Sorrow Is Not Our Name

A Call and Response Activity to All the Sweet Things

Photo by Yoksel 🌿 Zok on Unsplash

there are, on this planet alone, something like two

million naturally occurring sweet things

Even though February is the briefest of months, it taxes me more than day-heavy months. It’s the false flag of time. A half dozen times I thought surely February was over, but then it never was.  Now it’s finally escaped back into the calendar, and I think, “where did February go?”  

We’ve had no snow days in Kentucky, and the weather has been nauseatingly warm. Nauseatingly dangerous like a baby dancing on the edge of the alligator pit. I want to snatch back the February of snow storms and freezing temps, not the confused daffodils whipping in balmy 70 mph winds. Is this the part of climate change where we mourn the familiar disasters of the past? No snowbound futures? Every day the howling wind? 

Here in the faux-winter of my discontent, I’ve been working on a book about place-based literacy. Over the next month, I’ll be floating activities out to Your High School Creative Writing Teacher friends and neighbors, so gird your loins for free lesson plans. In the meantime, here’s an activity I did with my students last week. In a crazy week of floods and wind and storms, we decided to concentrate on all the sweet things. 

We read Ross Gay’s poem Sorrow Is Not My Name and I asked students to do a reading activity that allows them to engage with the poem from the purely human, purely appreciative, purely celebratory posture of call and response. 

The poet calls out. How do you respond? 

According to MasterClass, call and response in music is “a compositional technique that works similarly to a conversation.” One phrase of the music calls out and the second phrase responds or comments on the first. This is the posture we adopt when reading poetry.

• Read the poem. 

• Circle or underline four words, lines, phrases or images that call out to you. 

• Respond appropriately in the white space around the poem.

Any way you respond is valid, but respond you must. Identify what you are thinking and feeling as you read and translate into a response, written in the white space around the poem. Some students say they don’t know how to do that, so here’s a list of great ways you might respond. In the white space around the poem. . .

Ask a Question

ask a question as if you were writing a note to the poet

ask a question as if you were writing a note to the universe

ask a question as if you were writing a note to yourself or some version of yourself

Make a Connection

make a connection with a memory 

make a connection with a person 

make a connection with a song 

make a connection with an emotion 

make a connection with an historical event

make a connection with a personal event

React with Emojis

React with laughter

React with outrage

React with love

React with any emotion you feel 

Celebrate with Delight

Celebrate a word you love   

Celebrate an image you love  

Celebrate a phrase you love   

Celebrate a line you love

Engage with Confusion 

Engage with a word you don’t understand

Engage with an image you don’t understand

Engage with a phrase you don’t understand

Engage with a line you don’t understand

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Extension Exercise

Almost every student in the class had some kind of reaction to “there are, on this planet alone, something like two/million naturally occurring sweet things,” so we transferred that line to a clean sheet of paper and started our own list poem, naming a dozen ‘naturally occurring sweet things’. The only rules were the list needed to be personal and profound. I will publish some of these in a few days!