Playing with Poems: Rules, Tools, and Games

Introduction

For centuries, the poppy flower has held an association with restoration, sleep, and death: the plant was sacred to both Demeter—in ancient Greece, the flowering weed was used to revitalize the soil—and Hypnos—its seeds were used as both anesthetic and medicine. Red poppies grow in abundance in Asia and Europe including in the County of Flanders in southern Belgium. It was here, in the fields of Flanders, when the flower became the indelible symbol of World War I.

The Second Battle of Ypres started on April 21, 1915 and raged for over a month. Within thirty-five days, over 105,000 men were killed, wounded, or missing. ¹ Throughout the battle, Lieutenant Colonel John McRae, a field surgeon with the Canadian artillery, treated the injured from both sides. He would later write: "Seventeen days of Hades! At the end of the first day if anyone had told us we had to spend seventeen days there, we would have folded our hands and said it could not have been done." ² Included in the list of dead was Alexis Helmer, a close friend and former student of McRae. Helmer fell on May 2, 1915, twelve days into the conflict.

The following day, May 3 ^rd, McRae allowed himself a few moments to grieve. He sat in the back of an ambulance and began to write, staring out at the makeshift cemetery that had blossomed behind the field hospital. ³ Wild blooms of the blood-red flower adorned the new graveyard. In fifteen short lines, using a tight metrical pattern and paired rhyme scheme, McRae used poetry to grapple with the death of his friend, perhaps in an attempt to memorialize or give meaning to his loss. For almost 100 years, this composition—"In Flanders Fields"—has stood as one of the finest pieces of modern war poetry.

Unfortunately, most contemporary students finish their education with little background in poetry and almost no ability to analyze the genre. Many teachers assume that it is the students who do not like to study poetry and leave it out of their curriculum. Surprisingly, a 2006-2007 educational report found that "older pupils, particularly the more able, enjoyed the intellectual demands poems made and their ability to inspire frequent rereading." ⁴ In other words, our students want poetry in the classroom; we are the ones keeping it out.

With little exception, most of my seniors have had limited experience with poetry throughout their education. Some had an introduction in primary school, reading rhymed verse by writers like Dr. Seuss and writing short poems about family members. By middle and high school, they have analyzed very little poetry: maybe an occasional verse sprinkled in as an afterthought—a sestina here, a haiku there—with the literary focus always on the novel, play, or short story.

I'm guilty of this emphasis as well. In conversations with my colleagues, there is a sentiment that poetry is too hard, too confusing. It barely shows up on most standardized exams, so my fellow English teachers and I find teaching short stories to be more manageable. Perhaps some high school teachers shy away from poetry because of the overwhelming fear that this—this sonnet, this verse—is just beyond us, that this will be the day that we are proved a fraud. What if we don't get the metaphor or cannot identify the meter? If we do not get it, how can we teach it to our students? We are so used to being subject matter experts and we are pulled in so many different directions with our standards: teaching students the different genres; balancing fiction and non-fiction; pushing students to write and revise; practicing grammar and mechanics. Poetry is something that can easily fall through the cracks. Many teachers eschew poetry because of a misperceived benefit-cost ratio of teaching poetry: the amount of time it takes to adequately read, discuss, interpret, and analyze a 20-line poem is generally equal to reading, discussing, and analyzing a 1000-word short story. Ergo, in our minds, the study of prose gets us more bang for our buck.

Let us flip this final argument. When you are craving chocolate, you have many options, but for this analogy pretend you only have three: a chocolate chip cookie, a candy bar from the vending machine, or a truffle from an artisan chocolatier. All three will satisfy the craving, but the truffle will provide a richer chocolate experience. Poetry is like a truffle and using poetry—concise, densely packed texts—will provide a more satisfying experience in teaching language and voice in a way that cannot be matched by a prose-only approach to the classroom.

In its oldest form, poetry is oral, full of pattern, repetition, rhythm, music, sound, and beat. It is "the most kinesthetic of all literature, it's physical and full-bodied which activates [one's] heart and soul and sometimes bypasses the traps of our minds and the outcome is that poetry moves us." ⁵ It can help educate young children who may not understand all the words or meaning, but they will feel the rhythm, get curious about what the sounds mean, and perhaps want to create their own patterns or feel more comfortable in guessing the next word on the page because of the rhymes. Poetry can also educate older children who are learning English as a second language, and mainstream students who are learning about a major event in world history.

Poetry has been an important part of every civilization and dates back to the earliest of human history. Poetry as an art form is believed to predate the written word. "In many ancient cultures, the poem was used as a way to maintain oral history and transport it across long distances." ⁶ Most of the surviving ancient texts include the poetry of prayer as well as passion. Because of its use of grammatical and rhythmic patterns, poetry helped people remember and pass down their stories, laws, and history.

This unit is being written for 10 ^th grade World Literature, though it could be adapted for any level of English. Much of my research looks at the importance of fiction and poetry in an educational system that is pivoting away from those subjects in favor of expository reading and writing. This unit is concurrent to a World History unit of study on World War I.