Poems about Works of Art, Featuring Women and Other Marginalized Writers

Objectives

“The reader seeks...to gain insights that will make his own life more comprehensible.” Louise Rosenblatt, Literature as Exploration

There are five objectives for this unit. The first is for students increase their fluency in the language of emotion. By naming with newfound precision the emotions and moods they feel as a result of internal and external experiences, such as viewing art, I hope that students will develop their metacognitive skills. These include critical thinking, introspection, and self-regulation.

The next objective is for students to increase their fluency in art terminology, with an emphasis on the names of colors and color theory. In exploring color, I will also guide students to make connections between color and emotion.

The third objective is for students to develop their close reading skills, with an emphasis on the concepts of mood and theme, through the study of published ekphrastic poetry and the corresponding visual art.

My fourth objective is for students to utilize their new vocabulary in the interpretation of visual art through writing ekphrastic poetry. This will be a recursive process. Their new lexicons will help students confidently describe with detail and nuance the mood a work of art/poem creates for them. I plan to evaluate their responses in their first drafts, and then prompt them to make connections between their lives, the world they live in, and their affective responses in the second drafts. The final draft will have been revised for form and detail.

The last objective is the fuzziest, but it ties the previous four together. Ultimately, students’ ekphrastic poems may be called successful if they satisfy their sense of the artwork’s essence. In order to capture that essence, though, they must not only observe a painting or sculpture but also feel it. In short, they require an aesthetic experience at the art museum! This requires attention. It is my job to inspire them to combat indifference when at the museum and later when drafting and revising their poem. As Columbia Teachers College Professor Maxine Greene states in her talk “Notes on Aesthetic Education,” “The action required is at the furthest remove from the passive gaze that is the hallmark of our time.”⁷ If successful, we will not only have learned new words and written poetry, but we will also have enriched our lives through developing the practice of mindfulness.