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.

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

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

T: 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?

S: Poetry tells a story.

T: 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?

S: Yes.

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

S: Tells the story of what’s happening.

In this particular form of T: 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?

S: Flour, sugar, milk, eggs.

T: 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—

S: Feel.

T: 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?

S: The heart.

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

S: The heart.

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

When you are writing a poem and are looking for an image or word picture to describe the beach, let’s say, and you, Barbara, went to the beach once and found a shell with a pearl inside—and you, Neal, fell asleep in the sun and got a terrible sunburn, do you think you would use the same images or word pictures or put in the same feelings when writing your beach poem?

S: No.

T: No, of course not.

One image might be: "A day at the beach is as shiny and pink as the inside of a shell and white and brilliant as a newly formed pearl." The other image (or word picture) might be: "A day at the beach is red and hot and painful as a blister." Both images convey the visual impact of a word picture, and both draw on memory and experience. Each image is a very personal statement, and each image tells us something about the poet who wrote it. Are you beginning to see how images and feelings work in poetry?

S: Yes, but how do you really know what a day at the beach is like?

T: A day at the beach is like the poet who writes about it. If we chose today to write about the beach, there would be as many different views of the beach as there are students writing, and that’s what makes writing poetry so exciting. It gives us each a chance to be who and what we are through our poems and to explore our own very personal feelings about things. 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

T: 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?

T: You’re right. The five senses. Let’s list them on the board.

See—how things look
Hear—how things sound
Taste—how things taste
Touch—how things feel
Smell—how things smell
Emotions—how things make us feel inside

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:

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.

T: What color was I describing?
S: Black.
T: 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. In doing this, the teacher is modeling the listener role, so important to any class dynamic.

T: Did you hear the five senses in the poem? Can you give me an example of one of the five senses?

S: You can smell smoke.

S: You can see a limousine on the street.

S: You can feel sticky tar.

S: You can taste chocolate.

T: Good. What about an emotion? Did I use an emotion to describe the color black?

S: Yes, you said it was frightening.

S: And lonely.

T: I can tell you were thinking and listening very well. So now we begin to see how images—word pictures—work, and also how we use our five senses to create images. It’s important to remember that this was my black poem. Your black poem would have been different because you would have had entirely different memories and experiences to draw on. Let’s work on a poem together before we try individual poems. Let’s use the color red and try to describe it, through poetry, using all we now know about poetry: images, word pictures, feelings, the subject (red), and emotions; and let’s try to bring our own personal memories and experiences into our images. Now. What does the color red look like?

S: On a tree.
T: I can see that. An apple. Let’s take that a bit further to find the word picture. Where is the apple? Is it in a bowl or on a tree?

S: It’s fall.

T: I see. Is the apple ripe?

S: It’s shiny.

S: It’s round.

S: It’s juicy.

T: Those are fine descriptive words that tell us something about the apple. Let’s put them all together:

Red is a ripe, juicy, shiny, round apple on a tree in fall.

T: What else does red look like?

S: A fire engine.

T: Ah ha! A fire engine. Describe it.

S: It’s long.

S: It’s fast.

T: Where is the fire engine? What is it doing?

S: Racing to a fire.

T: Racing is a good word choice. All right, let’s put it together:

Red is a long, fast, sleek fire engine racing down the street to a fire.

S: It’s also a very long sound. It goes on and on.
T: Good. What time of day do you think the siren sounds the loudest? Day or night?

S: Red sounds like the siren on a fire engine.

T: What does red feel like? Is it smooth? Is it hot? Is it cool?

S: Hot is a feel word.

S: Cold.

S: Sharp.

S: Bumpy.

S: Sticky.
T: Good words. Which ones, or perhaps others we haven’t mentioned yet, might best describe the feel of the color red?

S: Hot as a fire.
S: Hot as an oven.
S: Hot as a fire in the woods on a cold winter’s night.
T: Now we’re beginning to see how to extend the image. Make it more visual, a better word picture. So then we might say that Red feels hot as a fire in the woods on a cold winter night. What else might red feel like?

S: Dry as a desert sun.

T: Yes! Good image! What does red smell like? What is the scent, the fragrance, the aroma of the color red?

S: Red smells like a rose.

T: Where is this particular rose? Your particular rose? In a vase by the window? In the garden? Where?

S: In the garden.

T: What time of year is it?

S: Springtime.

T: What time of day is it?

S: Morning.

T: Now put it all together and tell me what we have.

S: Red smells like a rose in the garden in the morning in the springtime.

T: It works! What else might red smell like?

S: Smoke.

S: Perfume.

T: Fine. Let’s take these one at a time and make them into word pictures. Let’s do the perfume first. Tell me about it. Whose perfume is it? What does it smell like? What does the fragrance remind you of?

S: It’s my mother’s perfume, and it smells like flowers.

T: Red is the flowery smell of my mother’s perfume. Good. Now, what about the smoke?

T: Like what?

S: It tastes hot.

S: Red is the smell of smoke from a campfire in the woods on a snowy night.

T: Very effective string of words. That’s putting it together! What does red taste like?

S: Spaghetti sauce.

T: Put it together.

S: Red tastes spicy hot like pizza and hot peppers and spaghetti sauce.

T: What emotion does red make us feel? Happy? Sad? Lonely? Excited?

S: Red is brave.

T: Brave as what?

S: Brave as a soldier in war.

T: What else?

S: Happy. Red is happy as a birthday party or a clown.

T: That’s really good imagery, and it’s a good place to end our red poem. Let’s go over it and see what we have:

RED

TO SEE Red is a ripe, juicy shiny, round apple on a tree in fall.
Red is a long, fast sleek fire engine racing down the street to a fire.
TO HEAR Red is the loud, long sound of a fire engine siren at night.
TO FEEL Red feels hot as a fire in the wood on a cold winter night.
TO SMELL Red smells like a rose in the garden in the morning in the springtime.
Red is the flowery smell of my mother's perfume and the smell of smoke from a campfire in the woods on a snowy night.
TO TASTE Red tastes spicy hot like pizza and hot peppers and spaghetti sauce.
EMOTION Red is brave as a soldier in war and happy as a birthday party or a clown.

T: Good poem. Let’s see if we can put together everything we know and everything we’ve experimented with today and write our own color poems. I want each one of you to choose a color (the subject) and using images and feelings and the five senses (plus emotion), describe that color for me through free verse poetry.

STUDENT POEMS

White feels comfortable.

Pink

—Third grade

White feels like two people getting married.
White smells like peppermint candy getting ready to be eaten.

I smell fresh but not crisp calm, like talcum powder and a clear river seen at the harbor.

I feel smooth like a baby’s skin soft as a new pillow made from light colored fabric.

—Sixth grade

PEACH

Peach reminds me of cool summer mornings,
It’s shaped long, bold and curvy.
It is like a sculpture of an Oriental woman warming peach juice for her baby.
It smells natural,
sounds like fur brushing a new leaf,
relaxing, peach cobbler,
a child with a freckle on her nose sleeping under a mother’s smile.
—FIFTH GRADE
I taste like bananas when they’re not ripe
and grapes and grass and papaya, salad and peas.
I am soft as cotton and comfortable as playing in the leaves,
cold as ice, squishy as peas.
I am the color of the Hulk and leaves in the spring and grass in the summer,
dinosaurs, apples, caterpillars.
My voice is the sound of grass swishing in the air,
wind blowing very hard through the trees.

Green

—Class poem, third grade

I smell like lemons and limes and juicy leaves and grass and ripe peaches.

SUMMARY: POETRY

Each group of students (on any given day) generates its own unique energy. It is this energy, this 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.

SUCCESSFUL MOVEMENT LESSONS HAVE SOME GIVENS: