Aim: What creative approaches can be taken to find ideas for writing poetry?
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Do now: THINK/SHARE WHOLE CLASS DISCUSSION
Consider your free-time outside of school, when you’re (hopefully) not procrastinating. What do you like to do & how do you like to spend your time when you’re not studying or working on assignments (Ex. Listen to music, watch T.V, Draw, etc…)?
For example, if you are a gamer, what type of games do you like to play? FPS? RPG? Simulation? FIFA? ETC! Do you play online with a guild/clan or a certain group of friends? Or, do you prefer to play alone taking in the soundtrack, graphics, and story? What is it that you enjoy about gaming; if you’re a gamer?
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In the beginning of our class, our do-now was a class discussion. The class discussion was about what my class liked to do in their leisure time outside of class. There were many different answers, since everyone had their own hobbies they like to do for their own enjoyment. My hobby was drawing while listening to music. One of my classmates, Ayah, talked about playing with her pets. Another one of my classmates mentioned watching youtube and drama. We ended the discussion with the answer of sleeping and walking as a fun activity. This activity was supposed to help us generate ideas of what we would like to do in our poems, using our emotions and think of inspirations for it.
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After our class discussion about our hobbies, we then move on to an excerpt of ‘Poemcrazy’ by Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge. This passage was about collecting words to create a wordpool, a tool that would help us later on when it’s time to create our own creative poems. The speaker in this shows their behavior of writing down everything that seems strange, exciting or stood out to them. The purpose of this in this lesson was to teach us that you could practically write about everything, from your surroundings to even words you have made up. Words can be used to express one’s thoughts and emotions.
Spirit Reading:
From Poemcrazy
by Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge
collecting words and creating a wordpool
I have a strong gathering instinct. I collect boxes, hats, rusty flattened bottle caps for collages and creek-worn sticks to color with my hoard of Berol prismacolor pencils. When I was a kid I’d lie in bed imagining I was a squirrel who lived in a hollow tree, foraging for acorns, twigs and whatever it takes to make squirrel furniture.
Most of us have collections. I ask people all the time in workshops, Do you collect anything? Stamps? Shells? ’57 Chevys? Raccoons? Money? Leopards? Meteorites? Wisecracks? What a coincidence, I collect them, too. Hats, coins, cougars, old Studebakers. That is, I collect the words. Pith helmet, fragment, Frigidaire, quarrel, loveseat, lily. I gather them into my journal.
The great thing about collecting words is they’re free; you can borrow them, trade them in or toss them out. I’m trading in (and literally composting) some of my other collections—driftwood, acorns and bits of colored Easter egg shell—for words. Words are lightweight, unbreakable, portable, and they’re everywhere. You can even make them up. Frebrent, bezoncular, zurber. Someone made up the word padiddle.
A word can trigger or inspire a poem, and words in a stack or thin list can make up poems.
Because I always carry my journal with me, I’m likely to jot down words on trains, in the car, at boring meetings (where I appear to be taking notes), on hikes and in bed.
I take words from everywhere. I might steal steel, spelled both ways. Unscrupulous. I’ll toss in iron, metal and magnolias. Whatever flies into my mind. Haystack, surge, sidewinder. A sound, splash. A color, magenta. Here’s a chair. Velvet. Plush.
Dylan Thomas loved the words he heard and saw around him in Wales. “When I experience anything,” he once said, “I experience it as a thing and a word at the same time, both equally amazing.” Writing one ballad, he said, was like carrying around an armload of words to a table upstairs and wondering if he’d get there in time.
Words stand for feelings, ideas, mountains, bees. Listen to the sound of words. I line up words I like to hear, Nasturtiums buzz blue grass catnip catalpa catalog.
I borrow words from poems, books and conversations. Politely. Take polite. If I’m in a classroom, I just start chalking them onto the board. I don’t worry about spelling or meaning. Curdle. Cantankerous. Linoleum. Limousine. Listen. Malevolent. Sukulilli, the Maidu Indian word for silly. Magnet cat oven taste tilt titter.
I call gathering words this way creating a wordpool….
When I’m playing with words, I don’t worry about sounding dumb or crazy. And I don’t worry about whether or not I’m writing “a poem.” Word pool. World pool, wild pool, whipoorwill, swing. Words taken out of the laborious structures (like this sentence) where we normally place them take on a spinning life of their own.
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Once we had finished spirit-reading the excerpt, we then watched Daniel Radcliffe rap Blackalicious’ “Alphabet Aerobics.” The rap is an example of using alliteration, the use of repeated sounds, to create a clever tongue twister.This was a good example of having a collection of words and using it as a form of creative writing.
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Teamwork:
After watching the video, it was time to work together with our teams in the team word challenge. We were put into breakout rooms with our members, having only five minutes to come up with verbs that mean ‘to walk or move’. Our limitations were that there can only be one word for each corresponding letter. My group together had come up with only 13 words. This task could be a bit difficult if there was a lack of communication, so this was to exercise your brain to generate words. The purpose for this activity was to help you come up with different words that have similar meaning, making it easier four you to create your poems if you wanted to change your mood, keep your rhyming and more.
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For the next activity, the class was supposed to spirit-read this passage and annotate anything that stood out to us. In this part, it talks about how writing poems using imagery can ‘create an experience allowing others to feel what we feel,’ meaning that it can help us better understand and visualize what is the meaning of the poem itself. For example, the speaker uses a man shooting a pool to show frustration, just simply ‘I’m angry’ does not create any feeling or emotions in the line, it’s dull and lackluster. The reader cannot relate to just a ‘I’m md,’ they need a comparison so they understand what the emotion is like. So, the speaker uses “I hear bang, click, shoosh // feeling like the white ball // that does all the work.” This is more powerful since there is an image, the audience can feel and image a man shooting with aggression, showing the anger the writer is trying to convey. Words and imagery are a very powerful component when it comes to poems.
Spirit-Reading:
… Image is the root word of imagination. It’s from Latin imago, “picture,” how you see things. Images carry feelings. Saying, “I’m angry,” or “I’m sad,” has little impact. Creating images, I can make you feel how I feel.
When I read the words of a young student named Cari—“I’m a rose in the shape of a heart / with nineteen days of nothing / but the pouncing of shoes on my dead petals”—I experience desperation through her image. Cari doesn’t even have to name the feeling—nineteen days, a pale green sky, a pouch of seed held against a sower’s heart.
Writing poems using images can create an experience allowing others to feel what we feel. Perhaps more important, poems can put us in touch with our own often buried or unexpected feelings.
Shoua discovered her frustration by using the image of a man shooting pool,
I hear bang, click, shoosh
feeling like the white ball
that does all the work.
Tori used images from a landscape to indicate hopelessness,
the clouds collapsed,
they’re touching the ground
trying to come alive,
but they can’t.
Sometimes word tickets magically fit with the images in the paintings. One of Tori’s words was jingle. It helped her convey her developing feeling of hope,
the glowing water shows shadow
till we all hear
the jingle of dawn.
Images we create in our poem can not only help us discover our feelings, but can help us begin to
transform them.
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Teamwork:
The next and last part of the lesson was a group activity. The group activity was to pick a picture and answer the instructions “Choose 1 picture from the previous slide with your TEAM and together, try to write a description that captures what the picture is AND how it makes you feel’ and “Where can you find creative inspiration that you can personally use to create your own form of poetry?” My group picked the kitten picture. Our response was it made us feel sad and lonely. This was because we thought that the kitten was alone in a forest and it probably can’t survive on its own. It doesn’t have anyone. Another team picked the seagull and they say that the seagull made them feel annoyed and angry. My team’s answer for the second question was that we can find creative inspiration that you can personally use to create your own form of poetry by going on social media like Pinterest or you can go outside and write down what you see. Like for example, the people on social media can influence what you think and tell you about topics that could spark interest and inspiration.
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Homework:
For our class homework, we had to create our own wordpool which should at least have thirty images or words. This was to help us brainstorm ideas for our poem and also show our understanding of how wordpools could help us with our creative writing.
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Reflection:
During today’s lessons, I have learned about wordpools and how important they are. Wordpools are a collection of words. They show no limits and barriers of what you have to write and help you expand in your creativity. I learned that wordpools are a helpful device that allows us to create ideas and become our own inspiration while we write our own creative piece. It allows the writer to experiment and help with the making of imagery in a poem. It is important to have an arrangement of words and descriptive phrases to help connect with the reader in a poem. Why I should learn this is because many people struggle with poems. They do not have an idea of what they should write or they do not know how to effectively express their ideas in a poetic style. Using wordpools is an excellent way to overcome that, as I mention before it provides you with words that you can use to execute your ideas. I definitely see myself using this while I create my own stories and creative writing piece. I don’t come up with ideas quickly and with a word pool to jot down what I would like to write about or think about, it would definitely help spark ideas and inspiration in my head.
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