Teaching project: week 4

Today's class was not canceled by Hurricane Sandy. While the weather in central Maine is windy and rainy, it doesn't seem much different from our usual autumn storms, at least not yet. Apparently there is more to come, so I won't dump out my buckets of water yet; but for the moment all I've done is dodge a few tree limbs and hang onto my rain hood.

Today's poems were two old teaching favorites of mine: Michael Casey's "driving while under the influence" and Kim Addonizio's "Garbage." As far as I can tell, neither is available online, but I can email copies if you want them. Just let me know.

The students continue to seem comfortable and cheerful; and when I asked a few of them to be readers, several seemed downright pleased to be asked. Because the group is so large, I find it challenging to develop a good read-aloud strategy that keeps everyone usefully engaged. It's always helpful when more than one person has the poem in his or her mouth--it seems to lead more naturally to conversation--but too many readers can be fragmenting. So today, for each poem, I asked two readers to alternate between the lines. I'm really trying to get them to internalize the idea of the line as a unit of sound, which is a very difficult thing to explain but fairly easy to hear and feel.

We started off with the Casey, a persona poem in which the poet leans heavily on pause and pacing to create his character. After reading it, the two boys who read spoke cogently about that sense of space in the speaker's voice: Casey is masterful at manipulating line endings to mimic a specific voice. I asked the class to tell me who this particular character was: male or female, old or young, smart or stupid--none of which Casey directly reveals. Everything is narrative context and speech pacing, but the students were instantly all over the poem: they nailed down the character without trouble.

Next, we turned to the Addonizio, a longish, untidy polemic about waste. The two girls who read the poem spoke about the awkwardness of the line endings, which, they felt, seemed to break up sentences almost randomly. So we moved on to look at the sentences. I asked the class to scan the poem and tell me where each sentence ended. We tracked periods down the page, and the class discovered that, after several shortish sentences, the poet launches into a twenty-line, detail-packed, almost hysterical description of accumulation. As one student said, "She's building up her sentence with the garbage." Then we went back and looked at how the sentences opened and noticed that several begin with "Don't think about . . . " before moving into the details of the garbage dump. We talked about this opener as a manipulation strategy: the poet is pretending that she isn't pushing our faces into the trash. But, in truth, she's forcing us to look at something we really don't want to look at.

For an in-class writing assignment, I asked students to write at least fifteen lines about something they really, really hate or that really, really makes them angry. They could choose to rush their lines down the page, like Addonizio does, or to pause deliberately at the ends, like Casey does. But whatever style they chose to emulate, they had to write the entire poem as a single long sentence. Before they began writing, we brainstormed words that help keep a sentence going, words that they could latch onto as inspiration to press forward: and, or, for, because, since, yet, etc. As you can see, this kind of prompt is a good way to teach conjunctions.

The idea of writing about something they hated made the students chattery and excited. But after about five minutes they settled down to write, and at the end of the class we heard drafts about unattractive hairy men, prideful football jocks, annoying roommates, and even, very bravely, given our politically conservative county, a declaration against gay-marriage opponents. After this last student read, I did make sure to talk briefly about the long history of political poetry and to also mention that poems can be a great way to think about these kinds of sensitive issues. They let us sit quietly and listen instead of jumping into the debate and arguing. And if we disagree, then we have to go home and write our own poem.

For homework, I asked students to add at least five lines to the in-class poem. They can do this by adding material and/or relineating. In addition, they need to transform the one-sentence draft into a three-sentence draft.

Next week I'll be on the road, teaching in New Hampshire, but the classroom teachers still plan to bring the students together. I'll be interested to hear how that session goes. By the time I've returned, each student should have chosen one of the drafts he or she has written so far, and that will be the template for the more intensive revision exercises we'll be undertaking. The goal, by the end of this experiment, is for students to have several progressive drafts that lead to a finished poem.

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3