Canterbury Festival Schools’ Poetry Competition
Teaching Resources for Secondary Schools
How to use these resources
These guidelines are designed to help students to engage with poetry in a number of different ways. Poem entries are by no means limited to these workshop ideas, but you may find them useful for generating creative material. Included is a list of creative exercises that can be used as starting points for the students, and in addition, a number of suggested poems to help support these exercises. Please don’t forget to submit the work generated using these materials to the Canterbury Festival Schools’ Poetry Competition! You will find the entry form enclosed in this pack.
Theme: What makes you feel good?
The theme of the 2014 Canterbury Festival Schools’ Poetry Competition is feeling good.
Encourage students to think about feeling good: what makes them feel good, what makes others feel good, why people might not feel good. Students should not feel as though their poems need to follow any particular format, and should be encouraged to use their imagination to the full to explore the idea of feeling good. They should not feel as though their poetry necessarily needs to rhyme or tell a story. We are excited to see students having fun with language and being as creative as possible.
WARM UP EXERCISES:
* Collage Poems
a)
Take a paragraph or page from a novel (that you like, or that you are studying or reading at the moment)
Eliminate words so that only words about feelings/emotions and who feels them are left.
(E.g. This from a paragraph of Nights at the Circus, by Angela Carter:
Fear disturbed
He did not want doomed
Found sinister troubling
the child hated to touch
Further exercises to extend this workshop:
- Take the poem to THE CUT UP LAB. Using http://www.cut-up-lab.com as an example, but paper and scissors makes for a really fun exercise.
Cut out each individual word and rearrange those words into a new poem. At this point you can add your own words in if you want or swap words with other people.
- Pick 5 words or phrases from this poem and use them as a starting point for your own poem. Try to write stream of consciousness associations around these words.
b)
Get each student to bring in or pick out a book from the library, and select a sentence/phrase/part of a sentence that is about feelings. Make a poem as a whole class by putting these together to make a whole poem.
* Snapshot poem
Take a look at the below Denise Levertov poem.
Discuss with the students: What images does the poet use? How does she incorporate sight, sound, colour, light?
The students might want to think about a specific point in time that they remember feeling good/happy, and describe it like a snapshot, using as many of the senses as they can.
February Evening in New York
BYDENISE LEVERTOV
As the stores close, a winter light
opens air to iris blue,
glint of frost through the smoke
grains of mica, salt of the sidewalk.
As the buildings close, released autonomous
feet pattern the streets
in hurry and stroll; balloon heads
drift and dive above them; the bodies
aren't really there.
As the lights brighten, as the sky darkens,
a woman with crooked heels says to another woman
while they step along at a fair pace,
"You know, I'm telling you, what I love best
is life. I love life! Even if I ever get
to be old and wheezy—or limp! You know?
Limping along?—I'd still ... "Out of hearing.
To the multiple disordered tones
of gears changing, a dance
to the compass points, out, four-way river.
Prospect of sky
wedged into avenues, left at the ends of streets,
west sky, east sky: more life tonight! A range
of open time at winter's outskirts.
* Object poem
Take a look at the below poem by William Matthews. The poet uses the image of the onion to explore happiness/feeling good on many levels, in order to make something ordinary extraordinary.
Discuss: How does the poet use adjectives, active verbs, alliteration and assonance within the poem?
The students might want to write a poem about an object that reminds them of feeling good/happy and explore it using all the senses. It can be anything, such as a food/an object/a place.
Onions
BYWILLIAM MATTHEWS
How easily happiness begins by
dicing onions. A lump of sweet butter
slithers and swirls across the floor
of the sauté pan, especially if its
errant path crosses a tiny slick
of olive oil. Then a tumble of onions.
This could mean soup or risotto
or chutney (from the Sanskrit
chatni, to lick). Slowly the onions
go limp and then nacreous
and then what cookbooks call clear,
though if they were eyes you could see
clearly the cataracts in them.
It’s true it can make you weep
to peel them, to unfurl and to tease
from the taut ball first the brittle,
caramel-colored and decrepit
papery outside layer, the least
recent the reticent onion
wrapped around its growing body,
for there’s nothing to an onion
but skin, and it’s true you can go on
weeping as you go on in, through
the moist middle skins, the sweetest
and thickest, and you can go on
in to the core, to the bud-like,
acrid, fibrous skins densely
clustered there, stalky and in-
complete, and these are the most
pungent, like the nuggets of nightmare
and rage and murmury animal
comfort that infant humans secrete.
This is the best domestic perfume.
You sit down to eat with a rumor
of onions still on your twice-washed
hands and lift to your mouth a hint
of a story about loam and usual
endurance. It’s there when you clean up
and rinse the wine glasses and make
a joke, and you leave the minutest
whiff of it on the light switch,
later, when you climb the stairs.
* Object Poem 2
Take a look at the below poem by Jonathan Galassi. You might want to use this in conjunction with
William Matthews’ poem, or on its own. The poet describes happiness by working together images of
weaving with images of plants to describe spring.
Discuss: How does the poet use alliteration and assonance? What about his use of colour? How does he
use metaphor to convey feelings of happiness?.
Students may want to think about a season that makes them feel good/happy and write a poem
using metaphors in a similar way.
Thread
BYJONATHAN GALASSI
Heartworn happiness, fine line that winds
among the tapestry’s old blacks and blues,
bright hair blazing in the theatre,
red hair raving in the bar—as now
the little leaves shoot veils of gold
across the trees’ bones, shroud of spring,
ghost of summer, shadblow snow, blood-
russet spoor spilled prodigal on last year’s leaves . . .
When your yellows, greens, and yellow-greens,
your ochres and your umbers have evolved
nearly to hemlock blackness, cypress blackness,
when the woods are rife with soddenness
(unfolded ferns, skunk cabbage by the stream,
barberry by the trunks, and bitter
watercress inside the druid pool)
will your thin, still-glinting thread insist
to catch the eye in filigreed titrations
stitched along among beneath the branches,
in the branches where it lives all winter,
occulted fire, brief constant fleeting gold . . .
* Object Poem 3
Take a look at the below poems by Jimmy Santiago Baca and Sarah Lindsay.
The first poet describes loneliness as a pair of old boots that, although he would like to leave behind,
he needs in order to appreciate being happy. The second poet describes happiness as a small moth.
Discuss: Poetry doesn’t always have to employ complicated or ‘flowery’ language. Look at the way Baca
uses colloquial phrases, simple imagery, and direct language within the poem. Look at the way Lindsay
uses domestic imagery and simple, direct language.
Students might want to think about using this sort of metaphor to convey an idea (happiness as a pair
of new shoes, or happiness as an animal or insect). Students might also want to use their poem to
reflect on how negative feelings might also be seen as positive.
Tying in with any of these object poem exercises, students could write a poem in which they attempt to
explore how something (like the shoes) could be used as a metaphor for an emotional state and
explore it from different angles as an extended metaphor.
It would be neat if with the New Year
BYJIMMY SANTIAGO BACA
for Miguel
It would be neat if with the New Year
I could leave my loneliness behind with the old year.
My leathery loneliness an old pair of work boots
my dog vigorously head-shakes back and forth in its jaws,
chews on for hours every day in my front yard—
rain, sun, snow, or wind
in bare feet, pondering my poem,
I’d look out my window and see that dirty pair of boots in the yard.
But my happiness depends so much on wearing those boots.
At the end of my day
while I’m in a chair listening to a Mexican corrido
I stare at my boots appreciating:
all the wrong roads we’ve taken, all the drug and whiskey houses
we’ve visited, and as the Mexican singer wails his pain,
I smile at my boots, understanding every note in his voice,
and strangers, when they see my boots rocking back and forth on my
feet
keeping beat to the song, see how
my boots are scuffed, tooth-marked, worn-soled.
I keep wearing them because they fit so good
and I need them, especially when I love so hard,
where I go up those boulder strewn trails,
where flowers crack rocks in their defiant love for the light.
Small Moth
BYSARAH LINDSAY
She's slicing ripe white peaches
into the Tony the Tiger bowl
and dropping slivers for the dog
poised vibrating by her foot to stop their fall
when she spots it, camouflaged,
a glimmer and then full on—
happiness, plashing blunt soft wings
inside her as if it wants
to escape again.
* Dream Poems
Think about how dreams are often a way of your brain processing your feelings. Write a poem about a
dream – think about how dreams can be illogical and dislocating and think about how that could be
explored in language, as in this example by Geraldine Monk. Think about what techniques (rhyme,
repetition, line breaks, shape) Monk uses to achieve this effect:
Return of Dream Two***Corridor
Geraldine Monk
Emerging me and little
seconds turned monster
s of time and conseque
n cellophane wrapped a
packed scream of d e l
i g h t my sugar da ng
erous need you insulin
poly und satur-day spo
rt with grand standard
have you jig-a-jig-jog
ing you carbon monoxi
de dead beat feet back
down the black and whi
te white black and
corridor
* List poems
Write a list poem: Try writing a poem about an emotion (eg. happiness) where each line is a thing
that makes you feel that emotion, or that you associate with that emotion.
OR
Write a poem where every line starts with ‘I remember’, or ‘I feel’, or ‘I felt’, as in this extract from
I Remember by Joe Brainard:
I remember my first erections. I thought I had some terrible disease or something.
I remember the only time I ever saw my mother cry. I was eating apricot pie.
I remember when my father would say “Keep your hands out from under the covers” as he said
goodnight. But he said it in a nice way.
I remember when I thought that if you did anything bad, policemen would put you in jail.
[...]
I remember when, in high school, if you wore green and yellow on Thursday it meant that you were
queer.
I remember when, in high school, I used to stuff a sock in my underwear.
I remember that for my fifth birthday all I wanted was an off-one-shoulder black satin evening gown. I
got it. And I wore it to my birthday party.
* Poems about not being happy
People are not happy all the time. Take a look at the below poem by Linda Pastan, which explores a
certain feeling of obligation towards being happy.
Discuss: How does the poet describe happiness, not being happy, the pressure to be happy? How does
the poet describe happiness in physical terms?
The students might want to think about ways to describe the physicality of happiness/unhappiness.
What would an emotion feel like if they had to carry it around with them? Would it be light/heavy?
Would they need a bag, or could they keep it in their pocket?
The Obligation to Be Happy
BYLINDA PASTAN
It is more onerous
than the rites of beauty
or housework, harder than love.
But you expect it of me casually,
the way you expect the sun
to come up, not in spite of rain
or clouds but because of them.
And so I smile, as if my own fidelity
to sadness were a hidden vice—