In August 2019, NPR asked its listeners to send them poems that reminded them of home. In two days, listeners sent in 1400 submissions, among them George Ella Lyon’s “Where I Am From.” After hearing her poem read on NPR, former Kentucky Poet Laureate Lyon wrote: “Written in 1993, [it] was inspired by a poem of Jo Carson's. Her poem took off from something she heard somebody say. So 'Where I'm From' has been a pass-it-on-phenomenon from the get-go. Here's to the power of poetry and place, and to the voices in all of us that long to be heard."
If you’ve been in an ELA classroom anytime in the last twenty years, you’ve used this lovely piece with its accessible format to help students create a poem of their own. When I asked my juniors this week if they had ever written a “Where I Am From” poem, 20 out of 21 students raised their hands; the lone dissent was a transfer student from South Dakota. The poem's repetition of the lines “Where I Am From” provides even the youngest of poets a structure and an entry point for a personal testament to place, culture, and identity.
By the time my students come to me in the 9-12 grade, they may have written a half dozen iterations of this poetry lesson, so I use five poems that offer the same access to a repeated line as Lyon’s poem with a different flavor, flair, and form. These poems use repetition in different ways, which allows students to see the power of repeating a line for structure or rhythm or to add power to a line with the force of a repeated word or phrase.
For this lesson, I made large posters from the five poems below, but you could make a packet or link online for students to read. Students could have read one or all of these poems, but I suggested to them that they should read until a line jumped off the page at them. And that line would be the one to start their piece. I didn’t require a particular form, but that students wrestle with the images and language for about 15 minutes before posting it to our Canvas discussion page.
“The Conditional” by Ada Limon
“The Dream of Knife, Fork, and Spoon by Kimiko Hahn
“When Giving Is All We Have” by Albertos Rios
“Resignation” by Nikki Giovanni
The results were wildly different even though the inspiration and mentor texts were the same. Here’s River’s prose poem inspired by Limon’s line “Say we never get to see it: bright future, stuck like a bum star, never coming close, never dazzling.”
That’s the thing. I never will. Just like I will never get a locker in middle school, just like I will never take the ACT, just like I will never get my period, just like I will never have a sweet sixteen, just like I will never look at colleges, just like I will never graduate high school, just like I will never marry a friend, just like I will never live on my own, just like I will never babysit my godchildren, just like I will never get rid of this feeling, just like I will never be a fifth grader, just like I will never have a first kiss, just like I will never leave my home, just like I will never go back to it, just like my brother will never be a foot taller than me, just like my mother will never die, just like it will never be summer again, just like I will never write another piano piece, just like I will never take a ballet class again, just like I will never be Clara, just like I will never have a last Nutcracker, just like I will never start this novel, just like I will never finish it, just like I will never get bigger or smaller, just like I will never ride a rollercoaster, just like my parents will never know those things about me, just like I will never know them as people, just like I will always be stuck in this place in time and space that isn’t really there, and isn’t visible to anyone.