• attention to line breaks and “white space”

• sometimes a formal structure (sonnet, ballad, etc.)

Teaching the “Tools” of Poetry

A poet uses many “tools” to shape language to suit an idea and a pur-
pose. Here are some examples:

• rhythm • comparisons
• musical language • shape and form
• sensory imagery • rhyme

These poetic devices are discussed in more detail on the following

pages.

Let’s leave the limericks in Rhythm

Ireland! By middle school, One characteristic that distinguishes poetry from prose is the rhythm
your students have written
and cadence of the language. Some poetry has a strong beat, while
enough limericks and anagram
much free verse has a subtle or irregular rhythm. It’s very important to
poems to last them a lifetime.
It’s time for some other poetry expose students to a variety of poetic forms, so they learn to listen for
– rhymed or free verse. many types of rhythms.
Repetition of sounds, words and ideas adds to the power and preci-
sion of poetry. (Now there’s alliteration!) Sometimes the first line of the
poem is repeated at the end. Sometimes a word or phrase is repeated
internally to enhance the rhythm. Go on a scavenger hunt for effective
use of repetition in poetry. Invite students to share the words and pas-
sages they chose and talk about how the repetition enhanced the
meaning and sound of the poem.
Students sometimes understand this idea better if you make analogies
to music. Have them tap different rhythms as they listen to music, then
do the same thing as they listen to poetry or read it aloud. Those won-
derful archaic terms – iamb, trochee, spondee, anapest – come from musical
rhythms that existed long before they were applied by the Greeks to
poetry.

Musical language
Effective word choice is one of the strongest elements of good poetry.
Because poetry is characterized by economical use of language, every
word must be deliberately and carefully chosen for its meaning, sound
and relationship to the other words in the poem.
More Than
Think about the order of the words. Some wordRhyme Timeare
patterns simply143
– Poetry
more rhythmical than others. There’s a reason we say “peaches and
cream” instead of “cream and peaches.” Encourage students to listen for
the music of language in their writing and to experiment with the order
of words and phrases. Some literary devices that contribute to rhythm
and cadence are outlined below.
• Onomatopoeia is a wonderful term that means words that sound
like the actions or sounds they represent, such as “bang,”
“rrriippp,” or “buzz.”
Together with the students, write some “onomatopoetry.” Make
noises such as crumpling a piece of paper or scraping shoes against
the floor. Have students brainstorm descriptive words that repre-
sent those sounds. Work together to put the words into a poem.
• Invented words sometimes convey a message more effectively than
real ones. For younger students, Jon Scieszka’s Baloney, Henry P. is
full of wonderful words that sound made up, but are actually real
words from other languages. Older students will enjoy reading
Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” and discussing his word choices.
Have students take chunks of text and rewrite with their own
 • Invented words sometimes convey a message more effectively than
real ones. For younger students, Jon Scieszka’s Baloney, Henry P. is
full of wonderful words that sound made up, but are actually real
words from other languages. Older students will enjoy reading
Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” and discussing his word choices.
Have students take chunks of text and rewrite with their own
made-up words.
• Alliteration refers to a pattern in which two or more words begin
with the same sound. Alliteration was the basis of our earliest
poetry in the English language and remains particularly important
in languages where rhyming is either too easy or too difficult. Allit-
erative patterns contribute to the rhythm and cadence of the lan-
guage.
Look for examples of alliteration in published poetry and share
them with the class. Traditional poets such as Tennyson and Walter
de la Mare offer good examples, as do many contemporary poets
such as Toni Morrison.

✎ MINI-LESSON: Alliterative Poems

Alliterative poems enable students to play with words and sounds with-
out worrying too much about meaning. Assign each student a letter of
the alphabet – perhaps the first letter of their own names. Encourage
them to enlist the aid of a dictionary to generate interesting-sounding
words that begin with that letter. They can then put the words together
in a way that is rhythmical – and syntactically correct – if not particu-
larly logical.
• Vigorous verbs are a key source of energy in powerful writing of
any kind; poetry is no exception. Students could use Hoops, a book
about basketball by Robert Burleigh, as a model to create sound and
verb poems based on action-packed pictures from sports
magazines.

Go on a word hunt for strong

verbs in poetry. Jack
✎ MINI-LESSON: Verb Poems

Prelutsky’s
144 T H E W“The
R I T ETurkey
G E N R EShot
Create poems out of “ing” verbs! Weather-related topics, such as snow,
out of the Oven” is a great rain, wind or lightning, work well. Brainstorm “ing” verbs related to the
example. topic, such as pouring, drizzling, pelting. Write each word on a card.
Together, experiment with putting the verbs together into a poem.
Think about which ones sound good together and convey the meaning
most effectively. Delete words that don’t work and feel free to add other
words, like prepositional phrases. After you have worked through this
as a group, have students write their own verb poems.

Sensory imagery
Effective poetry evokes sights, sounds, textures and even smells and
tastes. Read this excerpt from Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”:

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin
Try to imagine this poem without the visual image of the beach and
the sound of the waves. You can begin to see how sensory imagery
brings the poetry to life. It is for sense, music and language that we read
poetry – and these are the qualities we are trying to encourage when our
 At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin
Try to imagine this poem without the visual image of the beach and
the sound of the waves. You can begin to see how sensory imagery
brings the poetry to life. It is for sense, music and language that we read
poetry – and these are the qualities we are trying to encourage when our
students write.
Read a piece of poetry aloud and have students sketch what they
envision as they listen. Then pass out photographs of landscapes (post-
cards work well) and ask the children to write about the images they
evoke. They can later turn their ideas into poems.

Comparisons
Poets use similes and metaphors to create images by making unusual
comparisons that lead us to see things in new, fresh ways. Similes are
easier for kids: “He was as happy as a pig a-snortin’ and a-wallowin’ in
that there mud”; metaphors require a greater imaginative stretch: “The
moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.” Both modes of
✎
comparison
of
will :enrich
MINI-LESSON
their writing.
yourWriting
Fun Food students’ language in poetry and in the rest
Give each student a treat such as an Oreo cookie or a handful of
Judi Barrett’s
Smarties. picture
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Smells Like . . . ) thing
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Feels Likeis ____________
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It is (color) like _______________________________________________
It is _________________________________________________________
And smells (tastes, looks, feels) like _____________________________

✎ MINI-LESSON: Color Carousel

More Than Rhyme Time – Poetry 145

Hailstones and Halibut Bones by Mary O’Neill is a wonderful book of

poems about colors. Read four or five of the poems aloud to your
students and record the color images on separate charts. Post the charts
around the room and have students travel in groups of three or four to
each chart, brainstorming their own ideas about that color. Every two
minutes tell the groups to move to the next station on the circle, or
carousel. Remind the students to use all their senses, not just the visual.
What does blue taste like? What does red sound like? After each group
has visited all of the charts on the circle, there will be a large collection
of vocabulary related to each of the colors. Now the students will be
ready to create color poems of their own, using some of the words on
the charts and adding others of their own. A student might choose to
write an entire poem on one color or a rainbow poem with one or two
lines for each color.

Shape and form

The white space between (or included in) the line of poetry can be
almost as important as the text. Just as a musical composer must choose
where to place his rests, so a poet determines where to break lines in
order to create the most effective rhythm and sound. Poetry can take
many different forms according to the impression the poet wishes to
make. Teaching shape and form is an appropriate opportunity to intro-
duce formal structures such as diamante and haiku.

Paul: I thought we just said we ✎ MINI-LESSON: Diamante Poetry

 make. Teaching shape and form is an appropriate opportunity to intro-
duce formal structures such as diamante and haiku.

Paul: I thought we just said we ✎ MINI-LESSON: Diamante Poetry

should abandon pattern Although we caution against overuse of patterns and frameworks, there
poems. are times that teaching a pattern can help students learn about specific
Lori: They shouldn’t be our
elements such as shape, form, and economical use of language.
whole poetry program, but
sometimes we can use them Diamante is a parallel-structure poetry format in a diamond shape: the
for a specific purpose – like top and bottom of the diamond are single nouns, the opposite of each
demonstrating shape and other, such as “day” and “night.” The second line consists of two adjec-
form with diamante, or tives describing the noun in the first line. The fourth line consists of two
practising precise word adjectives describing the noun in the last line. The middle line consists
choice with haiku. of four “ing” verbs or gerunds, two describing the first noun and two
describing the last noun. Here’s an example you might use with your
146 THE WRITE GENRE students.

Winter
Frosty, Frozen
Snowing, Blowing, Flowering, Growing
Sunny, Breezy
Summer

Rhyme
Okay, here it is . . . at last. We’ve deliberately left rhyme till the end to
show students that there’s much more to poetry than rhyming text.
Nonetheless, rhyming poetry has great appeal for many readers and
some students become very skillful at writing rhymes. The thing to
remember is not to sacrifice meaning and rhythm for the sake of
rhymes. Emphasize that good rhyming poetry generally has a strong
rhythm as well.
Reference books such as rhyming dictionaries are useful to help stu-
dents generate rhyming text that has rhythm and cadence. They also
remove some of the mental grunt work required to come up with a
rhyme. We suggest that students start with rhyming couplets before
tackling more complex rhyme patterns such as ABAB or limericks.

The Writing Process in Poetry

By now, your students should have a toolbox full of poetry techniques

and a folder full of poetry exercises that may be turned into polished
and published poetry. (There we go again with the alliteration!)

Pre-writing
Brainstorm topics that students are interested in. Although many adult
poems are about love and romance, these topics aren’t likely to motivate
your students. Urge them to think about subjects related to everyday
life: sports, school, friends and enemies. Bear in mind that some of the
most interesting poems treat ordinary subjects in a unique way. (Wit-
ness Shel Silverstein’s tribute to the toilet plunger.)
If you have students who struggle to get started, they may want to
use some models from familiar poems as springboards. Here are a few
suggestions from Silverstein.
• “Hector the Collector” – What other things could Hector collect?
• “If the World Was Crazy” – What if the school was crazy?
• “Recipe for a Hippopotamus Sandwich” – A ______ sandwich is
easy to make . . .
• “For Sale” – Create a convincing ad to sell your brother or sister.
• “Who” – Exaggerate about what you can or would like to do.