Agenda: Week 13
• Reminders: Poetry Instruction
– What are we teaching?
– What do we hope to accomplish?
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John Ciardi” “How Does a Poem Mean?”
“What Good Poems Are For”
Strategy #3 Questioning a Poem
Strategy #4 Dialogue Journal
Imagism: The Aesthetic Foundation of
Contemporary Poetry
• Strategy #5 Progression and the Poetic Turn
1
Introduction to Poetry Instruction
2
Instructional Goals
Literary Pleasure
Developing
Independent
Readers
Developing
Student
Ownership
3
Poetry Instruction: An Introduction
• Teaching several explicit reading
strategies can help students develop both
confidence and competence.
4
John Ciardi:
“How Does a Poem Mean?”
• “What greater violence
can be done to the
poet’s experience than
to drag it into an early
morning classroom and
to go after it as an item
on its way to a Final
Examination?”
-John Ciardi
5
John Ciardi:
“How Does a Poem Mean?”
O body swayed to music, O
quickening glance,
How shall I tell the dancer from
the dance?
-William Butler Yeats
“What the poem is, is
inseparable from its own
performance of itself. The
dance is in the dancer and the
dancer is in the dance.”
-John Ciardi
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John Ciardi:
“How Does a Poem Mean?”
“Learning to experience poetry is not a radically
different process from that of learning any other
kind of play. The way to develop a poetic sense is
by using it. And one of the real joys of the playimpulse is in the sudden discovery that one is
getting better at it than he had thought he would
be.”
-John Ciardi
Aesthetic Reading vs. Efferent Reading
Figurative Reading vs. Literal Reading
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John Ciardi:
“How Does a Poem Mean?”
• Discussion of article
– 5 minutes to review it
– Identify two important or puzzling passages
– Write one question for discussion
• Why did I give you time in class to prepare
for this discussion?
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“What Good Poems Are For”
Tom Wyman
To sit on a shelf in the cabin across the lake
where the young man and the young woman
have come to live—there are only a few books
in this dwelling, and one of them
is this book of poems.
To be like plants
on a sunlit window sill
of a city apartment—all the hours of care
that go into them, the tending and watering,
and yet to the casual eye they are just present
—a brief moment of enjoyment…
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Only those who work on the plant know how slowly
it grows
and changes, almost dies from its own causes
or neglect, or how other plants
can be started from this one
and used elsewhere in the house
or given to friends.
But everyone notices the absence of plants
in a residence
even those who don’t have plants themselves.
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There is also (though this is more rare)
a man in his 50’s taking a poem from a new book Bob
showed him
around from table to table, reading it aloud
to each group of drinkers because, he kept saying,
the poem was about work he did, what he knew about,
written by somebody like himself.
But where could he take it
except from table to table, past the Fuck offs
and the Hey, that’s pretty goods? Over the noise
of the jukebox and the bar’s TV,
past the silence of the lake,
a person is speaking
in a world full of people talking.
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Out of all that is said, these particular words
put down roots in someone’s mind
so that he or she likes to have them here—
these words no one was paid to write
that live with us for a while
in a small container
on the ledge where the light enters.
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Conversational Focus
• How can we connect what Wayman says
about poetry to what Ciardi says?
• What are the implications of these
messages for us as literature teachers?
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Strategy #3
Questioning the Text
• Read poem once aloud.
• Have students read and mark/ comment
on text for 3-5 minutes.
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Strategy #3
Questioning the Text
• Ask students to turn paper over and write
in response to the prompt at the bottom of
the page.
• In groups WITHOUT TURNING BACK TO
THE POEM use your writing to discuss
things you noticed and questions that
remain.
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The Process Unpacked
• Repeated patterns from earlier instruction
– first reading by skilled reader
– additional readings and markings by students
– writing to clarify thinking and make questions
concrete
– peer or small group discussion
– full class discussion
• Introduction of new process concept: the
importance of the questions we ask about a text.
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The Importance of Our Questions
What we are capable of noticing in a text, of
understanding about a text, and of saying
about a text is both generated by, and
limited by, the questions we are capable of
asking of the text.
What are the implications of this for us
as teachers?
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RESPONSE, ANALYSIS, REFLECTION
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Strategy #4
The Dialogue Journal
The text says…
I say…
• Another way to help students into the
language of the poem, to help them engage
in a non-threatening way.
• Encourages, accepts and validates the
VALUE of their words, their voices by
positioning them in a position of equality with
the text.
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Imagism: The Aesthetic Foundation
of Contemporary Poetry (1912)
1. “Make it new!” (Ezra Pound)
a. Language: common speech; exact word
b. Topics “absolute freedom in choice of topic.”
c. Forms: free verse. “A new cadence means a
new idea.”
d. Aesthetic: rejected the sentiment and artifice
of Romantic and Victorian poets.
Concentration is the essence of poetry.
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Ezra Pound
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet black bough.
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Amy Lowell
Peace
Perched upon the muzzle of a cannon
A yellow butterfly is slowly opening
and shutting its wings.
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Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)
Pear Tree
Silver dust
lifted from the earth,
higher than my arms reach,
you have mounted,
O silver,
higher than my arms reach
you front us with great
mass;
O white pear,
your flower-tufts
thick on the branch
bring summer and ripe fruits
in their purple hearts.
no flower ever opened
so staunch a white leaf,
no flower ever parted silver
from such rare silver;
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Influenced By Imagism
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Wallace Stevens
D.H. Lawrence
Marianne Moore
T.S. Eliot
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William Carlos Williams
"No meaning but in things!”
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William Carlos Williams
The Red Wheelbarrow
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
“No
meaning
but in
things!”
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
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Strategy #5: Progression and the
Poetic Turn
Poems typically present readers with one or
more progressions from beginning to end.
Look for changes in time, location, or
increased understanding on the part of the
narrative voice.
•Ronald Wallace: “Grandmother Grace”
•Richard Wilber “The Pardon”
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Strategy #5: Progression and the
Poetic Turn
Many poems have a turn somewhere after
the halfway point that leads to a change or
development in meaning. Readers aware of
this convention and alert to the possibility of
this change are less likely to miss the
extension of meanings presented by the
text.
Elizabeth Bishop “One Art”
Adrianne Rich “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers”
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Strategy #5: Progression and the
Poetic Turn
•Explicit instruction
•Lots of practice identifying progressions
and turns
•Lots of discussion about the implications in
terms of the development of meaning in
particular poems.
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Wise Words from William Glasser
• WE LEARN:
– 10% of what we read,
– 20% of what we hear,
– 30% of what we see,
– 50% of what we both see and hear;
• AND:
– 70% of what we discuss with others,
– 80% what we experience personally,
– 95% of what we TEACH someone else.
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NCTE
• Anne Ruggles Gere, Leila Christenbury, and
Kelly Sassi. Successful On-Demand Writers:
What Teachers Can Learn From Them
• Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey. Graphic Novels:
NOT Your Father’s Comic Books
• Jerry Harste. What Do We Mean by “Literacy”
Now?
• Laura Rodriguez. President’s Award
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Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey.
Graphic Novels: Not Your Father’s Comic Books
• Wide readership
• Use to build background
knowledge
• Excellent for teaching
many literary devices,
especially inferencing
– Keep their minds in the
gutter!
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Jerry Harste.
What Do We Mean by “Literacy” Now”?
• Recognition of multiple literacies
– Different cultures, different literacies
– Multiple ways of knowing
• Critical Literacies
– Literacies should be understood as social practices.
– Literate methods are social practices.
• In order to change literacies, we must change
the social practices that hold existing literacies in
place.
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Jerry Harste.
What Do We Mean by “Literacy” Now”?
• What kinds of literacy are needed to read
critically?
– Instrumental literacy
• Ability to access text
• Understanding of what text is doing to reader
– Subtext strategies
• Two sticky notes
– Character thinking
– Character saying
• Lingering in a text: focus on a single passage that
students unpack.
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Jerry Harste.
What Do We Mean by “Literacy” Now”?
– Subtext strategies continued
• Key questions
– Who wrote this text?
– Why was this text writtten?
– Who was the text written for?
– Whose voices, points of view, are NOT
included?
– What do you find problematic about
the story being told?
– From a language or discourse point of
view, how is this message presented?
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Laura Rodriguez
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