Poetry is a great outlet for expressing
strong emotions. The Poetry Friday Anthologies are a wonderful source for poems about first day jitters,
disappointments, fears, and other emotional moments students experience on a
daily basis. I’d like to share two poems I wrote that your students could use
as models to write about their own feelings.
“Embarrassed” appeared in The Poetry Friday Anthology, K-5 Edition,2012.
In this poem, I use food images
to describe the feeling of being embarrassed after saying the wrong thing. I say “Words
spilled like soda/Now there’s a stain.” Sometimes things slip from our mouths
in a sloppy way we didn’t intend. It can feel like being a sloppy eater and
having potato chips end up in your hair.
The use of images to describe
one’s feelings is a powerful tool in writing, particularly in poetry. Ask your
student to think of an embarrassing moment. It can be a time when they said
something they were sorry for or it could simply be a time when they dropped
something or lost their balance in front of someone they wanted to impress. Can
they think of an image to describe their feelings? Can they compare it to
another situation or object readers will immediately identify with?
Begin with a freewrite, asking
your students to describe the situation in prose, with as many metaphors or
similes that come to mind. Freewrites give writers the opportunity to find
their images first before trying to rhyme or condense their thoughts into a
poem. Sometimes, writers choose words only because they rhyme. Doing a freewrite
first can help writers avoid this pitfall.
Another strong emotion is
fear. Fear of homework. Fear of thunder. Fear of being embarrassed. These
poems, “The Math Beast” and “Thunder” appeared in Balloon Lit Journal, August 2015.
In “The Math Beast” I
compared math homework and my fear of failing to a tiger roaring in a cage. In “Thunder”
I compared the frightening sound of a storm to a stampede of buffalos on the
roof.
Ask your students to write
about something they fear. Storms? Tests? The High Dive? Monsters? Can they
compare their fear to something else?
Once again, begin with a
prose freewrite, encouraging your students to identify images before they try
to write a poem. Poetry should contain at least one clear picture for the reader
and having one in mind before you start is very helpful.
There are so many emotions to
write about. Encourage your students to explore emotional terrains and
describe their feelings in concrete images.
No comments:
Post a Comment