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Write Your Own Poem: Use Your Own Metaphor

A Demo/Research Proposal Presented at the Hoosier Writing Institute by Ernestina Edoziem

on June 14, 2011

Invitation: “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” to be sung by all.

Introduction: I have constantly wondered why students are scared of Poetry. In my own

understanding, poetry is that literary genre in which so much is said in a few. A few which

applies to words, sentences, lines, stanzas. Poetry is that beautiful way of describing a particular

thing based on a personal perception of that thing using the five senses. In literature/poetry

different people say different things about the same thing in different ways. I believe that helping

students internalize these ideas about literature and poetry reduces their tension when it comes to

reading, interpreting and writing poems. In Reading, Writing, and Rising Up, Linda Christensen

laments: “Poetry needs to …get off the shelf into the lives of kids. Poetry is held too sacred,

revered a bit too much to be useful (126). In her book, the author, a Language Arts teacher

encourages her students to write their poems as a response or description of characters that they

read in other texts. This is a good way to get students to be reflective and to give a voice to

characters outside of a text in order to connect those characters to real life situations. This is

similar to what the second grade teacher at my school does when she encourages students to

write their own poems in imitation of existing poems that they read in class. No doubt, these are

great ways to get students started. However, as the academic year progresses, students can be

nudged to build on those poetic foundations and attempt originality and ownership of their own

poems which can be just about anything beginning with things they can see and describe.

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Objective: The essence of this Demo then is to explore how we as teachers of writing can

perceive and describe a particular thing in different ways. By so doing, we want to see how we

come up with poems that reveal personal perception and description of a particular thing and

how, individually, we can relate that same thing to another thing in a unique way. We want to

see how we can write our own poems using our own metaphors and how we can gradually guide

our young students into writing their own poems. At the end of the activity, I anticipate a

celebration of our own poems and an appreciation of one another’s poems. I want us to believe

that we can do it and we will. Then we will realize how poets do what they do that scares us. Let

us play with words and encourage our students to play with them like they play with toys.

Together we will shape language according to our needs.

Inquiry question: The question then is: How can I help young students (2nd Graders) enjoy

writing their own poems in a very personal and non intimidating way?

Step 1: Show Kindergarteners’ poems and explain that if Kindergarteners could write those

poems at five, they would do better in the First Grade and much better in the second grade

provided a teacher continues to build on what they already know and gradually introduce what

they do not know. Of course, the scary thing about poetry is the use of figurative language in

which a writer goes beyond the everyday/literal expressions to connotative use of language. The

question then is: how does the writer come up with those metaphors that mesmerize and frighten

students? It would be interesting to help students in second grade to understand that there are a

thousand and one ways of saying the same thing and that is the beauty of creativity, one of the

attributes of language. Explain to them that life is beautiful only because people and things

come in different colors, forms and sizes. It is a critical and reflective look at creation that

informs poets. In his book entitled, Rose , Where Did You Get That Red, Kenneth Koch stresses

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the need to make poetry inviting. To inspire students to write poems, the author suggests that

“they would need to be free… from demands of rhyme and metre, which at their age are

restrictions on the imagination; and from the kinds of tone and subject matter which might

oppress them (xl ). The demands of conventions can frustrate students’ desire to write poems. I

believe that in poems, poets simply describe and appreciate the beauty of varieties. To express

those varieties, they make connections and draw conclusions. Personal and cultural connections

and assumptions are the origin of simile and metaphor. More still, in today’s writing when

students are asked to avoid, cliché, they are simply asked to come up with their own metaphors

and to come up with their own metaphors, they have to think and make connections between

what they see and what they know looks like what they see. To stimulate their reflective mind,

students should be asked to use their five senses to describe what is around or within them. Let

us try this:

Step Two: Find a way to get the class to observe leaves before the Demo.

Step Three: In-class activity:

Describe Leaves in the Spring: Show clip: (write for five minutes)

Share your writing with your group. (five minutes)

Describe Leaves in the Fall : Show clip. (Write for five minutes)

Share your writing with your group. (Five minutes)

Describe Leaves in the Winter (Write for five minutes)

Share your writing with your group. (Five minutes)

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Comparison (simile): Using color or words, in three lines show the differences in the leaves at

the different seasons.

Now make connections, using the five senses:

Some leaves look like

Some leaves taste like…

Some leaves sound like…

Some leaves feel like…

Some leaves smell… (Write for five minutes).

Metaphors: Metaphor is simply making connections. Janelle Cowles says: “The power of

metaphor exists partly in the subtle associations that are drawn between two situations that appear quite

different on the surface. Metaphors suggest another context in which a situation can be understood and

therefore influence the meaning of any specific detail of the situation.” Having closely observed and

extensively described leaves at different seasons, what else, human, trait or thing can be said to

be associated with leaves and why? (Talk to each other). Here are some tips:

Wisdom, human beings, Hope, life, the earth. Knowledge, education, love etc.

Write a poem about any of these or something else. Use some of the descriptions of leaves you

wrote down earlier to describe your topic and its connection with leaves. Our metaphors come

from here and our class poems will emerge from everyone.

Step Four: Read aloud and discussions.

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At the end of the demo, teachers amazingly came up with interesting poems that have traits of

leaves, forming the metaphors of whatever topics they shoes to write on.

Questions: The teachers asked some clarifying question like:

Q. How can you help 2nd Graders to build up relationships between one thing and another?

A. My response was that I will use practical examples like ball and balloon.

Q. Why did you start the demo with “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star:”

A. I used it to arouse their interest with a very familiar nursery rhyme that they can identify with.

The words of the rhyme also suggest my inquiry question which is wondering how we can write

our own poem. It sets us on the right spot to be curious. I also like the mental picture the rhyme

pains. Examples include, “twinkle, twinkle” which can be demonstrated, “the little star” and

“above blue sky” which are visual. They all support the role of nature in poetry.

Q. Do you think the index card will work well with 2nd Graders?

A. Steve responded for me by telling the group that I already discussed with him that with 2nd

graders, I would be using construction papers for the same activity.

Extensions:

The teachers had many interesting suggestions for me and the group on how the activity

can be adapted in our writing classrooms. They are as follows:

We could use not just leaves but other visual things like different colors of apples.

For the leaves, we could let students pick, preserve or work with them across the different

seasons.

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The activity is a cross curricula activity. Students can do a nature walk with it, which is

science. They can observe, document and do an interdisciplinary writing with leaves.

The activity is appropriate for any age level.

For a celebration of students poems/writings, we could cut out papers in leaf shapes, ask

students to write their poems on the leaf- like papers and paste them on a tree shaped

object in the hall way.

There could also be a gallery walk of their exhibits of leaves at different seasons worked

on by probably different groups.

Students could also draw pictures to illustrate their personal experience of the activity so

as to keep the memory alive.

Reflecting on my Demo

Like I said in my Demo lesson entitled “Write Your Own Poem; Use Your Own

Metaphor,” my inquiry question was something I had only wondered about. Though I

had constantly thought through it; how I can help young students write their own poems,

using their own metaphors in a non-intimidating way and did not stop to imagine what

positive impact it would have on students’ perception of poetry, I had never tried the idea

until the 14th of June when I presented it at the HWP Institute. It was a little uneasy for

me to ask teachers to pretend to be 2nd Graders, but I did. The teachers like the good

students that they teach were very co-operative. They patiently followed my rigorous but

military-like rules; followed my five-step lesson plan to a successful end. For each step, I

read aloud a cited source to support the idea and show the relevance of the idea to the

process.

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At the end of the demo lesson, I found a metaphor for the exercise that I and the teachers

enjoyed. I saw the process and the end product as a successful cruise/ flight in which I

was the intern pilot, nervous about the success of the flight. After good timing and

conducting of the demo, when teachers came up with beautiful and amazing poems about

leaves and things that can be associated to leaves based on their implied or explicit

characteristics, I thanked them, the crew, and commended myself for safely landing the

plane.

Thus, after the exercise, my conclusion is that though my 2nd graders might not come up

with great poems like the teachers did, yet the exercise met its objective which is getting

students to write their own poems using their own metaphors in a non-intimidating way.

According to the teachers, the clips of leaves at different seasons that I showed helped so

much with their descriptions and making connections. The index cards also helped them

to write more without even knowing they did. The two or three-percent originality of the

individual teacher’s poems is my juicy part of the exercise. I am glad my tried idea

worked. I felt really good when teachers commented that the process was non-

intimidating. I have no doubt that my 2nd Graders will have the delight of writing and

joyfully celebrating their own poems next Spring. I gratefully noted so many good ideas

from the teachers during the extensions. They are great inputs that will certainly help me

make the process more enthusiastic and successful with 2nd graders.

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My Plans after the Demo:

Having succeeded in demonstrating the lesson and ascertaining that the activity is worth

doing and possible with students including my target group, the 2nd Graders, I am now poised

to try it out in my school, Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School next academic year.

Currently, I do not teach 2nd Grade, I teach Preschool and Religious education, but prior to

HWP, I contacted the 2nd Grade teacher at my school and my Principal, intimating them

with my intention to teach the lesson next year. They both welcomed the idea and they are

looking forward to the experience. I am already familiar with the students because they were

in my preschool class three years ago.

However, I will not do the exercise first thing in the fall. Instead, I will allow the teacher to

as usual get students started with writing their poems modeled on existing poems. Right after

Spring break, I will take their experience of poetry further by introducing my demo. I will

follow the steps I have mapped out on my demo but unlike what I did with the teachers,

which is going through the entire steps in a single lesson, I will engage the students with a

step at a time. At the end of the last step, I will make an anthology of poems from their

revised poems and we will celebrate the release of what I tentatively caption “OLL 2nd

Graders’ Collection of Poems.” The anthology might have individual reflections on how

they feel, going through the steps, writing their poems and becoming young poets. I plan to

be an active participant in the process doing exactly what I ask them to do (modeling). I will

judge the success of the activity based on their delight in the process as well as the end

product of the process and I will let Steve know how it went.

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Helpful questions to assess the objective of my demo:

How did you feel describing leaves at different seasons?

What helped facilitated your thoughts?

Can you find similes and metaphors in your writing?

Do you feel like a poet now?

Does this activity help you understand how metaphor works?

Do you think you can use this activity in writing about other things including emotions?

What effect do you think this exercise will have on students’ reading, interpreting and writing of

poems as they get older?

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Annotated Bibliography for the Inquiry question:

How can I help young students (2nd Graders) enjoy writing their own poems, using their own

metaphors in a very personal and non intimidating way?

Akers, Ellery. "On writing: feeding the lake." The American Poetry Review Mar.-Apr. 2007: 31. Literature Resource Center. Web. 27 June 2011.

Commenting on the different sources of poems, Ellery Akers, a teacher and poet reflects on nature and the crucial role it plays in writing. In this informative article, the author discusses her writing experience in terms of the inspirations she gets from looking closely at nature. The author stresses that writers often delve into the world of unconsciousness for inspiration. On such trips to the depth of unconsciousness, the author comments: “Nature provides me with companionship on those dives. “ The author believes that nature is a place that gets one meditating and writing. I agree with the author because nature provides us with what we see and associate to the abstract world. Reading through this article a reader cannot but embark on a tour of the natural elements that the writer makes vivid in the text.

Christensten, Linda. Reading, Writing, and Rising Up. Wisconsin: Rethinking Schools Ltd,

2000. Print.

In this insightful text written by a Language Art teacher, the author explores how she and her

students give a pragmatic approach to reading. She shows how she leads her students into

fighting for justice in the world through writing. To connect novels that they read to real life

situations, the teacher encourages her students to reflect and pretend to be any characters in the

novels that they read and think aloud by writing poems that reflect the characterization of a given

character especially those who suffer injustice in the text. By so doing, the students give a voice

to the voiceless in our society through the power hidden in the written word. What interests me

most is how the author encourages students to write poems by converting narratives into poems.

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As the students reflect on what they read, they express their emotions in writing which is what

poetry is all about. The images that they deploy to convey their emotions and reflections are

metaphors that ordinarily scare them in other professional poets’ poems. In the text, the author

celebrates her students’ writing by including their poems in her book. The text helps me to learn

what gets students started and excited about writing their own poems.

Christensen, Linda. Teaching for Joy and Justice. Wisconsin: Rethinking Schools Ltd,

2009. Print.

In Chapter One of this great text, the author discusses the details of the steps she takes in getting

her students to write and enjoy poetry. Interestingly, she shows that poetry is written not in

abstract but from real life issues beginning with families. She stresses that the group of students

that she teaches already know poetry from home through music and hip hop. Thus, it is easy to

move from familiar to poetry by encouraging them to write about what they already know. I find

this citation very meaningful: “A good poem takes something you already know as a human

being and raises your ability to feel that to a higher degree so you can know your own life more

intensely” (Hirschfield in Christensen 16). It is amazing how we can see one thing over and over

again and still do not know it except when poetry unfolds it to us. The author made an important

point when she says that “instead of drilling them (students) on literary terms or taking a scalpel

to dissect Adrienne Rich or Richard Hugo’s poems, students learn how pace, line breaks and

allusions work in their poems, so they can take that knowledge and language back to their work

when they analyze poetry” (16). I believe that it is not enough to teach students elements of

poetry using only existing poems, it is important to help them find those elements in their own

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poems. This is relevant to my topic because it is what I want to do when I help students write

their own poems.

Cowles, Janelle. "Lessons from The Little Prince: Therapeutic Relationships with Children." Professional

School Counseling 1.1 (Oct. 1997): 57-60. Rpt. in Children's Literature Review. Ed. Tom Burns.

Vol. 142. Detroit: Gale, 2009. Literature Resource Center. Web. 12 June 2011.

In this detailed article, Cowles uses the story of The little Prince to show how metaphor works in

everyday life but with specific reference to counseling and the relationship that exist between

counselors and their young clients. I am particularly interested in the way the author defines

metaphor: “the power of metaphor exists partly in the subtle associations that are drawn between two

situations that appear quite different on the surface. Metaphors suggest another context in which a

situation can be understood and therefore influence the meaning of any specific detail of the situation. ”

The author uses the growing relationship between the prince and the fox in The Little Prince to

explain the type of relationship that gradually develops between a counselor and a client and the

influence of such relationship on behavioral change. The author shows how metaphor works

when he draws a connection between his theme and the story. He succeeds in demonstrating that

the relationship that metaphor establishes between one thing and another is not really explicit but

mostly implicit.

Gallagher, Kelly. Deeper Reading. Maine: Stenhouse Publishers, 2004. Print.

In Chapter Seven of this exploring text on reading, Gallagher offers needed insight into the place

of metaphor in literature and how it can enhance students’ comprehension of a text. Gallagher,

like other authors that have written about metaphor, explains that metaphor establishes a

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relationship between two unlike things. He goes on to show how such connections can carve in

the mind of a reader, a vivid image of an incident in a text. Talking about the metaphor: “like

some old overalls slung over a fence,” in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees, Gallagher

comments: “That metaphor enlivens the passage—so much so that I still remember it ten years

after having read the novel for the first time” (127). Metaphors make reading memorable and

they stick with a reader because they connect with them much more than they connect with

abstract words. Metaphors stimulate high level thinking. I need this text because like the author, I

want students to think beyond what they see in order to make associations.

Koch, Kenneth. Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? New York: Vintage Books. 1990. Print.

In this interesting book of poetry, the author who is a Language Art teacher expresses his interest

in poetry and the processes he has gone through in trying to make his students not just readers of

poetry but poets too. He enumerates various interesting and inspiring ideas that he has explored

in getting students to write poems. One of the ways that he has succeeded in grooming his

students who become young poets is by introducing different poems and themes to them. The

text is full of poems written by professionals as well as poems written by his third- through- sixth

students. It is a great book that gives me insight into how students currently write poems.

Lakoff, George and Mark Johnsen. Metaphors We Live By. London: The University of Chicago

Press, 2003. Print.

In this great text, the authors argue that metaphor is not just a poetic device as many think; it is a

component of our everyday discourse. They discover that human perception, concept, thought

and actions are metaphorically structured. Using a word like “argument” which is perceived

differently by different people, they illustrate the place of metaphor in human cultures and

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perceptions. For those who see argument as confrontation, argument becomes a metaphor of war

and for those who view it a dialogue, argument becomes a metaphor of dance. Thus, metaphor is

not far from culture but grounded on culture. This is relevant to my topic because, part of what I

want to do with my inquiry question is getting students to understand that metaphor is within

their reach as long as one thing can be likened to another.

Pattison, Pat. Writing Better Lyrics: The essential Guide to Powerful Songwriting 2nd Ed. Ohio:

Writer’s Digest Books, 2009. Print.

The first chapter of this text takes a reader to the world of uniqueness in generating and using

metaphors. The author demonstrates object writing as the art of the diver. Using the image of a

diver, Pattison shows how writers dive into their individual senses to create personal and new

metaphors that intrigue readers. The author emphasized how to apply the five senses in writing

and the difference they make between one writer and another in terms of perceptions and

descriptions. Describing the uniqueness of the experience, the author writes: “You are absolutely

unique. There never was, is not now, nor ever can be anyone exactly like you. The proof lies in

the vaults of your senses, where you have been storing your sense memories all your life. They

have come cascading in through your senses, randomly and mostly unnoticed, sinking to the

bottom. Learn to dive for them. When you recover one, when you rise with it to the surface and

hold it aloft, you will not only surprise your onlookers, you will surprise yourself” (3). I believe

each author’s style has something to do with the author’s personal perception of nature and

society. All I want students to do is to dive into nature, using their senses and the outcome of the

dive will be unique poems on the same subject.

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Pink, Daniel H. A Whole New mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. New York: Penguin Group Inc., 2005. Print.

In this insightful book, the author discusses ways through which teachers can foster creativity and pragmatism in today’s classrooms. Rather than just pouring out information, the author encourages a synthesis of information to make them relevant to students’ daily activities. Discussing metaphor and its importance to students, the author cites George Lakoff’s The Metaphors We live By. Pink thinks that metaphor is present in everyday life. It can be found even in the information we process on daily basis right from the time we wake up from sleep. Talking about how we are daily bombarded with information and how we use them, he comments that “only the human mind can think metaphorically and see relationships that computers could never detect” (135). The author encourages people to “boost their metaphor quotient, or MQ, because “in the creative process, MQ is as valuable as IQ” (135). I find the book, especially the aspect on metaphor interesting and relevant to my topic, because it supports helping students to establish relationships which is vital to their high level thinking—necessary in almost everything in life, but unavoidably in writing and interpreting poems.