A Revolutionary Field Trip Writing Guide

(A Revolutionary Field Trip jacket illustration copyright 2004 by R. W. Alley)

[A Revolutionary Field Trip cover]
Publication date: June, 2004

A Revolutionary Field Trip: Poems of Colonial America 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. Jigsaw Poems

In A Revolutionary Field Trip, the poem "Cobblestones" views a cobblestone street as "a jigsaw puzzle" and the stones themselves as "oysters, arrowheads, turtles, loaves of bread." A jigsaw poem asks the poet to look at one thing but to see something else (i.e. to use metaphor). Jigsaw poems can be very short and simple, but they encourage the writer to use both observation and imagination, which are the two primary sources of good poetry.

This idea can be introduced by talking about the way we sometimes see clouds which are shaped like animals or objects, or the way ancient people looked at the stars and saw the Great Bear or Orion the hunter. Tell the students you want them to look at whatever they're writing about in that same way, stretching their imaginations to look for the most amazing things they can find.

There are many ways to choose an object to write about:

1. Students could go outside and look at clouds, leaves, shadows, puddles, cracks on the sidewalk, a garden or weed patch, or any other objects which might evoke a variety of responses.

2. The teacher could bring in evocative pictures. Or actual items like a bouquet of plants of varied shapes, colors and textures; a collection of seashells or rocks; fabrics with interesting designs; a basket containing a wide variety of fruits or vegetables, etc.

3. Each student could bring in a favorite object to write about.

4. The students could even draw squiggly shapes on a piece of paper, using different colors and patterns, and then they could either write about what they see in their own squiggles or exchange papers and see what they can find in someone else's drawing.

Once the object's been selected, the students can lay out their jigsaw pieces. Good poetry always contains surprises, so encourage them to be as wild and imaginative as possible and to jot down whatever pops into their minds as they look at shapes, colors, textures, sizes, etc. Tell them to list as many details as they can.

If students get stuck, you might prompt them with sensory questions, such as:

What does the smell of this object make you think of? Is it like a rose? A garbage dump? A spice?

If it has a flavor, what does it taste like? What does that make you think of?

If you touch it, what does it feel like? Is it rough, smooth, prickly, fuzzy, sharp? Is it hot or cold? What does that make you think of?

If it moves, how does it move? Does it jump, roll, fly, wobble, spin? What does that make you think of?

Does it make a sound? What kind? Loud? Musical? High-pitched? Can you write a word that imitates the sound - like biff bam kapow floosh. What does that make you think of?

The teacher might also want to ask questions like:

What sport does this object make you think of? What book? What movie? What computer game? What famous person? What common object in your school? What food? What animal? What toy? What item of clothing? What holiday? What moment in your life? etc.

When the students have enough details, they can choose the ones they like best to use in their poems. The title of a jigsaw poem should name the actual object the poet is talking about while the rest of the poem lists all the other things that the original object suggests. For clouds, for example, a poet might come up with items like sheep, elephants, blizzard white, wooly blankets, foggy castle, ships in pale blue sea, ice cream scoop, snowy silence, blank paper, summer afternoon, thunder coming, scent of morning, wisps, lace, etc. She could choose one item and turn it into a short poem, such as:

Clouds

Sheep graze
in a meadow
of sky.

Or she could keep adding stanzas, each one describing an image, such as:

Gray elephants
trumpet
thunder coming.

Or the whole poem could simply be a list of images, such as:

Clouds

a lace blouse
a ship steaming home
sheep in a meadow
misty castles
scoops of vanilla ice cream
sheets of paper the wind blows

For younger students, you might want simply to pull out one word for each of the senses. Tell them to close their eyes, use their imaginations, and write down the one word that pops into their minds. The title of the poem can be the name of the actual object, and the rest of the poem can be the one-word responses to each of the senses. For example:

Autumn Leaves (title)

flames (What do you think of when you look at autumn leaves?)
whispers (What do you think of when you listen to autumn leaves?)
smoke (What do you think of when you smell autumn leaves?)
paper (What do you think of when you touch an autumn leaf?)
ballet (What do you think of when you see autumn leaves move?)

You can also, of course, use taste if it's appropriate to the subject.

Students may, if they choose, expand each of their one-word lines into fuller descriptions, but just the simple list of words shows how many diverse things a single object can suggest. And any type of jigsaw poem reveals how much a poet can see if he observes even a common object closely and with imagination.

2. 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 introduce the students to the poem "What Did Colonial Kids Play?" from A Revolutionary Field Trip to show how a simple list of words, with very little added comment, can be arranged into a poem which depends almost entirely upon rhythm and rhyme, the musical elements of language. Then let them read "James Eats Chomp," which combines lists of colonial foods with a greater amount of additional narrative material to tell a simple story. (Another example of this is "Insectarium" from Mrs. Brown on Exhibit, where rhyming lists are interspersed with narrative lines about the children's experiences at the museum.)

You might want to read one or more of these poems aloud several times as a warm-up to writing, pointing out all the different kinds of repetitions of sounds in the poems and suggesting that the students try to incorporate as many of those patterns as they can into their own poems. Tell them not to hesitate to vary the form of their poems to include lines which comment on their rhyming lists.

To begin writing, first have the students choose a category of objects that is broad enough to include a long list of words, such as rocks, insects, sports, foods, famous people, music, action verbs, holidays, ocean creatures, kinds of clothing, flowering plants, seashells, mammals, items in their room at home, artifacts from a particular period of history, etc.

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:

1. add lines that indicate their feelings or thoughts about the objects in their poem
2. be detailed in describing objects
3. play with the sounds of words
4. use rhymes that are funny or off-beat
5. 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.

Here is yet another short example of a rhyming list poem:

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.

3. Chant Poems

The chant, one of the oldest forms of poetry, uses a word, line, or phrase, repeated over and over, to give the poem its rhythm and shape. Chants don't have a specific fixed form, but can use their repeated elements in a variety of ways. Long poems work well as chants because they allow space for the rhythm to build.

In A Revolutionary Field Trip, the poem "Ann at the Churn" repeats the phrase up and down more than a dozen times as Ann, trying to churn butter, plunges the dasher repeatedly up and down. Repeating that phrase underlines the humorous point of the poem and, of course, makes the poem itself exhibit the very kind of repetition Ann's complaining about. This poem also illustrates the way in which a chant poem combines repetition with variation and could be read aloud to the class as an example of the ways they too might want to both repeat and change whatever words are the core of their poems.

Almost any kind of word or phrase can be chosen as the repeated item in a chant, but it should be chosen with care since the repeated element is the heart of the poem. Students might choose to repeat a phrase like:
my dog
my brother
my best friend
I am afraid when
When I was younger
If I ruled the world
I wish
In my dreams

Or perhaps a word such as: secret, happiness, enormous, Halloween, listen, laugh, etc. The possibilities are endless. You might want to suggest them by categories. It's also possible to repeat variations on a single word, such as a color.

Prepositions or prepositional phrases often work well for chant poems. A poem could, for instance, start in a student's bedroom and, using "beyond," move out farther and farther until it reached distant galaxies. Or the poem could remain in the bedroom. A phrase like "in my room," could be used for a poem that described a room, talked about the things that happened in that room, revealed how the writer felt when s/he was in the room, etc. In the sample poem below, the simple phrase "on top of the" is used to move the chant along:

Ceramic Bowl

On top of the table four scaly feet,
On top of the feet a plain white base,
On top of the base a dragon crouched
with big white eyes staring up,
On top of the dragon a white bowl
whose handles are two griffins' heads,
On top of the bowl a curved lid,
On top of the lid a tiny man,
with long mustache and pony tail,
Trying to climb out.

The repeated line or phrase might emphasize the most important quality of the subject of the poem, or it might emphasize the writer's feelings about the subject of the poem. Writing about a musical instrument that is no longer played, for instance, a poet might want to repeat a sad line like "The song has ended now" between details about what the instrument must have sounded like, where it was played, who might have played it, and on what occasion it was played.

Be sure that, no matter what repeated line or phrase is used to connect and move the poem, students also include lines which vary the pattern to avoid monotony. It would be a good idea to emphasize those two key words: "repeat" and "change." Both are necessary for a good chant poem.

The repeated item in a chant poem can be used as a refrain which can be repeated exactly, or echoed with variations, at the end of each stanza. For examples of this, see "Corn Planting" and "Powwow" in A Revolutionary Field Trip.

For other examples of chant poems, see "Sleeping Outdoors" by Marchette Chute and "Silver" by Walter de la Mare (which can be found in the collection, A Pocketful of Stars, compiled by Nikki Siegen-Smith). Or read The Circle of Thanks, told by Joseph Bruchac, which contains many poems that use chant elements in a variety of wonderful ways.

You might want to locate a volume of traditional African or Native American poetry in your library or bookstore and read aloud to the students some of the outstanding examples of repetition and variation you will find there. One good possibility would be Brian Swann's Wearing the Morning Star. For upper grade levels, you might want to examine a poem like "Bavarian Gentians" by D.H. Lawrence. This poem repeats some form of the word "dark" eighteen times in nineteen lines.

Whatever kind of chant poems your students write, enough time should be set aside so the poems can all be read aloud as this is a form which derives from oral traditions and has much pleasure to provide to listeners.

4. Sound Poems

Your students might also have a good time writing poems in which every line or every stanza contains or describes a sound. An example of this type of poem from A Revolutionary Field Trip is "Muster Drum," where the rat ta tat RAT and other sounds of the drum are repeated throughout the poem.

Students might choose to imitate sounds in this way. Or they might use comparisons to convey what a sound is like, in lines such as: "with a noise like a wind brushing the ground," or "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."

5. Pantoums

More challenging than some kinds of poetry, the pantoum probably can be used most successfully with older students or those who've had some experience in writing poems.

A Malayan poetic form dating back to the fifteenth century, the pantoum follows a strict verse pattern in which every line in the poem appears twice. A pantoum can contain as many 4-line stanzas as the poet desires, but they must fit the following pattern of repetition:

---line 1
---line 2
---line 3
---line 4

---line 2 repeated
---line 5
---line 4 repeated
---line 6

---line 5 repeated
---line 7
---line 6 repeated
---line 8