How to Teach Poetry Writing at Key Stage 3

Pie Corbett

• Publisher: David Fulton Publishers
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134149896
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

How to Teach Poetry Writing at Key Stage 3 is a practical manual for teachers, to be used directly in the classroom. The book begins with a series of poetry games designed to warm up creativity and strengthen the imagination. These are followed by a series of creative poetry workshops, based on the writer's own experience both as a teacher and poet running workshops in schools, which focus on developing a 'poetry base' for young writers. This imaginative base provides a range of poetic techniques and gives pupils experience in developing a repertoire of different forms. The book also offers advice on how to organize an effective workshop, and demonstrates how to teach poetry writing in a dynamic, creative and imaginative way in relationship with the KS3 national framework. Pie Corbett also provides useful advice on working with visiting poets in school, addresses for relevant web-sites, a list of books for follow-up work and a glossary of poetic forms and techniques.

Workshops include writing from first hand observation; autobiography - valuing our lives; writing about paintings, sculpture and music; surreal boxes and the bag of words; secrets, lies, wishes and dreams; creating images, taking word snapshots; riddles - hiding the truth; and red wheelbarrows and messages for mice.

The Poet’s Repertoire

• Over time you will learn various different forms that you can select for different occasions (e.g. raps for entertaining, haiku for memorable moments, free verse for serious poems and capturing experiences).
• Being true to the experience that you are writing about is more important than trying to squeeze words into a form.
• To write in any form you need to spend time reading good poems written in that form.
• Read like a writer - notice how poets achieve different effects.
• Borrow simple repeating patterns from poets and invent your own (e.g. Kit Wright's 'The Magic Box').
• Invent your own forms and structures.
• Be careful with rhyme. Rhyme is handy for funny poetry and is easy enough when you have a strong pattern (e.g. Michael Rosen's 'Down Behind a Dustbin...'). But forcing a rhyme can lead to dishonest writing. Go for the right word rather than a forced rhyme.
• Keep the writing concrete and detailed.
• Use your own poetic voice. Try to use natural language and invent memorable speech - listen for this in everyday speech.
• Avoid old poetic language; use musical language.

Ways of Looking

Teaching Focus

To recreate and celebrate experience through the use of their senses, observations and careful word selection; to experiment with presenting subjects in different ways.

Observation — firsthand experience

Learning to observe carefully, to watch the truth, of experience, lies at the heart of many poets' writing. Ted Hughes believed that it was possible to capture the spirit of a poem by focusing our whole attention, absorbing ourselves meditatively in the subject, watching every detail so that the writer can capture and re-create an intimate image of the subject. His advice to young writers focuses upon this need to look carefully, to seek out the illuminating detail:

imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic . . . . You keep your eyes, your ears, your nose, your taste, your touch, your whole being on the thing you are turning into words. The minute you flinch, and take your mind off this thing, and begin to look at the words and worry about them . . . then your worry goes into them and they set about killing each other.

(from Poetry in the Making, Ted Hughes, Faber 1967)

Hughes' advice to young writers is simple enough and could be summarised as:

• Use your senses to respond to your subject.
• Zoom in closely on the subject like a telephoto lens.
• Write quickly.
• Do not worry too much about the words as you write - try to write in a quick, concentrated flow.

In the same way Gerard Manley Hopkins' notebooks show how he used to become absorbed in an experience. He would filter through his mind a stream of words and images to attempt to re-create the experience. For him, it was a limbering-up exercise, an attempt to recapture the true essence of the experience, an intimate image. Here he is looking at raindrops:

Drops of rain hanging on rails etc. seen with only the lower rim lighted like nails (of fingers). Screws of brooks and twines. Soft chalky look with more shadowy middles of the globes of cloud on a night with a moon faint or concealed. Mealy clouds with a not brilliant moon. Blunt buds of the ash. Pencil buds of the beech. Lobes of the trees. Cups of the eyes. Gathering back lightly hinged eyeballs. Bows of the eyelids. Pencil of eyelashes. Juices of the eyeball. Eyelids like leaves, petals, caps, tufted hats, handkerchiefs, sleeves, gloves. Also of the bones sleeved in flesh. Juices of the sunrise. Joins and veins of the same. Vermilion look of the hand held against a candle with the darker parts as the middles of the fingers and especially the knuckles covered with ash.

From Selected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, (Gerard Manley Hopkins, Penguin)

To develop this skill in the classroom is relatively straightforward. A common focus is needed perhaps something a little unusual, highly visual as a starting point. I have used the following with some success:

A candle
A mirror
Autumn leaves
Marbling
A stuffed owl
Slides of a spider
Pictures of magnified skin
Bark of a tree
Looking at hands with magnifying glasses
Flowers
Photos of snow
Glass bottles
Shells
A collection of shiny objects
Clocks
Storms
Snowfall

Teasels
Vegetables chopped in half
Visit to a deserted railway station.

The starting points you use will depend on what is to hand and to some extent on where you live. For instance, anyone living near the coast may use objects found on the beach or a view of a storm as a focus. Someone working in Gloucester may make use of the Cathedral windows, a burnt-out car or artefacts from the dock area.

Rapid brainstorming helps to generate possible ideas, words and phrases. Pupils should be used to jotting down ideas, trying a few similes, some alliteration perhaps. The essence of the poem will come through careful observation and rapidly listing words to describe - to re-create. This will mean looking carefully, noting details, using the senses. A class brainstorm, with pupils calling out ideas, can act as a useful strategy for generating ideas. It also provides an opportunity for the teacher to challenge the class, pushing for synonyms, pursuing possibilities as well as drawing them back to look more closely at the subject.

Look for the sorts of words that will bring the experience alive, avoiding abstract ideas and rooting the words in the concrete. For a flame one might well list words such as matches, rattle, shake, shiver, quiver, crack, hiss, flare, spit, leap, flame, red, orange, scarlet, flicker, flick, leap, dodge, dart, dive, lean, nudge, dither, fidget, sways, curls, shine, shimmer, gleam, glisten, glitter, glow, shadow, slip, slide, slither, crack, crackle, hiss, spit, and so forth. Looking at the pointed shape of the flame might elicit images such as tongue, peak, leaf, eye, mouth, wave, nail. These might be extended - a red eye stares in the dark. Often the words needed are of action and description. Try for a very long list - this technique of gathering words shows children how to look and notice, filtering words and ideas through the mind, rapidly responding to an experience.

Once pupils begin writing, such a list need not be stuck to too rigidly - more confident writers will take off on their own tack, weaker writers may be more dependent. The more experience young writers have of using this technique the swifter they can brainstorm for themselves. Brainstorming, at its best, bridges the gap between the abstract experience and the re-creation of that experience as a poem. It is linked to learning how to look at the truth of experience, how to name that experience, how to become a 'wordsearcher'.

Skeleton Leaf

Lifeless
Like tissue paper -
Frail animal bones.
A web of veins
Criss-crossing an old hand.
Map contours;
Dry streams.
I trace each tiny thread.
Dead lines.
Fine hairs woven
Into a lace lattice.

Sally, year 8

Tuning in the senses

Tuning young writers into using their senses and noticing detail lies at the root of all good writing....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Poetry Games - Syntactic Gymnastics
• The Poet's Repertoire
• Recommended Resources