Poetry as Sound and Object

Teaching Situation and Rationale

I teach at a magnet school in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It has a diverse student body, ranging from students who help support themselves and their families to those who are extremely wealthy. Specifically speaking, at Booker T. Washington High School, our current student body is 35% African American, 36% Caucasian, 3% Asian, 13% Hispanic, 9% Multi-Race, and 4% American Indian with 38% of our population on free and reduced lunch. My classroom reflects this diversity. Also, the two classes I teach, Pre-AP English II IB-MYP and AP Language and Composition and IBHL Literature I, have students with ranging abilities, so it is important that I differentiate and scaffold my instruction, as well as build in some flexibility for those students who need it. This unit will be written for my AP Language and Composition classes, but I feel like the information and texts will be useful for other grade levels as well. 

At the beginning of the year, I need to have students learn to speak nerd – that is to know the terms and functions of literary devices. The quickest way to teach these terms and their effects is to use poetry, shorter pieces packed with imagery, sound devices, and figurative language. Although most groan when I say the word poem, starting with the genre they most dread allows me to build up their confidence quickly. To do this, when I say the word poem, I immediately follow up with the sentence: “There are no right answers with poetry.” When I first bring up the fact that we are going to analyze poetry together, I make sure that they know that there really isn’t one perfect reading of a poem. I tell them that poems are like puzzles and it is our job to piece meaning together by looking carefully at each word, image, or phrase. In Our Difficult Sunlight, Popoff and Lansana assert that “The point of a poem is to elicit response, not to demand a singular solution for interpretation and understanding.”¹ I agree with this statement and try to convey this to my students. I love that I can get 30 different interpretations of one poem in one class period (Now, the fact that I have 30 students in one classroom is another issue). Popoff and Lansana remind readers that “It is important to remember that a poem is first and foremost a creative work of art, not an equation.”² Students often come into my classroom scared of poetry because teachers have used a rigid way of teaching poetry – this “there is only one correct way to read this poem.” They are as scared of poetry as they are of math! Again, these authors remind us that “The need to be ‘right’ in interpreting the meaning of a poem is a learned behavior that relies on the myth that if you interpret a particular poem in some way other than the accepted or perceived meaning, it means you are just too dumb to ‘get’ poetry.”³ It is this learned behavior that I need to break at the very beginning to ensure their confidence moving forward in my class.

Students also think you just need to read a poem once and you are supposed to magically get the meaning. I remind students that this is not the case. Poems need to be read over and over again, aloud, in different voices, with others – poetry is social at its core, just like them. This is why this unit brings in collaboration and performance, whole class and small group, as well. In “Talking to, Talking about, Talking with: Language Arts Students in Conversation with Poetic Texts,” Toby Emert reminds us, “Activities that encourage a collaborative approach, both in terms of students working together in imaginative ways to deepen their understanding of the texts and in terms of interacting with the poems dialogically in an effort to deepen their relationships with the texts, offer unexpected learning rewards.”⁴ This is an important aim of my curriculum unit.

Transforming Poetry into Performance

Poetry should not be an act of isolation. It should not be read in a room, alone, silently, and kept there inside the pages of a book. Analysis of poetry should not just be the questions at the end of a textbook where, again, you are alone and silent. If it is explored this way, there are so many missed opportunities that poems have to offer. When read silently and alone, you miss out on the sound and power a poem can have. By bringing in performance, what some teachers call dramatic readings, reader’s theater, or choral reading, not only are you assuring your students are actually reading the assigned text, but bringing in a level of engagement that pairs poetry with excitement. This technique of performance will also allow students to hone in on the author's purpose and the effects literary devices have on readers in a very hands-on way, every English teacher’s dream and aligns with standards and the AP Language and Composition goals.

Regarding using drama while teaching poetry, Ferguson notes “Research shows that, compared with other activities, dramatic activities can be more effective for exploring poetry and can result in higher comprehension.”⁵ Because students are thinking about poems as dramatic expression, they will stop and really think about the words and images used rather than rushing through their annotations. Ferguson also makes the point that “to perform a poem, a student must use critical thinking and comprehension skills such as activating prior knowledge, questioning, visualizing, inferencing, summarizing and synthesizing to explore both the literal and the unsaid within a poem”⁶ By using dramatic performance to transform poetry, students are hitting major standards in the ELA classroom. Research also supports “that readers who can apply their understanding of what they read by reinventing it in alternative formats signal their command of the material.”⁷ Performance offers an opportunity for students to demonstrate their understanding of the poem in a novel way compared to, say, writing an essay about it. This alone should excite students.

In a world of cell phones and social media, it is imperative that teachers approach poetry in different ways. Poetry as embodied performance affects our aesthetic response. This performance creates its own experience and completes the human expression of poetry. Teachers should use performance to show how it helps the creator make meaning, bringing their own life experience. Performance creates community. Performance is play. This ability to play with and dramatize poetry will create a sense of freedom from the humdrum of the conventional high school English classroom.