Aim: What creative approaches can be taken to find ideas for writing poetry?
Do Now: THINK/SHARE WHOLE CLASS DISCUSSION
What do you do in your free time?
People in the class answered with:
drawing
video games (minecraft, league of legends)
writing
designing fashion
tennis
spend time with family/friends
watching shows (criminal minds, greys anatomy)
We spirit read an excerpt from Poemcrazy by Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge
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.
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.
What are we noticing?
she uses words that seem like they don’t make sense on their own
if a word comes to mind, she just writes them down
she takes word politely
gathers them and places them in a nice way for herself
We then watched Alphabet Aerobics performed by Daniel Radcliffe
TEAM WORD CHALLENGE
With your teams, create a thesaurus of synonyms for the verb:
"to walk or move."
Try to find a synonym for each letter of the alphabet. You have 5 minutes to report your findings
Team 2 won with 21 words
A. amble
B. bungle
C. crawl
D. drive
E. excursion
F. floating
G. gallop
H. hop
I. interfere
J. jog
K.
L. leap
M. march
N.
O. operate
P. pace
Q. quicken
R. run
S. stroll
T. trample
U. urge
V.
W. wander
X.
Y.
Z. zoom
We read “gas, food, longing”: Annotate as we read along. Look for things that stand out to you for whatever reason.
... 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.
Image Challenge - Team 2
1. Choose 1 picture from the previous slide with your TEAM and together, try to write a description that captures what the picture is AND how it makes you feel:
We chose Spider-man. The picture captures an adventurous and courageous mood as he traverses the buildings of Manhattan.
2. Where can you find creative inspiration that you can personally use to create your own form of poetry?
You can find creative inspiration anywhere. For example, you can just look around for inspiration and write down things that we think of. lIterature and songs are great places to find inspiration as well.
HOMEWORK
Our homework was to make a word pool of 30 words or images. It will help when we write our own poetry.
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