Start the Year Off Write

Activity #7 of Ten Write Days

Photo by Fábio Alves on Unsplash

Spoken word poetry is an easy sell in a creative writing class. Students are familiar with the form, they love the word play, they love how strident and political it can be,  and they embrace the rhythm/rhyme resonance. In this YouTube of Marlon Carey, he delivers a flawless poem about Time while solving a Rubik’s cube. As soon as we watch it, I invite them to do the same. What ticking clock demonstration can you perform during a spoken word poem to heighten the experience of the act and underscore the significance of the poem’s subject?

Assignment: 

• Write a spoken word poem about an abstract concept, like Time or Love or Justice or Beauty. There’s no length requirement, but consider what demonstration you plan on pairing your poem with. Will your demonstration be finished by the time your poem is?

• Choose some demonstration, like solving a Rubik’s Cube or potting a plant or tuning a guitar, to pair with your poem.

• Practice, practice, practice.

• Perform for the class!

It sounds like a crazy assignment, but students love it. They love to bridge the abstract concept with something tangible, like the physical demonstration of a concrete act. Students thought deeply about what act might serve as a metaphor for the abstract subject they were slamming about. Last year, students in my class. . .

• Made a PBJ while poeming about their mother’s fatphobia

• Knitted while poeming about loss (of grandparents, dogs, small change purses, etc) 

• Performed pointe combos while poeming about body image 

• Sliced an apple while poeming about cottagecore (not quite an abstract concept, but a very funny poem, nonetheless)