The Connection of Poetry

A Small Group Poetry Exercise for the First Week

Teaching is relentless and leaves little time to do much of anything else. It takes me a full three weeks to unwind into my summer self, to read leisurely, to cook slowly, to savor my food instead of bolt it.

I do most of this living on my back porch. 

This porch is everything you want in a summer: two house sparrows building a nest in the flower box, my neighbor’s chickens tsking like old women. There are groundhogs, foxes, deer, possums, and raccoons prowling around. Fireflies in the deep glen at the bottom of the yard, a peafowl screeching in the distance. These are moments where I feel connected with everything in the universe. 

Science tells us that all objects in the physical universe, including our physical bodies, are composed of energy. That energy is always flowing and always changing, and when you have time and attention enough to notice it, you can actually feel it in the air, in your skin.  One of my goals as a summer teacher is to get in touch with that energy and pay attention to the moment.

Of course, my students are never far from my mind, and I’m already thinking about how to create community and connection in my classroom within the first week.

In Ada Limon’s poetic universe, all characters, all interactions seem to be connected by a hope-charged filament of energy.  Limon’s poetry tells us something of her faith, not in a god, but in a creative energy that all humans share.  In her poem, “What It Looks Like To Us and the Words We Use,” one character asks the speaker of the poem, “You don’t believe in God?” and the speaker answers, “No. I believe in this connection we all have/to nature, to each other, to the universe.” 

Poetry is an intentional act of art that seeks to make that connection, and I want to set that intention from the first day of my class to the last. Here’s a lesson I just designed that I plan to use next year. 

Materials

• Blank 34x48 poster board

• Single copies of three Ada Limon poems (below) on 34x48 poster board  

Poems

“The End of Poetry” by Ada Limón

Enough of osseous and chickadee and sunflower

and snowshoes, maple and seeds, samara and shoot,

enough chiaroscuro, enough of thus and prophecy

and the stoic farmer and faith and our father and tis

of thee, enough of bosom and bud, skin and god

not forgetting and star bodies and frozen birds,

enough of the will to go on and not go on or how

a certain light does a certain thing, enough

of the kneeling and the rising and the looking

inward and the looking up, enough of the gun,

the drama, and the acquaintance’s suicide, the long-lost

letter on the dresser, enough of the longing and

the ego and the obliteration of ego, enough

of the mother and the child and the father and the child

and enough of the pointing to the world, weary

and desperate, enough of the brutal and the border,

enough of can you see me, can you hear me, enough

I am human, enough I am alone and I am desperate,

enough of the animal saving me, enough of the high

water, enough sorrow, enough of the air and its ease,

I am asking you to touch me.

Published in the print edition of the May 4, 2020, issue of The New Yorker. Ada Limón, the author of five poetry collections, received the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry for “The Carrying.”

“What It Looks Like To Us and the Words We Use” by Ada Limon 

All these great barns out here in the outskirts,

black creosote boards knee-deep in the bluegrass.

They look so beautifully abandoned, even in use.

You say they look like arks after the sea’s

dried up, I say they look like pirate ships,

and I think of that walk in the valley where

J said, You don’t believe in God? And I said,

No. I believe in this connection we all have

to nature, to each other, to the universe.

And she said, Yeah, God. And how we stood there,

low beasts among the white oaks, Spanish moss,

and spider webs, obsidian shards stuck in our pockets,

woodpecker flurry, and I refused to call it so.

So instead, we looked up at the unruly sky,

its clouds in simple animal shapes we could name

though we knew they were really just clouds—

disorderly, and marvelous, and ours.

Poem copyright ©2012 by Ada Limón, whose most recent book of poems is Sharks in the Rivers, Milkweed Editions, 2010. Poem reprinted from Poecology, Issue 1, 2011, by permission of Ada Limón and the publisher.

 “Instructions on Not Giving Up” by Ada Limon

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out

of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s

almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving

their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate

sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees

that really gets to me. When all the shock of white

and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave

the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,

the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin

growing over whatever winter did to us, a return

to the strange idea of continuous living despite

the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,

I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf

unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

Copyright © 2017 by Ada Limón. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 15, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.

Lesson

• Tape poster board poems on the wall in three different corners of the room. 

• Divide class into three equally numbered groups and assign them to corners. 

• Allow each group to assign the following roles:

  • reader, discussion leader, annotator, creator, performer

• The reader reads the poem completely one time and gives the discussion leader a chance to discuss and get everyone’s take on the poem.

• The reader reads the poem a second time stopping after each line to allow the annotator time to annotate the poem using feedback from the group:  what word stands out in each line, what image, what poetic device, what sense or sound? 

• After annotation, the group should connect with any element of Limon’s poem (language, line, word, phrase, devices, title, and so on) to create a new, connected, energetic, hope-filled poem of their own as a group.

• Using the blank back side of the poster board, the creator begins to create a “zero draft” from the collaborative offerings of the group.

• The creater helps the group make revisions and then writes the final draft on a new blank posterboard. 

• The performer reads the new “connected” poem to the whole class, and each group discusses their choices, their collaboration, and their connection.

I want to create the same kind of summer time back porch invitation the universe extends to me to my students. This treasured and energetic connection among my students will create empathy and vulnerability for future risk and art making.