ColorPoem.pdf

The Color Poem

Often, teaching poetry in the classroom is achieved successfully through imagery. This introductory lesson provides students with an insight into their own creative depths, helping to establish their “eye for resemblances.” Furthermore, it helps create the sense of language as a visual medium. Defining a relationship between the image and the art is the key to explaining how everyday words can be patterned to create memorable language experiences (e.g., poetry). Poems do not begin with ideas so much as they begin with words that are developed into language patterns that create imagery.

from A Word or Two Against Rhyme

Give the word the fresh scent of ripe corn swaying in the wind of a hopeful field, tasty as the rare bread of my hungry childhood. Oh let the word ride endlessly, fantastic speak face to face, heart to heart with your neighbor of the farthest century.

—Menke Katz

In poetry, each word has monumental importance. The goal is to create the most potent sensory image possible. Out of imagery is born the poem and a new understanding of and delight in language. This experience leads to a new insight into one’s own possibilities. Like fingerprints, the unique images each individual is capable of creating encapsulate personality, psyche, memory, and experience: self. This first lesson introduces imagery using color and the five senses.

SAMPLE LESSON: POETRY

Teacher: Today we are going to be talking about poetry. Who knows something about poetry?

Aristotle’s Poetics: “The greatest thing by far is to have command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted to another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.”

6 The Word in Play

Student: Poetry uses rhyming words.

Teacher: Always? Does a poem always have to rhyme?

Student: No, not always. But most of the time it does.

Teacher: It’s true that most of the poetry, limericks, and nursery rhymes that we study and read in class do rhyme. However, most poetry that is being written today, and much that has been written in the recent past by those we call contemporary poets, does not rhyme. It may have a rhyme inside the poem, and we call that internal rhyme, or it may have a line or two that rhymes, but the poem overall is written in what we call free verse. Free verse allows us, among other things, not to rhyme. We’ll be getting quite familiar with free verse once we begin to write our poems. Does anybody else want to tell us what poetry is?

Student: Poetry tells a story.

Teacher: Sometimes. But again, not always true and, in fact, the type of poetry that tells a story has a very specific name. It’s called a narrative poem. Has anybody ever heard the word narrator?

Student: Yes.

Teacher: What does a narrator in a movie or on television do?

Student: Tells the story of what’s happening.

In this particular form of

Teacher: Right. So a poem that is a narrative is the kind of questioning, the intent poem we would want to write if we wanted our was to give the students poem to tell a story. The kind of poetry we are going to be writing today is not going to be narrative. Today we are going to be most concerned with the words themselves. In poetry, words are often more important than the idea. Let’s explore poetry a bit by trying to define what makes a poem a poem. If we were going to bake a cake, for example, what ingredients would we need?

Student: Flour, sugar, milk, eggs.

Teacher: Right. And we might also want to add a bit of salt, some butter, and maybe top it all off with some ideas that will clarify the chocolate icing. Now, if we want to make a poem, we need to know what ingredients go into the poem. The first and most important ingredient, like the flour in our cake recipe, is a small word. It comes from the larger word imagination. The small word we are looking for is the word image. An image in poetry is what we call a word picture. We will explore how word pictures work in a few moments. The second ingredient is almost as important. Without it, there is no poetry. I’ll give you a clue: We laugh or we cry, we yell or pout or kiss and hug, depending on how we—

Student: Feel.

Teacher: Yes, feel. Feelings are the second ingredient in our poetry recipe—how we feel about what we are writing. We need to put ourselves into our poems. We need to try to make the reader understand our emotions and feelings so that when they read our poems they will be able to feel and understand what we felt when we wrote them. Our goal, in poetry, is to capture our own personal energy and to project our very own personal feelings. How do we know how we feel about something? From where do feelings come?

Student: The heart.

Teacher: Yes, but how do we know, for example, that we like chocolate cake but dislike spinach (or like spinach and dislike chocolate cake)?

Student: The heart.

Student: Because we’ve tasted them, and chocolate cake tastes better than spinach.

The teacher is attempting to build a foundation of ideas that will clarify the terminology to be used, and, in this case, illuminate in understandable language the essence of poetry. As in all of the scripting, the emphasis is on repetitive reinforcement of newly presented ideas and increasing vocabulary.

By encouraging students to draw on their own views of the world, the teacher provides them with a means of personalizing their feelings through poetry.

This encouragement is also a way of subtly reassuring them that their responses are neither right nor wrong but rather a projection of their creative use of words, flavored by their experiences. The teacher is therefore constantly creating this accepting environment, which will allow for the greatest freedom of ideas. Note also that the teacher presents image examples (modeling).

What we are going to be writing today is not going to be narrative. Today we are going to be most concerned with the words themselves. In poetry, words are often more important than the idea. Let’s explore poetry a bit by trying to define what makes a poem a poem. If we were going to bake a cake, for example, what ingredients would we need?

Student: Flour, sugar, milk, eggs.

Now, let me give you an example of how the ingredients we’ve discussed work. Suppose I wanted to describe the color of my blouse without ever using the color word in my poem. I might write something like this:

Learning about the sense of touch.

My blouse is the color of midnight, of bats that flap their wings on Halloween, of the sleek limousine that cruises down the street. My blouse is a color that smells like smoke drifting up from a campfire in the woods and the rich, dark smell of chocolate melting in a pot. My blouse is a color that tastes like licorice and burned marshmallows and steak cooked on a grill. My blouse is a color that feels bumpy and rough like coal or sticky and bubbly like tar on a summer day. My blouse is a color that is frightening like stairs that creak in the middle of the night. It is a lonely color like a sky without stars or a room without lights.

Learning about the sense of smell.

Teacher: What color was I describing?

Student: Black.

Teacher: Did you see the word pictures? Could you have drawn pictures of the images I used? Bats on Halloween? Smoke drifting up from a campfire? A sky without stars?

This illustrates the process of creating an image, and extending it through the use of adjectives. The teacher extracts ideas by using a technique of quick, insistent questioning. This type of lesson needs to move quickly, and the teacher should be constantly aware of pacing. Note also how the teacher adds weight to the student response by thoughtfully and reflectively repeating it, indicating to the class that he or she is a truly attentive and involved listener.

Let’s move on now to the final major ingredient. This ingredient, like the eggs and the salt in our cake, completes the main part of our poetry recipe, and it is the subject: what we are writing about. Most people think that the subject is the most important ingredient, and if we were writing a book report or term paper, it would be. But in poetry we are concerned with language, words, what we can do with them, and what we can make them do for us. So far, then, this is what our poetry recipe looks like:

The Poetry Recipe

How

1. Images—word pictures
2. Feelings—emotions (memories and experiences)

What

3. The subject

Teacher: The image and the feelings are what we call the how of poetry. How do we put words together to form pictures? How do we shape those pictures by using feelings and emotions? And the subject is the what of poetry. What are we writing about? Now we have a basic understanding of what goes into making a poem. There is still one more thing we need to include if our poem is going to come to life. It’s something you have five of, and it isn’t your fingers and it isn’t your toes. What else do you have five of?

Teacher: You’re right. The five senses. Let’s list them on the board.

You’ll notice that I added an additional sense—emotions. It’s not a physical sense, but it is important in writing the poem.

Now that we have all of these ingredients, let me give you an example of how they work. Suppose I wanted to describe the color of my blouse without ever using the color word in my poem. I might write something like this:

Learning about the sense of feeling.

Learning about the sense of smell.

Teacher: What color was I describing?

Student: Black.

Summary: Poetry

Each group of students generates its own unique energy. It is this energy, spontaneity and sense of sharing that cannot be captured in print. What is lacking is the giggles, the laughter, the delight in students’ eyes when confronted with the wonder of words (their own and others’). The exhilaration, exuberance, and sense of accomplishment that comes from the metamorphosis of red into an apple, an apple into a bloody moon, and the moon into an angel’s pillow are memorable. Each creative strand becomes part of a fabric that is woven of words, conceived joyously one at a time. But the real moment of truth is the time of sharing. The poem, personal and personified, is given as a gift and more often than not, accepted in the same spirit. The enthusiasm with which the poems are read and greeted readies the group for further word/music/movement exploration.