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LESSON PLAN
Richard Evans
Terragogous
Transcript from:
http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/content/competitions/fyp/lessonplans
I’m Richard Evans, and I teach at Tonbridge School in Kent, and I’m going to be talking
about Andrew Wynn Owen’s poem ‘Terragogous’. This lesson plan is, I suppose, a Swiss
Army knife of a lesson plan, in that it has all kind of variants. But the ideas are very basic
indeed; and what you should be able to do, is use it at any level really, and with different
kind of ability sets. I usually use it for a Year Nine course, and we’ve usually done some
work beforehand on kind of man and nature, animal poetry, something that they’ve
enjoyed looking at, and usually some Hughes or Heaney, and I’ve popped in the
references sort of poems that could be looked at. So you could use animals, like Andrew
did, but if you want to do it with Sixth Formers, you could use something about famous
people, politicians, musicians, items of clothing – its very open to interpretation. I always
do a warm up with creative writing, and one thing I learned from Peter Sansom, the poet,
is that he has these great ideas, these plans, has these thirty second to one minute plans
at the start, a workshop or lesson, where he’ll say something and just talk to you about
and image and get you to think about it. Then he’ll totally leave it. And with ten minutes to
go at the end of the lesson, he comes back to it, and you’ve cogitated on it, and it’s kind of
evolved while you’re not thinking about it.
So it’s a really quick warm up. If your lesson is short, don’t use it; just go straight into
‘Terragogous’ itself. But what Andrew uses in his poem is what’s called ‘kennings’, so I’m
kind of going by this. Stage one – you need to hook the class, get them speaking, so I say
standard things like, ‘what can you tell me about Vikings?’ And you get the kind of clichéd
answers that you’d expect, you know, big hairy men, drank beer, big noses, and that’s all
fine. If you want to be more sophisticated and it’s a lesson linked to historical context, go
on and do some Anglo-Saxon, talk about that kind of thing. But really, for the purposes of
this lesson, that’s fine. You’ve moved forward and you’ve had big hairy men, beards,
battleaxes, all that kind of thing, but actually, they had a very powerful aura of culture, and
one of the things they liked using were these compound words called kennings. I don’t
really get too complex about that, we’re not teaching them Anglo Saxon here, so really just
keep it simple. Compound word, noun noun, or noun verb. And it’s a kind of image, it’s this
thing Viking, Norse or Anglo-Saxon poets used to try and describe things, in an original
way. So go to stage two: give them a couple of examples. And these are both, by the way,
taken from Beowulf: so a battle axe, is a brayed bonnet. The sea is a whale road. And
then you can start giving them other examples, see if they can guess them, a little quiz
thing, it always works well. So what is a swan path? Eventually they might work out it’s a
river. And what is the world candle? And they might work out that it’s the sun. So a bit of a
quiz to get them going. You can move on from that and really quickly, you sort of give
them modern examples of this, and say ‘okay, come on, what do we mean by flower
power?’ There’s a great Pepsi cola, which is showing my age, advertising slogan from the
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The Poetry Society, 22 Betterton Street, London, WC2H 9BX
tel 020 7420 9880 fax 020 7240 4818 e-mail info@poetrysociety.org.uk
website http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk
70s called ‘lip smacking, thirst quenching, ace tasting, motivating, good buzzing, cool
talking, high walking, fast living, ever giving, cool fizzing’ – throw that at them, see if they
can work out what its advertising. So that’s sort of one lesson, and that will go on, and
Andrew does use these sort of kenning things. There is a quick option: if you want to go off
there, young students love writing kenning poems. Even with older students, you can have
a team kenning poem, where they each write a few , and then you say ‘okay, a politician, a
JCB, a baby,’ and five kennings to describe it. And you can go around and have a team
kenning poem from the class as a warm up.
So, onto ‘Terragogus’ itself; and the lesson plan now really is leading out of, and into, that
poem. Just to give some background, ‘Terragogus’ is actually Latin. It means tortoise, but I
wouldn’t tell the students that straight away; its about Andrew’s pet tortoise. So before you
start reading the poem, at this stage, I’ll be handing out the poem. We’re now going to look
at one poem, it’s by a student, around your age, that uses these compounds and
kennings. You challenge them again, to spot them; can you work out also what is being
described in the poem. It’s a sort of riddle poem. Again, depending on the ability, or the
age, or the focus of the lesson, you can spend as long, or as short a time as you want
reading through the poem. Get them to guess what it is, try and give them some clues,
they always eventually guess what it is. Just a clue, a lot of fun words in it, just actually
mean tortoise, I think there’s Latin, German, Portuguese in there, so as not to confuse
you. So, again, critically, if you want to look at it in more detail, you can divide the group
up, get them to look at a couplet each and say ‘okay, why is the description that Andrew is
using especially fitting?’‘how is he describing a tortoise?’, ‘what is it about body mace that
fits to tortoise?’ and spend as long, or short, over that as you want.
Now we can move on to looking at how a class can actually generate their own poem, and
we tell them that we will write a poem about an animal; so you can vary it, it’s a flexible
lesson plan. A famous person, an item of clothing, a building in the high street; the
principles are all the same, so vary it to what suits you. Because my lesson plan is on an
animal, and that’s where Andrew’s poem comes from, I actually come round, and I gather
over time these sheets, these animal sheets. (shows the examples to camera) Look in
New Scientist, look in National Geographic, they’re easy to find. It’s more sophisticated
just to download images for goodness sake, I’m a bit old fashioned and I kind of like the
students to have something focussing downwards that they can look at. The weirder the
animal, the weirder the image, often the better, and you can have real fun with that. So,
the next thing you do as well is, we’re going to use a workshop technique that’s called the
furniture game. I think this originates with Sam Brown john, but I kind of came across it by
Peter Sampson, and its like this – and again, there should be in the pack that comes with
this an attachment, a sheet on this with the categories. You want to get the guys you’re
teaching thinking laterally about the animal, not describing it in that simplistic way, but
thinking in more imaginative ways about it, and this is called a lateral thinking exercise. So,
on the sheet you’ve got a whole series of categories. And it says at the top, ‘if this animal
was an (example), it would be an (example.)’ If this animal was a car, it would be a 1950s
Chevrolet, steaming across California.’ You could give them a couple of examples to help
them, it would be really easy – ‘if Winston Churchill was an item of furniture, he would
be…’ They generally come up with a gentleman’s red leather chair sat in a gentleman’s
club. And again, it’s a lovely way to get them to move from specifics to these more
imaginative, metaphorical links. They find this harder at first; just tell them not to be
frightened of it. Okay, so, we’re looking at the animal, they’ve got five minutes, they’ve got
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the category sheet; if your animal was an item of clothing, a shop on the high street, a
sports personality, a planet, a weather phenomenon, what would it be? And they’ll
eventually come up with these extraordinary lists of descriptions of that animal, none of
which mention them directly. Give them time to do that to generate their descriptions. The
key thing here is that it has to be in detail; you’re not allowed to say just ‘if my animal was
a vehicle, it would be a car.’ We want detail. We want things like colour, texture, size,
shape, setting, where do you find it; if possible, and if your class are up to it, try to get
them to include the compounds, or kennings, or any kind of words like that, while they’re
doing it. Don’t let them do this too slowly. You’ve got to power them through it. A poet is
usually unconscious just when they want to be conscious, and conscious when they want
to be unconscious, and this is quite a good unconscious bit; we don’t want them thinking
too hard. They tend to get bogged down in it. So you know, power them through it. Have a
read around, once they’ve finished, get each student to pick their favourite example. If my
animal was, whatever it is, an item of furniture, it would be… and that’s great fun, and they
generate, and they get confident at that. Quick bonus insert: only if you have time, in a one
hour lesson, there’s one other workshop that works really well here, and it’s a three minute
thing. Here it is: they have their animal in front of them, and they have to describe this
image. The student they’re describing it for is sitting in the next room, they can’t see it,
they’re never going to see this image – but they’ve got to draw it based on what the
student writes. It forces them to write incredibly precise things about shapes, textures,
colours – try it out. But as I say, only if you have time.
The final stage is really from idea to execution. I think its really important at this stage to
say, it has to allow some flexibility; you’ve moving the set of notes you’ve made into writing
a poem. I don’t think at this stage – I’ve never, ever been formulaic at this stage – you
have to write it exactly this way, and generally students always write really good poems
without a strict instruction.
But here are some real tips and I’ll certainly pass these on to them. Obviously you tell
them they’re now going to transform their notes now into a poem. Instruct them to re-read
it through, what they’ve just written, highlight under a line, words, phrases or sentences
which they like, which strike them as unusual, or which just seem to have a kind of charge
in them; and they’ll get that, they’ll understand that. So that’s one way we start. Then we
use those words as a springboard, a way of generating ideas. We don’t want a poem list
that just say, ‘if my animal was this, it would be this’ That’s a starting point, and you need
to encourage them and find a way forward. That’s the key to the door; we’re in, and now
we’ve just got to go and find the form that works, find the language that works. It might just
be a single word that starts out as a word, but generates the idea for the rest of the poem.
It might be a line, it might be an image or a metaphor. But I have to say, almost always,
with whatever ability set, that they find that okay. I always tend to send them, when they’re
writing it or drafting it, to go somewhere quiet; find a quiet space, maybe do this in the
library. I’d actually set it as homework. They’d probably have about half an hour to forty
minutes to draft all of it, and its quite a nice thing to let them go away and write.
Final stage: Drafting and redrafting. I think this is really one of the great crafts, and must
be done with great sensitivity. I’ve attached to this lesson plan just some very basic advice
with writing and redrafting, and with the young students, to be honest with you, I find that
there’s just five or six simple things that really work. There’s also an attachment which is
an early draft of a poem, and a later draft of that poem, and again that might be a useful
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The Poetry Society, 22 Betterton Street, London, WC2H 9BX
tel 020 7420 9880 fax 020 7240 4818 e-mail info@poetrysociety.org.uk
website http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk
thing to explore with your students. Really, Andrew’s poems are fantastic poems; it was
great fun, we had great fun writing it and reading it. I hope you have as much fun with the
drafting of your own versions. Best of luck with it!
This is ‘Terragogous’ by Andrew Wynn Owen.
Rock-reptilian, land-bound, looking round,
cumbersome thundersome, the wondersome survivor.
Schildkröten, ground besotten, age rotten,
wide thrown, seed sown, unknown.
Abdominally-all, steady canopic crawl,
Terragogous, analogous, one solus.
Rising up, mountain top, tired not,
mountaineer, buccaneer, aged seer.
Strong, striking pillar, salad killer,
Desert tracker, can’t walk back-er.
Tortue, fought-few, end due, never new,
Stronghold, bulky bold, winter-told.
Armoured for battle, a pebble rattle, tiny cattle,
Mud spattered, shell flattered, egg shattered.
Tartaruga, shambling mover, ancient hoover,
blithering, dithering, all withering.
Lizard face, mammoth base, body-mace,
Lion claws, bear-scaled paws, plated sores.
Testudo, Greek named, truculent-famed,
Unmatched, unmastered, untamed, unreal.
Steadfast thing, resilient king,
Shuffling, ruffling, tussling boulder.
Ancestry great, dino-fate, Jurassic-late,
Wizened race, egg based, carapaced.