The unit
Our seminar “Poems about Works of Art, Featuring Women and Other Marginalized Writers” sent us searching past the usual well-known examples of ekphrasis for our own units. We sought out poems by women, by minority writers, and by other less-explored groups that might be relevant to our student bodies. My reading and research took me organically to a set of poets, well-known already, who had not only written ekphrastic poems but also had two other attributes in common: they were exemplars of confessional poetry and had known histories of mental health struggles; in fact, two of them committed suicide as relatively young poets.
Each of our considered poets—Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Robert Lowell—has a story that will interest my students, and while their ends are often upsetting, the issues are timely and relevant, especially with my population. The central piece of the unit will be an intense poem study during which we look at specific examples of ekphrastic poems and their artworks. My students are or will be completely overwhelmed by the processes of explication and interpretation, but we can do this in smaller, less daunting pieces and sometimes collaboratively. I want them to benefit from the close reading skills that we use when we read poems and that often teach them to read prose more critically, as well. Pairing poems and images should provide engaging activities that will get students to think and apply. The central topic of depression (and suicide and other mental illness) is a sensitive one. The nature of my small classes means that we’ll inevitably have some intense discussions along the way. Inevitably, students will write their own ekphrastic poems and maybe produce art to go along with existing poetry.
Objectives
By the end of this unit, my students will have improved their visual literacy skills as well as their textual literacy competence, the latter of which is a constant weakness of many of my students. The strategies and activities are intended to provide deep practice in identifying, analyzing, and applying specific poetic conventions; exploring and articulating relationships between works of art and the poems written about them; and creating original poems about works of art that demonstrate mastery in these objectives. The Oklahoma education funding crises has hit our school again; we will have no art teacher next year. In our classes we will have to make up for those experiences, partly because our state alternative education board mandates it, but more importantly because students with our challenges are more likely to thrive with them.
The shorter unit should take place over a two-week period. I have two 2.5 hour English classes each day. Because of the length of the class period, we’ll be covering other course objectives at the same time. The unit is to be used in my 11th and 12th grade classes.
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