Poetry
By Dorease
I am from Soul Train, from Sulfur 8 and Afro Sheen cosmetics
I am from bacon sizzling, hair straightening, gospel playing
I am from the Aloe Vera and the olive oil
I am from family walks after dinner and singing around the piano, from Jaqueline and Kenneth and The Walkers
I am from the West Indian culture, love & respect and love yourself first before demanding it from others
From "A hard head makes a soft behind," and "Your eyes may shine, your teeth may grit, but none of this treat you gonna get"
I am from a Christian home
I am from Jamaica by way of New Jersey and plantains & curry goat
From my grandma Doris waking me up for Saturday chores, the smell of Pine Sol and Ajax Cleaner
I am from a line of strong Queens
The compressed, musical, imagistic nature of poetry can speak to the reader's emotional, inner life and resonate with lived experiences in deeply layered ways. We wanted to introduce poetry as a genre for students to enjoy and as a motivation to use their strong, expressive voices in writing. To help demystify the process of writing and reading poems, we offered formal structures and models to help teachers and students get started.
- George Ella Lyon's "Where I'm From" poem provided a particularly useful model. It allowed students to use their experiences as a basis for identity poems, filled with sensory images, snippets of the spoken word, and the concrete details of everyday life. See Lyon's website where students can listen to the author reading her own poem.
- For a prewriting activity to use prior to writing the poem see Prewriting lesson plan: Where I'm From.
- For more student poems, see:
Bio Poems
The bio poem provides a model for writing identity poems. Teacher and counselor Linda Snow explores the value of bio poems as a way to get to know her students better. See her reflection in The Value of Bio Poems, where she also offers a template. The Facing History website also offers templates for bio poems. For a sample of students' bio poems from Vermont Adult Learning, see Bio Poems from Vermont Adult Ed.
Jade
Who is impatient, loving, sarcastic, and independent
Who loves Hayden, my 3 year old
Who fears the dark, the future
Who needs more time to get things together
Who gives support, love, care, advice
Who believes with hard work and focus, you can achieve anything
Collaborative Poetry Writing
Collaborative poetry writing allows students to work together to produce a final piece of writing. Collaborative poems take the pressure off of the individual student while still using his or her contributions to the final piece. Collaborative poems also reveal similarities and shared perceptions among students in ways that everyday discourse would probably not reveal. In the Managing Stress project, we experimented with collaborative poetry, resulting in the poem Blue Is.
See the lesson plan Collaborative Poem: Blue Is for fold-it poem guidelines.
Group poetry
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