Aim: What creative approaches can be taken to find ideas for writing poetry?
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?
For the Do Now, the main question to be answered is “What do we like to do when we’re not in the world of school?” First, classmate Ayah started the discussion. Ayah liked to jog around the community but because of our foe, COVID-19, she spends her time either texting or face-timing her friends. She spends her free time in some interesting ways such as enjoying some Netflix & Chill, Youtube, and TikTok. Ayah passes the discussion to another classmate, Vallerie. When the sun is shining and beautiful, Vallerie likes to relax outside in her backyard and enjoy the weather. On the other hand, when the weather is not that amazing, Vallerie likes to listen to music, draw, or again, enjoy some Netflix & Chill. Vallerie passes the discussion to her classmate, Fiona. Fiona similarly enjoys the same activities as the other students. Classmate Paula shares what she likes to do with her free time which is gaming. Paula likes to play Valorant and Minecraft. Speaking of gaming, Mrs. Peterson shares her experience with gaming which she described her experience to be horrible, a nightmare, and atrocious. From the Do Now, we can gather that a lot of us do similar activities during our free time.
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.
After Spirit Reading, we jumped into an interview from Jimmy Fallon with the Great Harry Potter, Mr. Daniel Radcliffe.
Daniel Radcliffe Raps Blackalicious' "Alphabet Aerobics" [3:39]
This video shows Daniel Radcliffe rapping Blackalicious’s “Alphabet Aerobics.” A weird, yet cool song.
TEAM WORD CHALLENGE
With your teams, create a thesaurus of synonyms for the verb:
"to walk or move."
Try to find a synonym for each letter of the alphabet. You have 5 minutes to report your findings
… 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.
TEAM WORD CHALLENGE PT. 2
Reflection: Today I learned that there are more words and images that mean the same thing than we know. From the beginning, the question being asked was “What do we like to do when we’re not in the world of school?” This showed that activities we do during our free time are not so different at all. We do the same things even though we might not enjoy them as much as others. Going further into the lesson, who knew that there could be 25 and more synonyms for the verb,
to walk or move because I sure didn’t. Similar to Blackalicious’s “Alphabet Aerobics”, who knew you can rap about words that start with the same letter. Furthermore, we can take images as an example. A picture of a gaming console can give gamers a feel of relaxation because gaming is what they do during their free time while others may despise it since it enrages them when they lose. Thus, words and images can be the most beneficial to us because they can convey the most precise and visual ideas.
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