Helping Writers Take Flight
Sonia Jolliffe
Teacher Inquiry Project
TE 848
Michigan State University
First Flight: Imagism
Poems inspired by Christina Rossetti's "Color"
Preflight Preparations
In choosing to begin with Imagist poetry, I was selecting a form of poetry that asks students to focus on creating imagery through the use of clear, precise language. This freed students from worries about form, including specific meters or structures. Instead they were able to focus on diction, images, and sensory detail.
Students participated in diction exercises, as well as a sensory detail activity. Students also examined a number of imagist poems, including Christina Rossetti's "Color" which served as the inspiration for their own creative writing piece.
Diction Exercise 1 (Description): Students were given a picture from a magazine and were not permitted to show this image to other students. They were given 5 minutes to create an effective description of the image that avoid using "identifying" nouns (for example, if the picture was a jungle scene with a tiger, students were not permitted to use the words jungle or tiger) and relied instead on detailed description. At the end of 5 minutes, the pictures were collected and shuffled, then displayed at the front of the room. Students took turns reading their descriptions and then the class tried to identify the corresponding image.
Diction Exercise 2 (Group Writing): Students were divided into groups and assigned a topic, such as prom, hospitals, and farmer's market. As a group they brainstormed nouns, adjectives, and verbs related to their topic. When brainstorming ended, they separated and created brief poems describing their assigned topic. When poems were completed the entire class listened to the poems created by group members and discussed the various ways in which different writers employed similar words.
Sensory Detail Exercise: The room was set up with five stations, each featuring an item. One station held donuts, another cider, another dry maple leaves. Two more stations featured a wool hat and football respectively. Students were divided into small groups and rotated through the stations, touching, looking, tasting and smelling as appropriate. (No one licked the football!) As they experienced the items, students recorded phrases or individual words that captured their experiences. After students had visited all five stations, they partnered with a classmate from a different group and compared their words and phrases in order to expand their descriptive options. The entire class then discussed what makes effective imagery in the form of sensory detail. When the discussion ended, students separated to work on creating poems about Autumn that incorporated sensory details.