My high school English classroom is populated with students who are skilled at copying notes from the overhead screen or chalkboard and following directions, but lack the ability to experiment, invent, and learn from mistakes. I am always searching for techniques that help students open up and write something that is personal, potent, and a bit peculiar.
At the beginning of the school year, I like to share with my students a bit of wisdom from Nikki Giovanni. In her essay, "Meatloaf: A View of Poetry," she writes, "Poems are dreams. Dream. But dreams are conceived in reality. Meatloaf is real. Write that poem." Giovanni urges her students to avoid sentimental generalities about love and sadness and search for meaning in the mundane. To begin such a search, a student must be willing to experiment and make a mess.
Dave Morice, in his book, The Adventures of Dr. Alphabet: 104 Unusual Ways to Write Poetry in the Classroom and the Community, offers up dozens of poetic activities that unlock students' imaginations. I have had great success with his Rorschach inkblot exercise, and would like to share the modifications I have made to Morice's somewhat slight directions.
A Perfect Model
Young writers need models to inspire them. Gwendolyn Brooks's poem "We Real Cool the Pool Players. Seven at the Golden Shovel," is a perfect model. It is brief but evocative, conjuring concrete images my students can relate to while throwing them a curveball or two. The poem begins, "We real cool. We left school." These words always make a few kids smile. The penultimate line, "We jazz June," proves to be a headscratcher for most, though the final line hits home for some: "We die soon."
Students hear Brooks read the poem via a recording from the book & CD set, Poetry Speaks: Hear Great Poets Read Their Work from Tennyson to Plath. I ask students to listen for examples of three basic poetic techniques: rhyme, repetition, and alliteration. After we discuss how Brooks uses the techniques, I tell students I would like them to use the three techniques in their inkblot poems.
Taking the Rorschach Test
The word "inkblot" gets their attention. "What is an inkblot?" I tell the students that a German psychologist named Hermann Rorschach developed the use of inkblots to study how individuals tend to project their own unconscious attitudes onto ambiguous situations. I show them a few samples and we have a fun discussion about what we see. The last time I did this exercise, one of my students made a timely connection. He noticed that a Rorschach inkblot dominates the promotional art for the paranormal movie, The Mothman Prophecies.
Next, each student makes an inkblot. The directions are simple: fold a sheet of paper in half, open it up, dribble some ink or paint on the paper and fold it up again. Finally, open the paper to see a symmetrical design.
I like to think of the inkblot as a memory probe, to use a term from Mike Sharples' book How We Write: Writing as Creative Design. Henry A. Murray and William James, contemporaries of Hermann Rorschach, wrote that "individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen and how work is actually done." Each student searches her long-term memory and retrieves ideas, images, memories, and associations and projects them onto the ambiguous splatter. This step may take the form of a free write, a list, a web, or a spontaneous story or poem.
Now students evaluate what they have written. I ask each student to circle a word or phrase that stands out to him or her and then elaborate on that word or phrase. Many of the students I work with have not flexed their imaginative muscles very much and need concrete directions. For these students, I simplify by saying, "Make a list of words the inkblot makes you think of. Circle your favorite word on the list. Now make a list of words and phrases that you think of when you think of that favorite word."
If a student feels she has not come up with any good ideas, I tell her that she should make a new inkblot. "Maybe you need a new key to unlock your memory," I say. The student uses the two lists as fodder for a first draft of a poem. I remind students that I would like them to experiment with the three basic poetic techniques: rhyme, repetition, and alliteration.
The first time I used Morice's messy but effective brainstorming technique in my classroom was the day Marie was added to my roster. By the end of the hour, she had written a poem. After she read it to me, the seventeen-year-old surprised me by saying, "I'd never written a poem before."
Marie made two lists after making her inkblot. The first reads: "Two aliens, nose, mouth, hand, alien body, claw, two bears, two snakes, each with a white eye." The word "snake " stood out. Marie circled the word and used it to start a second list: "Snake, cobra, garden snake, rattling, skinny, long, dangerous, scary, ugly, bad pets, poisonous, fang, bite, black, green, irritating, mean, no hands, rough, scales, evil, Adam and Eve, apple, anaconda, big old snake, deadly, murder, hiss, sssssss."
Her final poem, though elementary, is humorous.
Big Old Snake
Big old snake
Dangerous and scary
Big old snake
Ugly and furious
Big old snake
With no hands
Big old snake
Rattling at an old man
Big old snake
Got stuck in a garbage can
Big old snake
I asked Marie if she used the three techniques I mentioned at the beginning of the lesson. She read her poem again and found examples of repetition and rhyming. "But I didn't use alliteration," she lamented. When I pointed out the mild alliteration in the middle of the eighth line, Marie smiled.
Using this strategy, I've found that if students are first encouraged to make a mess, they are more likely in the future to avoid trite Hallmark homilies and write something truly original.
Don Leibold
Loyola Academy, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
This teaching idea was originally published in Classroom Notes Plus (October 2002).
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