Reading Poetry Relationally

In this lesson, I, Sarah, take you into my junior high classroom to offer you a glimpse into a lesson in progress. I invite you to step into a poetry lesson that creates space for collaborative interpretation and some quiet opportunities for students to do some concentrated and repeated readings. This is great when you need a low-key day in the classroom to assuage anxiety or off-set some tense energy going on in the school.

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“Find a good place to stop in your books,” I said to end our choice-reading time.

I finished up a student-reading conference and looked around to see students finishing a page, writing a response on a sticky note, stretching their legs.

“Today we’re going to spend a little bit of time thinking about poetry around the topics of justice and being a young adult. Some of our time has been on novel study or textbook readings, so I thought we’d spend some time with poetry,” I said.

“Yes,” one student whispered to a neighbor.

“No,” one another whispered to a neighbor.

“Right, so mixed responses — to the poetry? I think poetry has typically been written for little kids or adults. A lot of the poems in textbooks seem to be about historical periods or written long ago. I want us to take a look at poems written by contemporary poets.

“You have likely learned poetry in different ways in elementary school — a unit of study, some writing of poetry. Poems are not actually written for students to analyze. Poems are a very concentrated form of ideas and experiences — big, complex ideas condensed, concentrated into phrases. Powerful words and images about those ideas seem mysterious to readers because phrases and fragments want the reader to think about what’s there and what’s not. What I like about poetry –its form — is that it accepts that sometimes ideas and stories and experiences are partial or incomplete.

“Now what does this have to do justice and being a young adult? The concentrated and fragmented form helps people process the fragments of understanding that they can piece together in snapshots – stories, thoughts, observations, even arguments,” I said.

The room was quiet, so I thought the mood was right to begin. I appreciated their patience and respect. I continued

“Let’s read a few poems to consider what these poets have to say about and to us, young adults. Open you Chromebooks. ” I paused.

Students open up their Chromebooks, log into our Google classroom, and open up the shared document of poems we can all edit. I copy and pasted a bunch of poems from Just YA into one Google doc for collaborative reading and commenting. I made copies of this document for each class period.

The reason for the collaborative document is that I wanted us to all be inside this document of poems together, trying to make sense of poems in a shared, live experience without me pacing their reading or controlling their focus.

I asked students to first scan the titles and forms to get a sense of the whole and notice that all the poems are short. They realized quickly that they would have time to read multiple poems, but this scanning helps them get excited about what is interesting to them.

I asked students to use the comment feature to just comment openly about what they like, what they notice, what they are wondering. I reminded students that they were connected to the World Wide Web and that they can, at any point, look up the poet. Search up a word. Explore a place.

For students who wanted some guidance, I offered these questions on a half-sheet of paper (handout):

What do you know about the speaker? His/her relationship to the audience, concerns, purpose for saying these words?

What is the setting or sense of place in this poem? Which words/phrases are most vivid or create an image/picture?

Which words capture the mood throughout the poem?

Which words seem fancy or unfamiliar? Find the denotation or dictionary definition of a few words.

Which lines or phrases teach us about 9/11? What does the poet want us to know or remember?

Describe the form of the poem: how many lines; does it rhyme; how many syllables in each line, most common punctuation.

Notice any figurative language: simile, metaphor, allusion, personification,alliteration, onomatopoeia, hyperbole.

Students read, selected phrases, and attached comments to the phrases. I noticed some students opening up a new tab to look up a word, an allusion, an image. They were uncovering meaning, reading into the white spaces the poet left open.

I kept the lights low and turned on some lo-fi background music. Other than that, the classroom was silent.

I hovered in different spots of the room making myself available for quiet conversations about the poems. One boy calls me over with a wave.

“This poem here doesn’t have a meter and doesn’t rhyme. I don’t think I have anything to comment on,” one student says in a whisper. “Should I do something else?”

I kneel down and take a look at the poem he’s referring to.

“I see what you mean. This is a free verse poem. There isn’t a pattern. It doesn’t rhyme. We are both noticing the same thing. But let’s think about why that is. A poet crafts each line-break purposefully, so if the form doesn’t follow a regular pattern, that might be for a reason. If we think about the subject of land and how the poet must have been feeling, it makes sense that there’s lots of irregularity or uncertainty. It’s possible that the poet is trying to capture the chaos with this irregular meter,” I whispered.

The boy had an “aha” look in his eyes and returns the poem.

“I’m a little confused. Can you help me?” another student asked in a whisper-shout waving me over. She is reading “A Place to Breathe” by Christine Hartman Derr. “The speaker in this poem seems to be Native American? I don’t know what some of these words mean. ”

“Aha, I see what you mean. Let’s read this together. the author wrote ‘Wado, ganolvvsgv,/gratitude for wind, for breezes.’ And just above that there is ‘a language maybe I used to know’. Yes, it seems this poet is exploring language – the knowing, the forgotten words. Maybe something about connections. What else are you noticing here?”

Students had an opportunity to make some comments on their selected poem and noticed peers commenting, too, so I interrupted the quiet to move into the online discussion part. Time for students to respond to each other’s noticings online.

“Okay, so finish up the comment you’re making right now. And then go to the top of the poem and read the observations and comments your poem-mates noted. If you click on the comment, you’ll see that you can reply to one another. See if this helps you notice new features of your poem, if this extends your understanding of the poems, justice, and being a young adult.”

Before we ended class, I ask students to return to Google classroom and write a public comment on the assignment: “One poem I read was “__________,” and one thing I learned/found interesting, powerful. insightful, meaningful is _______ because ______________________.”

In closing, I thanked students for their silent dialogue, compassion, and thoughtful work as we closed class. One boy told me he opened his notebook during the activity to write a poem inspired by Stefani Boutelier’s “Zit Ode.” I listen and then invite others to try a poem. They can access the Google doc and the anthology online any time they wish. I tell them that I’d love to read their poetry.

You don’t have to do a poetry unit for students to read a poem. You don’t have to do a lot of frontloading of poetry analysis methods or figurative language for students to be able to access the meaning of a poem. Gather a few poems; create a few questions; and then let students uncover the poetry. The poem itself is enough to start the conversation. Students will dialogue about meaning with one another to uncover meaning, illuminate the poet’s craft, and respond with their hearts and minds.

As Pablo Neruda said (or I think it was Neruda), “Poetry is an act of peace.” And don’t we need more peace now? Don’t wait until April (National Poetry Month) to welcome poetry into your classes.