Teacher’s Corner – Poetry

Poetry invites us to pay attention. It allows students to slow down and observe how language can be manipulated to make the strange familiar and the invisible felt. At its core, poetry is less about explanation than about experience, using words to press sound against color, motion against stillness, and one sense against another. For this reason, figurative language should be recognized as a skill that reaches well beyond poetry.

Every year, I walk my students over to the school garden where I ask them to listen for silky and sandpaper sounds, to see loud and quiet colors, and to distinguish between acrid and sweet smells. This exercise trains them to create the kind of counterpoint and juxtaposition Paul Harding describes, where words borrow qualities they do not normally possess. Just as “stampeding clouds roared across” gives the sky an unexpected urgency, these sensory crossings become a building block for students learning how metaphor, personification, and imaginative verbs bring poems to life. These observations serve as the first stanza, which is five lines, of a three-stanza poem I assign every year.

The second stanza will be four lines, either a quatrain or two couplets, but they must work in a variation of two of the following sentences: Abstraction is often one floor above you. The ability to hear the soundtrack of your life. The sun had set with its dreams. The thick foliage and intertwined vines of my life. I change the sentences every year. While I was in college, a professor required us to incorporate observations and overheard conversations into our writing to create authenticity. Rather than assigning that practice, I give students the sentences so they can practice using and shaping language.

Lastly, the final stanza is just an additional five lines where they must tie in the theme of their poem however they see fit. The goal of this assignment is to describe an intangible using the natural world. Below is a student example: