Education and Teaching

Source: H. Ko

Guest Contributor: Richard Holinger, Ph.D.

High school students often avoid reading or writing poetry, much less think of themselves as poets. However, few experiences can engage an adolescent’s most cherished and daunting thoughts and feelings as penning a poem, which can lead to reflection, catharsis, and self-actualization. The question is, how to get students motivated to identify, confront, and divulge some of their most volatile and sensitive emotions and memories—in verse?

Creating Alliances

Before retiring last year, I taught English at a single-sex (male) parochial high school. Believing most of my students have a contemptuous relationship with poetry (having suffered through analyzing Shakespeare sonnets or Miltonian stanzas), I read a poem about a ball hit

to the shortstop magically
scoops to his right whirling above his invisible

shadows
in the dust redirects
its flight to the running poised second baseman

pirouettes
leaping, above the slide, to throw
from mid-air…

from “The Double Play” by Robert Wallace

My junior-year students relate to this poem, most having played (or playing) baseball, gone to an MLB game, or watched one on TV. The next day, I read John Updike’s “Ex-basketball Player,” about a young car mechanic dreaming of bygone days when setting his high school scoring record. Hearing modern narrative free-verse poems about people their age helps break down their preconceptions about poetry being dry, confusing, and formulaic.

Later in the school year, I begin by saying, “Now for the moment you’ve all been waiting for, writing poetry!” Groans, laughter, smiles, and grimaces follow. Students’ voiced and unvoiced resistance to writing their own poetry needs to be addressed. Recognizing their trepidation validates and excuses it, hopefully with humor because, to many adolescent boys, writing poetry is the equivalent of Kryptonite to Superman.

Fortunately, they have previously written a personal narrative essay and a portfolio of short fiction, both assignments encouraging the description of memorable events and people in their past. Writing poetry, more than ever, they will need to embrace their truest emotions and passions, both comic and tragic.

I also allay their fears by encouraging stupidity and laziness. “Don’t think,” I tell them. “Thinking is lethal. Consider writing a poem as a free write, jotting down whatever comes to mind. The more you try to intellectualize a poem, to force it somewhere, to make a point or express a moral, the harder you’ll work for a far worse poem.”

I hand out a list of quotes about the process of writing poetry that includes using your dumbest ideas—often your most honest and true. Another encourages using a conversational voice; never, whatever you do, try to sound like a “poet,” high-minded and didactic. In Teddy Wayne’s 2020 novel Apartment, a well-published poet ends his reading with, “It’s funny how the poems I’m most proud of are about the things I’m most ashamed.”

Next, I reminisce about my background. I let them know I care about their lives by sharing my personal memories, many describing embarrassing or inept moments, hoping they will open up their own lives. Chris McNutt, in his Human Restoration Project, notes, “Strong relationships are built on authentic empathy and care. Teachers constantly engage students in conversation, seek out their passions and interests and incorporate them in the classroom” (2018).

Writing about singular personal relationships and favorite memorable places helps engage a natural voice, not one defined by “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?” Finding one’s writing style as an avenue to self-fulfillment is emphasized by Dr. James Kaufman, author of several books on creativity. “Like other forms of ‘voice,’ our audible speech can be affected by our self-esteem, beliefs, and other issues. But it is our inner voice or critic that may most encourage or inhibit how much we authentically express ourselves through our creative work” (2020).

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To further divulge my background growing up, I draw on the whiteboard a memory map, a crude sketch of the neighborhood where I grew up: a square for my Chicago apartment building; a few waves for Lake Michigan; a stick figure of a lion for Lincoln Park Zoo; a diamond for where I played pickup baseball after school; a cross for the Fourth Presbyterian Church; and so on. Then I turn storyteller, choosing self-effacing, often uncomfortable memories. For instance, in the alley behind our apartment building, my brother and I played stickball. Because his pitching and hitting skills were far superior, he allowed me just enough runs hitting the tennis ball with a sawed-off hockey stick until within striking distance of his lead.

Students then create their own maps, using pens or pencils, in notebooks or, for the technologically inclined, on their digital devices. Some, like me, use mostly squares and circles; others sketch marvelously intricate maps, with leafy trees and buildings architecturally accurate.

Next, I ask them to jot down, in a few words, five to ten memories associated with their maps. Finally, choosing one memory, students expand it into a short narrative, digging deeper into forgotten particulars; free-writing for merely ten minutes will reveal particulars until then hidden in their unconscious.

First Efforts

Before writing their first poems, to encourage using their descriptive powers, I write on the board, “A dog goes down the street.” Then I ask them to describe the dog: color, breed, hair length, etc. Next, how does the dog “go down” the street: lope, slide, skateboard? Finally, what kind of street: gravel, two-lane, 12-lane expressway? They quickly learn to out-do classmates with fantastic, hyperbolic imagery, proving that writing can be fun, even rebellious, such friendly competition encouraging participation and class coherence.

Wanting to wean my poets (I now call my students “poets”) from the inclination to write rhymed poetry controlled by the last word in each line, I encourage free verse and simple, conversational vocabulary. However, because Robert Frost insists writing free verse “is like playing tennis without a net,” I stress the need to consider every line’s length and rhythm. Handing out my free-verse poem “A Way Back In” written as a paragraph, they read, “Withered leaves hang like shredded chamois as dusk darkens snow to stone, the creek to ink….” They then rewrite it using “poetic” lines as long or short as they want. Some choose lines of one or two words; other lines stretch across the page. Whatever line ending they choose will emphasize the idea couched in its last word. When they turn over the paper and see my poem in its original form, I stress my choice of line length is no more or less “good” than theirs, simply different.

Following these few gentle guidelines, we read and listen daily to examples of different kinds of poems, then students write one before the next day’s class. Categories include light, humorous verse; family-focused narrative poems; hometown poems (following Sandburg’s “Chicago”); concrete poems (words written/drawn in the shape of the poem’s subject); and more. For light verse, an acapella singalong (to the tune of “My Favorite Things”), a satire of Lord of the Rings, “Bored of the Rings,” elicits smiles and laughter. A concrete poem, Apollinaire’s “Il pleut” (“It’s Raining”) written in vertical lines, simulates wind-driven sheets of rain.

Students’ first attempts, rough drafts were written longhand or typed, I do not grade. I suggest a minimum line length but do not enforce it. I ask for volunteers to read (and show if concrete) their poems to the class. Excitement is palpable when waiting for volunteers to read, evident when I hear someone cajole a friend, “Alex, read yours,” proof they shared their work before class! Conversely, readers enjoy the spotlight and the audience’s snapping of fingers to show appreciation.

One of my students’ poems, “Leaves,” exemplifies the use of sense imagery, compelling details, specific memories, poetic structure (here, anaphora), and a unique voice:

Leaves on a crusty old oak whose bark is scarred by many seasons / Leaves crushed by the burning rubber along roads / Leaves neglected by the anxious anxiety of a sleepless teenager… / Leaves crunching like paper beneath the feet of the man who still appreciates the town lost within the instant, continuous world / Leaves for the man who knows what it feels like to be just another one of the / Leaves.
– Cole Bonebrake

Poetry Redux

Some students bring poetry with them after high school. In class nearly forty years ago, David Offutt wrote the poem, “I wonder when I die,” about “what people would say at my funeral, knowing that not everyone was a friend or would be heartbroken.” Later in life, after a stressful period, David returned to poetry. “Poetry provides an outlet for emotions or reflections,” he wrote me, “a way to come to grips with a situation, a way to express myself that isn’t full-on prose, but rather snippets, or snapshots.

“Taking the train to work for twenty years is a ripe source of the material. Being a gardener, watching the seasons, especially winter that seems like death but in fact is necessary for spring, offer inspiration as well.”

David’s published chapbook, Benchmarks, includes the marvelously succinct, imagistic “Inertia Dance”:

The train starts and stops.

Zipper pulls jiggle in unison.

Fourteen bags on the shelf.

Thirty-six metal tabs, silently grooving.

Teaching poetry to adolescents is about affirming, encouraging, and guiding emotive responses. It helps to empathize with teenagers about the difficulty of writing; to elicit from them their most valued, vivid—and sometimes vulnerable—memories; and to encourage their most feeble, resistant efforts by showing one’s own foibles and failures. If successful, the process and production of writing poetry can be gratifying, can raise self-esteem, and can elicit a self-revelation perhaps nowhere else possible.

About the Author

Richard Holinger’s recently published first book of poetry, North of Crivitz (Kelsay Books) contains many poems originally appearing in literary journals such as Boulevard, The Ohio Review, and ACM. A collection of humorous essays about suburban life, Kangaroo Rabbits and Galvanized Fences: Views of a Guy Who Wants To Know, “What Do They Make Pinewood Derby Cars Out Of," was just released by Dreaming Big Press. Holinger’s poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in The Southern Review, North American Review, and The Iowa Review. His work has been nominated for four Pushcart Prize awards, and his Thread essay, “The Art of Passivity,” earned a “Notable” listing in Best American Essays 2018. He holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from The University of Illinois at Chicago. Retired from teaching English at Marmion Academy, Aurora, he is working on a collection of his creative nonfiction, The Grounding of Flyover States: Flights of a Midwestern Essayist.