Poetry Writing Intensive

We asked every student to think of a response to this question and to answer it in the form of a poem. To teach poetry, we used a form by one of my favorite poets, Roberto Juarroz, who wrote “The Sixth Vertical Poetry.” In the poem, the poet states one fact, and then offers a contrary thought to accompany it. For example, “the word is full of voices/but no one speaks it.” (Include the poem in a final essay version). Rachel and I began to write a collaborative poem as an example: “Friendship likes to sit under a treee/but true love swims in the middle of the night.”. We asked the students to notice a pattern in the poem and to interpret the power of the last line, “everything is fleeing/toward its presence.” Once we felt that they were immersed enough in the ideas, we asked them to answer our question in the form of a poem, with the suggested form going something like:

_________________________
pero....

_________________________
pero....

________________________
pero....

_________________________
pero...

Rachel told me that some students had never written original poetry before. A few struggled and others really enjoyed it. Rae told them that poetry writing was like the experience of a dam that breaks, once you start flowing, you can’t stop! It was true. They wrote very sweet and intense poems about true love.