What Is Poetry?: Initial Explorations 

An Excerpt from “Studying Poetry: Building on Students’ Lives and Languages” (Classroom Notes Plus, January 2007)

The four-week Studying Poetry unit by Katie Van Sluys and Hadley Smillie involves students in reading, exploring, and creating poetry, and includes strategies for defining poetry, learning from poets, drafting poems that matter, and revising, publishing, and reflecting. 

This excerpt describes a reading and responding activity that takes place during Week One. 

Exploring People, Place, Language & Identity: Our Poetry Text Set

Selected poems from:

Neighborhood Odes by Gary Soto (Harcourt, 2005)
My Own True Name by Pat Mora (Arte Publico Press, 2000)
Here in Harlem by Walter Dean Myers (Holiday House, Inc., 2004)
19 Varieties of Gazelle, by Naomi Shihab Nye (Harper Collins, 2005)
My Name is Jorge by Jane Medina (Boyd Mills Press, 1999)
Philanthropist Poets—A self-published book of poetry written by Indiana third graders

Individual poems and songs:

And Still I Rise by Maya Angelou (from And Still I Rise, Random House, Inc., 1978)
Like a King by Ben Harper (from Welcome to the Cruel World (Virgin Records US, 1994)

We selected poems that represented diverse perspectives but that spoke to the issues alive in classroom conversations. Multiple copies of the text sets were available such that each table of four students had access to a variety of poems.

Students were invited to read poems silently, aloud, alone, or with friends. They were not asked to read all the poems—rather they were invited to select and read poems that drew them in and/or were of interest to them.

After uninterrupted periods of reading, thinking, and responding to the poems, students were asked to start examining with the following questions in mind:

• What do you notice about the topic, content, and issues the poets are exploring?
  
• What do you notice about what the poem looks like and how it is put together?

Using sticky notes and margin notes on photocopied poems, students began to label parts of poems. They also began to hypothesize why poets made particular decisions. Here's one example of student notetaking:

Students shared their "what they noticed" notes with the whole class and we created a reference document with two columns. Students' words were used to title the two columns "What we think about poetry" and "Ingredients."  We added the subtitles, "What we notice about content (topics, ideas, messages)" and "How poems are put together."  A sample chart is shown below:

Katie Van Sluys is an assistant professor of literacy at DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois.

Hadley Smillie is a language arts teacher at the Lycee Francais de Chicago.