poetry workshops for children and teens and for their teachers, counselors, and leaders |
|
|
|
Exercises for Teachers : The Color of Poetry, Arlyn
Miller, founder/director of Poetic License
|
||||
The Inspiration. Stephen Beal's wonderful book of poetry, The Very Stuff: Poems on Color, Thread and the Habits of Women (Interweave Press, 1995). Beal, an accomplished fiber artist, has written this book of poems inspired by colors of embroidery floss. Each of Beal's poems appears with a tab of the inspiring color. Each poem's title is the subject color's identifying number assigned by the floss manufacturer. As the book jacket notes, “Beal finds that colors are magic carpets for his mind and for his heart.” So have many of my elementary and middle school students. Appropriate Age Groups. This exercise is appropriate for students of any age. Because of the hands-on, imaginative nature of the exercise, it would also work well in enrichment, camp, or scouting programming. The Exercise. I begin by introducing and sharing several of Beal's poems with my class. Sharing poems from Jane Yolen's Color Me A Rhyme (Wordsong/Boyds Mills Press 2000) would as work well for students in grades K—12. Next, I spread out an array of sample paint chips, available at paint retailers. A box of crayons could work just as well, especially with younger students. Each student selects a color or card of colors as inspiration for his or her poem. The poem can be about anything the student associates with the color: a place, person, emotion, experience. In only 35 minutes of class time, I've had time to introduce the exercise, read two or three of Beal's poems, and then have students choose colors and get a start on writing. Students may finish up poems either as homework or during additional time allotted in class. Volunteers read their poems aloud during class time. Though The Very Stuff is an excellent resource, this exercise can be done successfully without it, especially if students read other poems inspired by color, like Yolen's nature poems in Color Me A Rhyme. When working with students, I always like to include examples of poems written by people their own age. Results. Students like the hands-on nature of this exercise. Both those students who need structure and those who want creative freedom have enjoyed and succeeded at this exercise. One student wrote about her brown camp cabin and summer experience, another about a friend's semolina kitchen walls and how he felt sitting in a home so culturally different from his own. Students came up with poems about the regal nature of purple vestment, the brown of death and funerals, what green pens write about, and the pink of a baby girl moving through her life to become an old woman. Sometimes, as with colors like “tear drop blue” and “angel pink,” the name of the paint chip color served as the subject and/or title of a poem. Timing and Purpose. I do this exercise as part of a multi-session focus on poetic inspiration - how we find our way to the poems we want to write or that want us to write them. Specifically, I do this exercise following an exercise using photographs as visual prompts for poems. We talk about how what we see in the everyday world around us can be a springboard for a poem if we keep our eyes open and our minds and hearts attentive. While the photograph exercise provides specific visual images to prompt a poem, this exercise demonstrates how even something as abstract as color can serve as inspiration. Not only can “things” themselves move us and inspire us to write, even their qualities of color, texture, shape and scent can do so. |
|||||
