Poetry Declamation: Embodied Thinking

Embodied thinking is the process of exploring a concept through movement or emotion. Empathy, a trait that many educators strive to enhance and develop in their students, is one of the most common types of embodied thinking that happens in the classroom. In teaching literature and composition, empathy plays a central role in my classroom. My students are asked to define tone in poems, stories and speeches, and they seek to identify with the emotions experienced by characters in these works. Without the ability to explore literature through this means, my students might be left struggling to connect to the literature that we read. Human emotion is a constant across time and space. Whether they are reading poems from ancient Egypt, letters from Stalin's Soviet Union, or poems from World War I, my students can use embodied thinking in the form of empathy to connect to these distant and disparate pieces of writing.

Recently, my students - both freshmen and sophomores - engaged in Poetry Out Loud. This is a national competition in which students memorize and declaim poems. Our school mandates that every student must participate at the classroom competition level, and so the process of reading, understanding and embodying a poem is one that is common to each and every student at the Academy. Embodied thinking is central to this experience. Students begin my pouring over the hundreds of poems included in the Poetry Out Loud site, trying to identify a poem that they want to declaim. Often the ability to connect to the emotions of the poem's speaker is central to that choice.

Once poems are chosen, our work in the classroom begins, and I strive to coach my students through the process of embodied thinking that is central to a successful poetry declamation. As the POL site states, "you are the vessel of the poem," and in order to successfully serve as a vessel, students must have a thorough understanding of their poems and then convey that understanding through their voices, faces and bodies. It is a daunting task.

Students begin by completing a Speaker Questionnaire that asks them to consider the speaker, subject and overall tone of the poem. They are also asked to create a backstory and identity for their speaker. This requires a great deal of empathic thinking, analysis and creativity. The next step is to create a "Tone Map" for their poems. This task involves identifying the shifts in tone or emotion over the course of the poem. To do this, students must read each line of their poems carefully, considering what the words imply about the speaker's emotional state. This means that students need to empathize with the poem's speaker. After this, students begin thinking about the facial expressions and body language that can be used to convey the various emotions they have identified in their tone map. This is where the process moves to the kinesthetic realm, as students play with their bodies and faces to try and find the right way to capture the essence of the poem they have selected. Often I ask students to create a digital document that links images of potential expressions to the tone map of the poem. I also encourage students to film themselves as they try different facial expressions, vocal tones and body movement in their declamations. All of this relies heavily upon embodied thinking. My students are physically and emotionally connect to and conveying a work of poetry. Needless to say, students end by possessing an in depth understanding of the poems they have chosen.

In a perfect world, I would be able to link to this site, a time-lapse video of my students working through this process. In lieu of that, I offer you - what else - a poem. I am trying to capture what the experience of poetry declamation feels like: the immense responsibility to try and make a room full of people feel what you feel and understand the truth that you have found in the emotions the poet has put into words.

Poetry Out Loud

It was, I suppose, the title that caught my eye.

Curious about what the words might imply,

I read. And I reread. And read it some more.

Poem to poet’s soul a door.

Here, I said and pointed to a word or phrase -

This is what I have felt on darkening days.

Or perhaps instead I identified with joy -

Childish wonder of a newfound toy.

Whichever path, the connection was clear,

In my past I have wandered through emotions writ here.

And so it begins, my daunting endeavor