After my students made poems using the Poetry Bingo technique, I modeled a poetry-revision method. I led a class discussion-and-creation session in which we took four 10-word poems and brainstormed several new two-word phrases from those. We grouped some of these phrases into sentences, calling that a new poem. Then I read that poem aloud to the class and I asked particular students which words or lines they liked least (based on their feelings about the sounds or images or anything else about the words). We’d swap those out with others of the brainstormed phrases, or sometimes we looked up words randomly by my opening a book to a random page, putting my finger on a page, and taking whatever word(s) my finger pointed to. We subbed in the new word(s) and read the poem again and tried new change-outs; we did this for 20-30 minutes over two days’ class periods. We started with words that were joined almost accidentally, without intending any particular meanings, and we ended up with texts that seemed to grow almost by themselves into original poems. We said things we never would have thought to say. Here’s what resulted:
Sorry water mourns
the judge’s darkest promise.
The gods’ governors trade censors
for groaning temptations.
Earth signs glass bones
with sleeping wings.
Its death agonized
over ancient emotions.
— CW1, 2nd hour, Spring 2019
Chickens waste
heroic dreams.
Flat mountains
remain conscious.
Inside a palate, thick breezes
darken corrupt influences.
A blinded witness
frees persimmons.
— CW1, 3rd hour, Spring 2019
White rains white on sheets
— perhaps.
Hands expect joy to watch.
Dominion Friday records a man
while silence becomes action.
— CW1, 10th hour, Spring 2019
Note: Poems created by this method may seem abstract and be structured more by juxtaposition than by narrative, of course. This seems to be the kind of poem I prefer, poems that are mental palate-cleansers, poems that startle my mind out of conventional thought, and this is the kind of poetry-sensibility by which I teach the writing of poems. I’m not saying this is the only kind of poetry that’s valuable, but I do want to wake my students from their preconceived notions of what poems can be.
MonkeyMoonMachine 