![[Mrs. Brown on Exhibit cover]](browncover.jpg)
Publication date: July, 2002
Publication date: July, 2002
Mrs. Brown on Exhibit was designed so that its poems could serve as
starting points for various kinds of classroom poetry activities. Below are
a number of ways in which poems from the book could be used to initiate
student poems.
1. Voices from the Museum: Persona Poems
A persona poem is a poem written in the first person, in which a writer imagines him/herself to be an animal, an object, a famous person - anyone s/he is not. Have your students choose a favorite museum exhibit and imagine what it would say if it could speak. Tell the students to write in the first person, from inside the exhibit, speaking as if they were dinosaur skeletons or stained glass windows or stuffed owls or statues or Chinese palace vases.
You could use as an example the mummy's words from "The Mummy's
Smile":
I still remember the sun on my bones.
I ate pomegranates and barley cakes.
I wore a necklace of purple stones.
And sometimes I saw a crocodile
Slither silently into the Nile.
This stanza focuses on sensory impressions, and all the details accurately
describe things this mummy might have actually experienced when she was
alive.
Students should choose an exhibit they find exciting and interesting, and they should really think about this exhibit. What was its world like? What might it have seen? What might it have heard? What might it have done? (Or what might a person have done to it?) What variety of things might have happened to it during its whole existence? What does it know? What might it feel or think?
For younger students or for a warm-up exercise, you might want to write a
class poem to which each student contributes one couplet. The first line of
the couplet should state who or what the speaker is, and the second line
should describe one thing the speaker saw, heard, tasted, smelled, or
touched:
I am a triceratops;
I heard the echo of tyrannosaurus's roar.
If the class has a favorite museum exhibit, you could see how many different
sensory impressions they, as a class, could think of for that one exhibit.
For longer poems, you might want to get the students first to list as many sensory details as they can think of or find in their research. Then, from those details, they can choose the ones they think would make a good poem.
This assignment could follow an actual museum visit, or it could involve library research. The interesting part is to have the students attempt to recreate and enter the world of the exhibit. Remind them to look for specific details that can make that world really come alive.
The same writing idea could be applied to a "classroom museum." Have each student bring in an object that is old or unusual or of scientific interest. Maybe their grandparents have items they might use. Maybe they could find a cocoon or make a cast of animal tracks. Maybe they have personal collections of stamps, coins, etc. from which they could choose an item. In their poems, the students could use the details they know of the object's history. Since they should know their objects well, the poems they write should be an effective way for each student to share his/her item with the rest of the class. And the items, with their accompanying poems, can make a wonderful display for an open house or other occasion.
Students might also enjoy writing general persona poems. For a warm-up, you might want to write a class poem to which each student contributes a one-line question addressed to an animal or a thing:
Bee, what is your favorite flower?
Tiger, do you feel sorry for the antelope you kill?
Cat, where do you go at night?
Tell the students to try to think of a question to which they would really like an answer. Often good questions are those addressed to a pet.
As a follow-up, the class could write an answer to each question.
Or students could choose an animal or object they would like to be and write one line telling why they made that particular choice:
I'd like to be a banana peel so I could trip everyone.
I would like to be a seashell because I love to lie on the beach
and have waves wash over me.
I'd choose to be a book so that I could read myself forever.
If they get stuck, have them think of some characteristic they'd like to have. If they wish they were strong, what's the strongest thing they can think of?
Both thing and animal persona poems make great riddles. Have the students write their poems without actually saying who is supposed to be speaking, and see if the class can guess.
Students often like to draw a picture and print the poem inside the object or animal.
2. Sound Poems
Your students might also have a good time writing poems in which every line
or every stanza contains or describes a sound. They might use words that
imitate the sound, as in the following lines from the railroad museum
poem, "Steam Train Noise":
There's a WHOOO WHOOO and the brakes' squeals,
And rackety rackety rackety wheels,
A hissss of steam....
Or they might use comparisons to convey what a sound is like, as in these
lines from the same poem:
With noise like a wind brushing the ground
And a kettle-before-it-whistles sound,
Then a roar like Mom's vacuum turning on.
You could introduce this assignment by having the students respond as a class to several sounds (you might want to make a tape to play for them). Have them listen to a sound and then ask them to invent a word that captures the sound, such as "the tickety tickety of my dog's claws crossing the kitchen floor" or "the blaaat/blaaat of a car horn." Students usually like to make up sound words and are often very good at it.
Then have them listen to the same sound again and ask them what it sounds like. It's as loud (or as soft) as what? Does it sound like an animal? A piece of machinery? A human sound? Does it sound angry, or happy, or sad? Does it sound like any kind of music? What does it remind them of?
You might have them make a list of sound words to put on the board: hum, bang, swish, snip, beep, etc. Tell them to think of comic book words like pow, zap, etc. If you like to slip in literary terminology, here's an opportunity to mention that this use of words which suggest their meaning by their sounds is called "onomatopoeia."
The students could write a poem in which they list a certain category of
sounds, such as:
scary sounds
loud noises
things that squeak
morning sounds
what I heard on the playground (at the shore, at the carwash, at the museum)
animal sounds
noises I hate (love, am afraid of)
Or they could focus on the variety of sounds made by a single animal or
object:
listening to lions
song of the airplane
my noisy little brother
washing machine sounds
If you have students in your class whose first language is not English, you might put on the board a list of words from that student's other language, along with their definitions or English equivalents, and have the class write poems in which each line contains one of those non-English words. This often gives a very haunting and beautiful sound and texture to a poem.
Students also often have fun writing poems in which the speaker has some verbal peculiarity, such as a person who substitutes the letter v for the letter t, a person who reverses the syllables of two-syllable words, a person who says every noun twice, a person who makes odd noises when s/he talks, a person who only says the first five letters of any word, a person who substitutes the word "duck" for every verb, etc. Have each student select one silly characteristic to use in his/her poem. Then ask the students, using this characteristic, to write a poem on some very simple topic (like listing ten things they did this week).
Sound poems provide a chance for students to see how wide a scope of pleasures
language can offer. Even laughter and silliness can be included in that broad
category, "poetry."
3. Concrete Poems
Another type of poetry that students usually enjoy is the concrete poem,
which exploits the visual aspects of language. If the word "falling"
is written as:
f
a
l
l
i
n
g
the way the word appears on the page heightens its meaning.
In introducing this concept, you have the opportunity to take a brief detour into the history of language and point out how early writing evolved from pictures (how the letter A, for instance, evolved from a picture of an ox's head with horns).
In the poem "Disasters at the Museum," the tornado section is shaped like a tornado, and the word earthquake appears with the letters all scrambled and shaken around as they would be if they were caught in an earthquake.
Have your students choose some part of the natural world for a concrete poem.
Some possibilities are:
rain, wind, cloud, lightning, snowflake, blizzard, flower, mountain, tree,
volcano, tornado, hurricane, fish, shark, whale, dolphin, butterfly, firefly,
beetle, spider, spider's web, stone, star, sun, moon, planet, comet, fire,
dog, cat, bird, elephant, giraffe, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, seal, snake,
turtle, lizard, rabbit, pig, cow, sheep, horse, lion, mouse, etc.
The students should set up their poems on the page so a reader can see
what the poem is about, but remind them that what they say in the poem
should be as interesting as the poem's shape. The words and the visual image
should work together.
If you wish to use a museum theme, you could have the students write about objects they saw. Many items found in museums could make wonderful concrete poems: drum, totem pole, dinosaur skeleton, statue, vase, mask, stuffed bat, sword, armor, clock, items of furniture, etc.
They might want to break their poems into separate parts. One sentence might form the trunk of a tree. Another sentence or sentences might form the foliage.
Ask them to think about the essence of whatever subject they choose. What quality or characteristic do they want to convey? The delicate gentleness of a quiet spring rain? Or the lashing force of a downpour? Have them list the words and phrases that describe the aspect of their subject they want a reader to feel. Remind them to consider all of their senses, not only sight. What are the sounds (or maybe smells) associated with their subject? How does it feel to the touch? Can it be tasted?
When they have a good list of ideas, they need to decide how those words can be laid out on the page to show as well as tell about the subject. You might want to suggest that they work in a BIG space so their words don't become cramped or illegible.
Once they've worked out a final version, the poems can be printed in large
letters and bright colors on a roll of white paper for an appealing hallway
display.
4. "Entering" a Picture
Another possible poetry assignment is one in which the students are asked to picture themselves walking into a painting, photograph, or drawing.
You could tie this assignment to an art museum trip, asking the students to actually stand in front of a painting and take detailed notes about the objects, colors, people, and scenery the artist has painted. Ask them to think about what it would feel like to stand inside the world of the painting. What would they hear? Smell? Touch? Taste? What part of the painting, if any, might hold secrets? What would they want to explore or examine more closely? What does the painting make them feel like doing? Is the painting a sad place, a happy place, a mysterious place, an exciting place? If there are people in the painting, what might those people say if they could speak?
The same questions could be raised about reproductions of paintings, photographs, pictures from magazines, illustrations from books, or even drawings the students make themselves. You could bring in a group of evocative prints or photographs for the students to choose from, or you could ask each student to bring in some kind of picture s/he really likes.
Or you could ask the students to make a drawing of the place they would most like to be right this minute. Tell them it can be a real place or an imaginary place, a place they know well or a place they've never seen. When they've finished their drawings, ask them to imagine themselves now in that place and write a poem describing what they are doing.
You could, if you like, give them an opening line for their poems. The poem
"Entering the Painting" begins:
If I stepped
into this painting,
I'd hurry past the grown-ups
dozing in their chairs
and rush up to the table
where that boy is reaching
for something I can't see from here.
You might ask the students to begin their poems with a line like "If I
stepped into this picture" and then tell the reader what would happen
next.
It can also be fun to bring in a painting in which there are many characters and details (one of Pieter Brueghel's lively paintings, for instance), assign each student to a different figure in the painting (including figures like a dog or a sled or a tree), and have them each write a few lines about what their particular figure is feeling, thinking, or doing.
You could set up a form to guide them if you wanted to, maybe something like:
I am________________________
I see________________________
I feel________________________
Soon I am going to_______________________
and let them fill in the blanks.
This assignment - the poems and the pictures which inspired them - is another
project that makes a very interesting classroom exhibit.
5. Rhyming List Poems
Students like to use rhyme in poems, and I usually discourage this because inexperienced poets tend to get so focused on finding a rhyme that they wrench the meaning of the poem into the direction suggested by whatever rhyme they can think of. Usually this results in cliche (moon/June) or incoherence (bringing a skunk into a poem about an elephant because skunk rhymes with trunk).
But here's a simple, entertaining kind of poem where they can rhyme to their hearts' content. First, have the students choose a museum category that is broad enough to include a long list of words, such as rocks, insects, ocean creatures, toys and games, flowering plants, seashells, mammals, or artifacts from a particular time period or geographic location. Or you could focus the poems on a particular museum you visited with your class, having them make a list of everything they saw on their museum visit.
Help them to make as complete a list as they possibly can of every item that fits into the category they've chosen. This would be a great opportunity to practice using a thesaurus to find words (and a dictionary to look up words they don't know). You may want to put a list on the blackboard. Then the students could work individually or in small groups to see what variations they could get from the same list of words. They can add adjectives, synonyms, and other extra words or lines not part of the original list.
Once they have their words, tell them to look for interesting, rhythmic ways to arrange those words into rhyming lines. If some of the rhymes are silly or strange or unexpected, all the more fun! This is an opportunity to play with the music of language for its own sake.
Suggest that the students might want to:
A. add lines that indicate their feelings or thoughts about the objects in their
poem
B. be detailed in describing objects
C. use similes (such as "wings with circles like owls' eyes")
D. play with the sounds of words
E. use rhymes that are funny or off-beat
F. break their rhyming lines into stanzas and insert a refrain
after each stanza to act as a kind of comment on the rest of the poem
You might want to have the students read their poems aloud to be sure the lines flow smoothly on the tongue. While you're having fun, you might want to allow them to read in different voices: the way a baby would read it, the way an old man would read it, the way a dog would read it, the way an alien from another planet would read it.
The rhyming list poem, of course, also works well for non-museum subjects, using such categories as sports, foods, famous people, music, action verbs, holidays, etc.
For an example of a rhyming list poem, you might want to read aloud the poem, "Insectarium."
Another short example is the following:
Birds' Eggs
Eggs of catbird, cowbird, crow,
Goldcrest, grosbeak, vireo,
Pigeon, puffin, penguin, hawk,
Crossbill, spoonbill, finchbill, auk
Sparrow, swallow, cactus wren,
Jackdaw, thrush, and guinea hen
Solid, speckled, freckled, lined,
Eggs of almost any kind
Are simple but mysterious things
Filled with colors, songs, and wings.
You might want to read one of these poems aloud several times as a warm-up to
writing, pointing out all the different kinds of repetitions of sounds in the
poem and suggesting that the students try to incorporate as many of those
patterns as they can into their own poems. Also be sure they notice that the
poem incorporates lines that are more than lists of words and that give
each of the poems its meaning. Tell them not to hesitate to vary the form of
the poem to include lines which comment on their rhyming lists.
In all of these exercises, the most important thing is that the students experience the sheer joy of playing with language, of seeing what it can do that leaps beyond its day to day capacity for providing information. In these exercises, words can be formed into statues, songs, and doors to other worlds. I hope you all enjoy the pleasures poems can provide.
For other poetry-writing ideas, click here.
To return to the main screen, click here.