Read Up with Lead Up – Poetry
How Do You Work Out A Poem?
We celebrated National poetry Month in style with a room full of poetry, old and new.
The evening started with a discussion about what students like about poetry and what they find challenging about it, before they dove in.
We tried our hand at writing poetry using some unconventional methods.
Found Poetry:
“Found poems take existing texts and refashion them, reorder them, and present them as poems. The literary equivalent of a collage, found poetry is often made from newspaper articles, street signs, graffiti, speeches, letters, or even other poems.” (poets.org)
Spine Poetry: Browsing through a bunch of books, students chose 3 or 4 based on their titles and stacked them to create a striking poem.
Periodical Poetry: Students created poems by cutting words out of magazines and newspapers, then pasting them together.
Blackout Poetry: Starting with a regular book page, students searched for words and phrases to create a poem. They then blacked out the rest of the page in an equally creative way.
List Poetry: Picking an emotion to use as a theme, students wrote a poem in the form of a list of things they associate with that emotion, fit with an unexpected twist at the end.
Visual Poetry:
Based on a poem found in the room, students created a drawing, comic, collage or concrete poem.
Haikubes:
Students rolled cubes with words on them and used the words to create Haikus.
Sensory Poetry:
Students walked around the building and found a piece of artwork that spoke to them to use as inspiration. Once they found some artwork that they liked, they were challenged to finish these lines:
I see…
I hear…
The scent…
The texture…
The taste…
I imagine…
Group Poetry:
Using letter tiles, each person formed a word and put it in the middle of the table. As a group, students turned the words into a poem (most of them goofy).
