Aim: What creative approaches can be taken to find ideas for writing poetry?
Do Now: THINK/SHARE WHOLE CLASS DISCUSSION
Consider your free-time outside of school. What do you like & how do you like to spend your time when your not studying or working on an assignment
For the Do Now we were asked to share what we liked to do during our free time, outside of school when we were not studying or completing an assignment. Edward responded first by saying that he likes to watch sport to help relieve stress (when it’s not his favorite team) and that he also likes to read and listen to music. Moving forward, Jonathan said that he likes to watch tv, talk with friends, and drink tea. He then also mentioned that if he isn’t watching tv, talking with friends, or drinking tea he likes to help his family out around the house. As we continued the discussion many mentioned that they liked to play instruments (such as Eleanor, Aidan Ng, and Alyssa) before the pandemic and now because of the pandemic they don’t play as much. Others such as Samuel, Jed, Wyatt, and Joel, liked to play games either with friends or by themselves.
After the discussion we read a poem a poem by Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge:
collecting words and creating a wordpool
I have a strong gathering instinct. I collect boxes, hats, rusty flattened bottle caps for collages and creek-worn sticks to color with my hoard of Berol prismacolor pencils. When I was a kid I’d lie in bed imagining I was a squirrel who lived in a hollow tree, foraging for acorns, twigs and whatever it takes to make squirrel furniture.
Most of us have collections. I ask people all the time in workshops, Do you collect anything? Stamps? Shells? ’57 Chevys? Raccoons? Money? Leopards? Meteorites? Wisecracks? What a coincidence, I collect them, too. Hats, coins, cougars, old Studebakers. That is, I collect the words. Pith helmet, fragment, Frigidaire, quarrel, loveseat, lily. I gather them into my journal.
The great thing about collecting words is they’re free; you can borrow them, trade them in or toss them out. I’m trading in (and literally composting) some of my other collections—driftwood, acorns and bits of colored Easter egg shell—for words. Words are lightweight, unbreakable, portable, and they’re everywhere. You can even make them up. Frebrent, bezoncular, zurber. Someone made up the word padiddle.
A word can trigger or inspire a poem, and words in a stack or thin list can make up poems.
Because I always carry my journal with me, I’m likely to jot down words on trains, in the car, at boring meetings (where I appear to be taking notes), on hikes and in bed.
collecting words and creating a wordpool--Continued
I take words from everywhere. I might steal steel, spelled both ways. Unscrupulous. I’ll toss in iron, metal and magnolias. Whatever flies into my mind. Haystack, surge, sidewinder. A sound, splash. A color, magenta. Here’s a chair. Velvet. Plush.
Dylan Thomas loved the words he heard and saw around him in Wales. “When I experience anything,” he once said, “I experience it as a thing and a word at the same time, both equally amazing.” Writing one ballad, he said, was like carrying around an armload of words to a table upstairs and wondering if he’d get there in time.
Words stand for feelings, ideas, mountains, bees. Listen to the sound of words. I line up words I like to hear, Nasturtiums buzz blue grass catnip catalpa catalog.
I borrow words from poems, books and conversations. Politely. Take polite. If I’m in a classroom, I just start chalking them onto the board. I don’t worry about spelling or meaning. Curdle. Cantankerous. Linoleum. Limousine. Listen. Malevolent. Sukulilli, the Maidu Indian word for silly. Magnet cat oven taste tilt titter.
I call gathering words this way creating a wordpool….
When I’m playing with words, I don’t worry about sounding dumb or crazy. And I don’t worry about whether or not I’m writing “a poem.” Word pool. World pool, wild pool, whipoorwill, swing. Words taken out of the laborious structures (like this sentence) where we normally place them take on a spinning life of their own.
After reading the poem we went on and watched a video of Daniel Radcliffe Rap Blackalicious. These demonstrated the amount of words that could be contained in one poem or rap. Which leads us to the next activity which was to find synonyms of the verb “to walk or move”, and we were also challenged to find a different word for each letter of the alphabet.
WORDS FROM MY GROUP:
After this activity we read another poem and were told to annotate and look for things that stood out to us
… Image is the root word of imagination. It’s from Latin imago, “picture,” how you see things. Images carry feelings. Saying, “I’m angry,” or “I’m sad,” has little impact. Creating images, I can make you feel how I feel.
When I read the words of a young student named Cari—“I’m a rose in the shape of a heart / with nineteen days of nothing / but the pouncing of shoes on my dead petals”—I experience desperation through her image. Cari doesn’t even have to name the feeling—nineteen days, a pale green sky, a pouch of seed held against a sower’s heart.
Writing poems using images can create an experience allowing others to feel what we feel. Perhaps more important, poems can put us in touch with our own often buried or unexpected feelings.
Shoua discovered her frustration by using the image of a man shooting pool,
I hear bang, click, shoosh
feeling like the white ball
that does all the work.
Tori used images from a landscape to indicate hopelessness,
the clouds collapsed,
they’re touching the ground
trying to come alive,
but they can’t.
Sometimes word tickets magically fit with the images in the paintings. One of Tori’s words was jingle. It helped her convey her developing feeling of hope,
the glowing water shows shadow
till we all hear
the jingle of dawn.
Images we create in our poem can not only help us discover our feelings, but can help us begin to
transform them.
At the end of the poem we were introduced to the second activity for the day, which Ms. Peterson called it the “Image Challenge”. In this challenge we were given a set of pictures.
From this set we and our group was select one of these pictures and to create a description for the image and also compilation of how that one picture made us feel
MY RESPONSE:
After answering this question we had to answer another question which was “Where can you find creative inspiration that you can personally use to create your own form of poetry.
MY RESPONSE:
At the end we all came back together and had a discussion about the image of what each group chose. Group 2 chose the picture of puppies they said that “The puppies provide a sense of warmth and a boost of serotonin. They are fluffy, soft and lovable. Their energy levels are always high and their chaotic movement fills us with peace.”. Another response was by group 5 which chose the picture of spider man hanging on the side a skyscraper, they said “It makes us feel nostalgic since we use to go to the city it makes me think, woah I used to go their, but now I’m stuck at home”
REFLECTION:
After this lesson I feel that there are so many ideas that I could use as inspiration to write my poems. Before this I would always have had a hard time finding ideas, but I feel like this lesson exposed me to all the possibilities that are out there that I could use as inspiration. This will help me in future writing assignments, as now I know that if I just look around and explore I will eventually find some sort of inspiration for my writing assignment.
No comments:
Post a Comment