Maybe you weren’t taught poetry with joy and pizzazz, and you don’t incline to writing it yourself. Which perhaps describes, what do you think, 99% of the population? Maybe 99.99%? If you’re in this camp, I get it. Poetry can feel like a nebulous enigma in the world of literature, and it’s easy to find yourself nodding along when people talk about it being great without really believing in your nod, like the parade-goers in The Emperor’s New Clothes.
I didn’t have much use for it until I met my first performance poetry multimedia – audio recordings, a slam documentary, and the Def Poetry jam series – about twenty years ago. Then everything changed. Suddenly instead of a hoop to be jumped through, poetry opened up as a gateway I could use to help students connect to ELA.
Since then, I’ve discovered layer upon layer of wonderful ways to build poetry in across units, learning a great deal from others along the way. Today on the pod, I’ll walk you through twelve different creative, engaging options you can tap into as you teach poetry throughout the year. And I do hope that after this, you WILL teach poetry throughout the year.
Multimodal Poetry Exploration: Design a Poetry House
A few years ago my family headed to Rome for a weekend trip from our home in Bratislava. Astounded as I was by the dark chocolate gelato with whipped cream, the bright splendor of the Sistine chapel we waited in a line stretching thousands of people deep to see, and the architectural ruins popping out to surprise me from behind every seemingly modern corner, one of my favorite experiences came inside an obscure little room in The Colosseum. We drifted inside to discover it was an interactive multimedia exhibit walking us through the narrative inscribed upon Trajan’s Column. One wall showcased the story, as audio surrounded us and lights created complementary scenery cues rippling across the floor where we sat. We might find ourselves suddenly in the midst of a shadowy field of grass as we listened to the sound of a battle and watched scenes from it unfold on the wall, narration sliding in between the atmospheric sounds to explain what we were experiencing.
All housed in a single small room, it was one of the most powerful learning experiences I’ve ever encountered, and it inspired this project.
Invite your students to design a structure to showcase a poem. Maybe it’s a gazebo in a forrest, a cabin at the top of a mountain, a run-down – but unexpectedly profound – shack on the edge of a small town.
Invite them to craft an experience inside that brings out the meaning of the poem. There might be murals, interactive sounds and videos, games, narration, a photography exhibit, a maze, different intentional colors in each room corresponding to the meaning in each stanza.
There might be an audio tour companion, or a video introduction, or an entry foyer that introduces the poet and prefaces the experience visitors are about to engage in.
Students might create digitally or build physical models tied to explanatory writing.
There are SO many ways to go with this, all of them, in my opinion, exciting!
Take a Musical Angle: Melodies to Highlight Poetic Meaning
Are you familiar with Chrome Music Labs Songmaker tool? It. is. so. cool. By clicking the squares on their screen, students can compose melodies to be played back at the touch of a button. They can make single notes or chords, choose their instrument, and download the melody with a click.
I’d start this project by playing some famous instrumental theme songs from films, and discussing what those theme songs share about the films they’re in. Could students hypothesize anything about the themes of the films, based on the music? Take the theme from Jaws, for example. What does the melody evoke?
Next, invite students to analyze a poem – maybe one of their choice, or one from a curated list you’ve shared, or have everyone work on the same poem so they can experience different melodic interpretations from their classmates. Let them know that they’ll be composing a theme song based on their interpretation shortly.
Now send them in to play with Music Labs, and create a piece of music to represent a key thread of meaning they’ve discovered in the poem. What they interpret, and how they interpret it, is up to them. But they’ll need to be ready to explain their thinking. This might mean sharing back to another group or the whole group their song and their choices, writing about what they’ve created, or maybe showcasing their work with a creator’s statement on a slide as part of a collaborative slide show including the whole class’s work (which you can then invite them to explore through headphones).
A Creative Poetry Analysis Activity: Blackout to Focus
We chatted about poetry blackout (not to be confused with blackout poetry) back in episode 398, so I’m going to direct you over there if you’d like to deep dive on this one. But in brief, the idea here is to take any poem, divide students into groups, and have each group member black out every part of their poem EXCEPT whatever specific thing they’re in search of. For example, they might blackout everything but lines connected to key themes, striking imagery, connections they can make to life today, or an author’s style. Then they can spend some time adding interpretative images or notes around what they’ve found, either by taping or gluing on images or small papers with notes, collage style, or by overlaying them digitally.
Once each group member has explored their own thread, the group members can come back together to share what they’ve found. It’s very striking to see how idea pop off the page when everything else has disappeared. In the above example I created for ee ccummings’ poem, “Impressions IV,” my understanding of it changed dramatically throughout the process of blackout analysis. I could believe I had missed the parallel lines and images at the beginning and end on my first reading, but once I had blacked out the rest and started illustrating themes (upper right image), I could clearly see how the poem rose and fell with the rhythm of the day.
Creative Poetry Creation: Digital or Paper Blackout Poetry Workshop
From poetry blackout to blackout poetry… I’m sure you’re familiar with blackout poetry, so I’ll just give it a short nod here. You can grab my full kit for creating digital or physical blackout poetry free over on TPT through this link, which will also allow you to skip ripping up old books if that’s not your jam (it’s just as easy to cut and paste pages from books now in the public domain onto a doc or Slide and print them).
Craft Videos to Express the Meaning behind a Poem
I’m ever in search of multimodal means of expression for students, and poetry videos check the box beautifully. Students can create them for poems of their own or use them to showcase their interpretations of poems they choose or poems you’re studying as a whole group.
Take a look at some incredible examples here….
In the Dead of Winter We blows me away every time! The artistry in this video will help students think about the many possibilities of a poetry video, though they may not be ready to design on this level just yet.
I will not Let an Exam Result Decide my Fate is lighting it up on Youtube, with over six million views. Clearly, students are resonating with the message.
Earthrise, by Amanda Gorman, shows another angle on what a poetry video can feel like.
The first step for a project like this is for students to find/write and dig deep into the poem they’ll explore. No incredible interpretive video was ever made from a poem the narrator didn’t understand. So right away there is a purpose behind discovering as much hidden meaning as they can.
Next, storyboard time. You can make this as simple or as complicated as you want. For example, if you suggest they create four different sections of the video, providing a storyboard with four squares, you’re starting with a very simple, doable structure. Now they can map parts of the poem to types of video.
Check out the example below of a very simple place to start. Students do not have to be limited to this structure, but they can build confidence starting from a storyboard structure like this.
In a platform like Canva, they can now start to create their sections. They can record their voiceover audio right inside the platform, then connect it to video clips they find there in the videos tab or upload their own to complement the voiceover in those sections. And they can record the talking head sections and upload them to intersperse however they wish (if at all) with B-Roll/Voiceover sections.
Will there be tech issues to troubleshoot?
Undoubtedly.
Will it be worth it? YES!
If kids are having trouble, encourage them to search for the solution to their problems. There are endless tutorials on the technical aspects of video creation and editing in our multimedia-focused world.
At the end of the project, encourage reflection on what they learned about learning new skills, and how they grew as learners as well as poets and interpreters of poetry. They’ll have many future projects to tackle in life in which they won’t have all the skills up front.
More to Come
I have so many more to share with you, so we’re going to continue this next week in part two!
