Start The Year Off Write

Activity #1 of Ten Write Days

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It’s the end of July, people. Make haste! Gird your loins!  Commence the back-to-school nightmares!

In the spirit of that gentle terror, I’ll post a writing activity every day for the next ten days (July 20-July 30). Most of these use poetry in some way with a few short prose pieces mixed in here as well. 

All of the invitations center identity and place, and all of them are meant to create community in your classroom where 30 strangers are going to show up soon. We need to create community yesterday, and the fastest way to hotwire connection is stories, language, building empathy, encouraging risk and vulnerability.

Activity #1

My goal is to introduce different poetic structures (without talking about form per se) and allow them to play with design. Perhaps they understand the power of lines and stanzas, perhaps even meter as well, but many are looking for a different shape that organically represents either their flow or their subject or a unique frame through which they want their reader to engage with their poem. Once students have written their poem, I ask them to drop it into a Google Slide Deck and design their slide any way they wish. Here’s a sample my class did.

For this activity, I printed a single copy of each poem and blew it up into a poster, so students could see from a distance the structural choices the poets made. These poems are also relatively short.

“Tell Me a Story” by Robert Penn Warren

“Aubade Ending with the Death of a Mosquito” by Tarfia Faizullah

“Progress Report” by Maurice Manning

“Cattails” by Nikky Finney

Notice all four poems play with structure/design a bit.  Warren’s poem is written with two parts denoted by [A] and [B]; Faizullah has a contra-call-response design. Manning’s poem is written as a letter, and Finney’s prose poem is written in a single narrative chunk that is both visually and lyrically striking.  

Invitation #1:

Choose some aspect of your identity you would like to represent poetically: your gender, age, race, family, values, background, place, culture, and so on. Then select one of these poems and write a poem in a similar structure in your writing notebook. Either a two-part poem denoted by [A] and [B], a. contrapuntal poem, a poem written as a letter, or a prose poem in a single narrative chunk. 

Drop your poem into our Google Slide Deck and design your slide any way you wish.

Here’s some biographical information about Robert Penn Warren, Tarfia Faizullah, Maurice Manning. and Nikky Finney if you would like more information about these amazing poets.