog" or Anne Porter's "Wild Geese Alighting on a Lake". We
identify and discuss the mood created by the poem, and then I challenge them to
change the mood dramatically by changing just five words and the title. The
results are hilarious, focused on the lesson's objective, and quick.
The short poems "Keeping Quiet" by Robert Bly, "The Balloon of the Mind" by William Butler Yeats, and "We Wear the Mask" by Paul Laurence Dunbar have all
generated particularly rich discussions in my classroom. Their brevity makes
them sharp, but their themes are provocative and appealing to adolescent
readers.
I also encourage you to get
your hands on some of the phenomenal books of haiku that are out there right
now, from the scholarly anthology Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years to the more whimsical and illustrated Guyku -- A Year of Haiku for Boys and the hilarious Suburban Haiku: Dispatches
From Behind the Picket Fence, which brings satire to the
form.
2. Poems
Are Intense
A novel may take chapters and
hours to establish an emotional connection through the characters and plot --
poetry can do so in seconds. Even reluctant readers can be captured quickly by
the right combination of words arranged into a powerful rhythm.
Each year, I incorporate
"Shock Week" into our poetry routine. I advertise it as "more
intense than Shark Week,” which piques the curiosity of my Discovery Channel
crowd. We read "Tariff" by Michelle Boisseau, a short,
blistering poem about guilt. We read Wislawa Szymborska's "The Terrorist, He
Watches", a poem chilling in both subject and tone, giving us
pause about the dark ramifications of being a bystander when others suffer.
Even funny poems can be
intense. Students always enjoy this kinetic typography rendition of Taylor
Mali's spoken-word poem "Speak With Conviction". While it
makes us laugh at ourselves, it also urges us to scratch at the underlying
issues that may cause our lackadaisical patterns of speech.
3. Poems
Connect (to Other Reading)
Poetry can open a door to
discussing those meatier, longer works of fiction and nonfiction that often
define our curriculum.
Try using Gwendolyn Brooks'
classic poem "We Real Cool" to introduce an underlying conflict in
S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders.
Rumi, the 13th-century Persian
poet, has written some poetry that beautifully
echoes specific lines
in Romeo and Juliet, that standard freshman introduction to
Shakespeare. Incorporating writing from a completely different culture that
speaks to the same aspect of the human condition sends a powerful message about
inclusion and diversity.
I once used a haiku about a falcon by An'ya, a reclusive naturalist poet
from the Pacific Northwest, to draw a comparison to Atticus Finch's treatment
of his children in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. The discussion was
brief, but the haiku gave us a lens through which to evaluate Atticus and his
actions, leading to more specific close-reading that we would have achieved
without the poem. (The fact that both texts allude to a bird was just a happy
accident, by the way, but the kids loved pointing that out, too!)
4. Poems
Inspire (Writing)
Poems make such excellent
inspirations for writing. When we share poems with students and invite them to
respond with their own ideas and musings while imitating the writer's form or
style, we empower them to develop a voice, to work at something that will
eventually become their own. A colleague in my school district, Elizabeth
Jones, introduced me to Elizabeth Coatsworth's poem "Swift Things Are Beautiful", and I
challenge you to read this poem without immediately wanting to write about
finding the beauty in other opposites and inversions. Our students have chosen
things to write about that are small and large, rough and smooth, foreseen and
surprising, and they always uncover beauty as they write.
Penny Kittle, of Book Love Foundation fame, first introduced me to Anis
Mojgani's notable spoken word poem "Shake
the Dust". Its message of kindness and welcoming cadence
provide an invitation to write about the people in our world who are not given
a voice. In so doing, your students can find their own.
Even a simple-at-first-glance
list poem like "Words That Make My
Stomach Plummet" by
Mira McEwan or "What I Like and Don’t
Like" by Phillip
Schultz can get students thinking and writing about the quirky lists that
define their own personalities.
In truth, I could write for
hours about the positive experiences that I've enjoyed with students over the
past three years of using a poem to start class each day. If this is a strategy
that you ever wanted to try, I encourage you take a test drive during National
Poetry Month 2016. I suspect that you (and your students) will be hooked!
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