Poetry Models Expand and Inspire

I'm dramatic. I think of Joseph Tsujimoto as feeding me manna with Teaching Poetry Writing to Adolescents (ERIC Clearinghouse and NCTE, 1988). Through a wealth of examples in his slender volume, he shows that models of poems do not limit new poems. Models are not a barrier to possibility. Models expand and inspire.

I began teaching high school juniors in 1986, eager to add an element to my curriculum that would make poetry writing natural. I wanted the students to develop a habit of the mind, a reflex response of the soul. I did the obvious skill builders like composing similes, haikus, cinquains, rhymes, and meters. But I needed something to prompt the natural flow of self into its best form for a specific image, emotion, or realization.

Tsujimoto's book offers eighteen poetry exercise assignments. I decided to give one a week to the students. I did not want to inflate this into something that would make them tense or pressured. I reserved the last fifteen minutes of class on Friday and told the students I wanted an impromptu response, nothing more. The results would be ungraded. They could do whatever they wanted, or nothing at all if access to imagination seemed clogged. I referred to the writing as Impromptu Poetry.

For each exercise I copied Tsujimoto's brief italicized directions and included two of his examples as models. These were the catalysts for my students.

Tsujimoto's first exercise is to create a Found Poem, "that ingenious assignment used to introduce students to lining and spacing, without their having the burden of also inventing their own words." The exercises move on to excellent warm-ups of the students' own origination: the Two-Word Poem, the Circle Poem, and the Change Poem. The fifth, the Transformation Poem, lifts the students to a higher plateau. Its process is a complex one, yet elicits wonderful response. Tsujimoto's instructions (from page 51):

1. Write a poem describing a worker becoming a part, a tool, or a product of his or her work. This requires your intimate knowledge of the particular work process and the attitudes, responsibilities, and language connected to the work.

2. Do not use any form of the following words: becomes, change, transform. Instead, make us experience the transformation.

Virtually all of the students get the idea of the implied extended metaphor. We are what we do is the message. It comes through in students' writing with cleverness and even beauty as the result.

Current cognitive psychologists give the term priming to describe an efficient way for the human brain to retrieve information. I think it suggests the process of writing Impromptu Poetry as well. The prompt (which summarizes the structure of the poem) prepares the student's mind the way a primed pump brings water. The first water gushing up is the model poem, and what follows is the student's own water that is fresh from the depths of memory.

Psychologists Medin, Ross, and Markman in Cognitive Psychology (Harcourt College Publishers, 2001) say, "Much of the power of memory comes not just from our ability to retrieve stored information, but from the fact that we can use this information to compute or infer new information that we have never learned." Surely "infer new information" includes the unique expression of retrieved experience.

 A Weekly Read-Aloud

I was so pleased with the results of the first exercise that I chose some to read aloud in the first ten minutes of the next class. Thus, Impromptu Poetry has become the frame for English class each week. Students write on Friday; on Monday I shuffle their poems and then read every fourth one so we learn what was in their thoughts at Impromptu time. I always say how much I enjoy all the responses and that I have chosen some representative ones or personal favorites from across all English sections. I repeat that I do not give the students' names and I do not read poems that might identify the writer or refer to a situation at school possibly hurtful to any individual student.

At first I did not comment on the selections. I let the poems speak for themselves. The students were absolutely attentive. Rustling and movement ceased when I read their poems to them. It was a little scary! What were they thinking? Were they trying to figure out whose this might be? Were they thinking about whether they agree? Sixteen-year-olds are cool. Facial expressions are generally neutral.

Then I started offering my own comments after reading certain poems and found that this sometimes smoothed the way for student responses. I pointed out what had pleased me about the structure or an image or word. I might say, "I love what the word 'frontiers' does here as the child lies by the Christmas tree and watches the shadow patterns of the fir branches. That the living room stretches to frontiers rather than walls reflects to me the yet unbounded imagination and wonder of a child."

Sometimes cultural comments surprised me. When I read responses for The Style Poem, I was amazed to find some girls lamenting the loss of modesty in the skimpy, revealing clothes that girls typically wear today. One wrote:

She was Modest, Pure and Kind
But "they" wanted more,
So rebellion came knocking at her door.

Another recalled her grandmother's words,

"Your top
wouldn't have passed for a sock
in my day!"

One had fun with platform shoes. Reading to the class, I pointed out the metaphor that is also a terrific example of hyperbole.

She was suddenly three or four inches
taller than me and I couldn't quite think
what had happened until I realized that
her shoes were of a size that could
intimidate a monster truck.

In another vein entirely, The Favorite Relative Poem never fails to show how treasured grandparents are, even among cool guys with turned-back baseball caps, earrings, and low-hanging pants. This poetry model is based on one of the vignettes in House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros.

Revisions

I give no grades. I write something on every poem, such as circling a "vivid image!" or "effective repetition." I put a check above the poem if I think there is even one thing distinctive in it. I remind the students, "The check means this is worth putting in your English file, where it will be safely held for other possible purposes. It becomes a part of your writing portfolio."

Students seem pleased when they receive a check, and they usually return poems. Most poems are never revised. Some students tinker, but the revisions are seldom the extensive kind described by Tsujimoto; he gives more time for the initial writing and considers it a first draft that will be "revisioned" and clarified. Impromptu Poetry is simply another approach. Tsujimoto's process is that of the artist who carefully composes and paints; my students are like opportunistic photographers who must take their shots fast.

There is another kind of revision for me, the teacher: the prompts themselves. I have used all of Tsujimoto's eighteen, but I rarely use more than one a year now. I like to try new primings. I am ever on the lookout for poetry with structural and imagistic clarity. The New Yorker has given me some superb models. What I call The Artist's Poem is based on "Silver Gelatin" by August Kleinzahler -- a poem that appeared in The New Yorker (January 13, 1997); it is perhaps my favorite for eliciting excellent responses. My prompt reads:

An artist is aware of perspective, light, color, and shape in a technical way. Select a scene. Describe it as technically as you can, and then give an interpretation.

In the model I have provided, the interpretation is a metaphor ("a broken-off piece of Chinese ideogram moving across the page"). It might also be an insight or judgment.

I have many other favorite models in my file. Among the thirty or so I have used are ones I term the Small Place Poem, based on Lawrence Ferlinghett's "The pennycandystore beyond the El" and the Incongruity Poem, based on his "Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes," both from A Coney Island of the Mind. Also included are the November Twilight Poem and the Friend Poem, based on entries from Thoreau's journal; I rearranged each into a Found Poem. Additional models based on poems from The New Yorker include the Surprise Gift Poem, the What If Beauty Arrived Poem, the Tribute Poem, and the Coping Poem.

The model for the Month with a Metaphor poem is one that leaped out at me from a student poem by Jennifer Stob titled "Eleventh Month," which I read in the "Best Poetry" issue of the IATE Illinois English Bulletin (Fall 1994). The poem which one of my students wrote in response to this model, coincidentally, was included in the 1999 edition of the "Best Poetry" issue:

October
is a spiraling staircase
connecting the hot house
to the cold basement
Bright
warm
golden
steps
winding down
to a cool dark silver landing.

There are many potential purposes beyond the classroom for these student poems -- bulletin board displays, the school literary magazine, Web publishing, and contests such as the Scholastic Writing Awards.

Some purposes serve personal needs. At a parent-teacher conference, a mother told me that her son, who rarely tells her anything about school, announced, "Ms. Laughlin likes my poems. She reads them aloud to the class." His mother seized the moment: "Why not let me type them up as a gift for Grandma?" He agreed. Then he decided, "Let's print another copy for Uncle Bob (subject of his Favorite Relative Poem) and the others coming for Christmas." The recipients were delighted; the ultimate thank-you was the request to autograph the ten-poem collection.

I also find the poems helpful for college application letters of reference when juniors turn into seniors. I go to the file as I seek to present the student as a distinctive individual to an admissions committee reading hundreds of resumes.

Any teacher knows the most frequent student remark is, "I was absent yesterday! Did I miss anything?" Are you surprised when I tell you that in my Junior English this is almost matched by, "It's Friday! Are we going to do an Impromptu?"

Rosemary Laughlin, University Laboratory High School, Urbana, Illinois

This teaching idea was originally published in Classroom Notes Plus (October 2002).