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"Community Life in Poetry"
a year of poetry, a day of celebration, a constant community voice

Poetry Partnerships

Indian River High School
Kristie Fuller's Theatre Classes with poet Marj Hahne

Day-by-Day Process with the teaching artist

Day 1: Tuesday, April 25
Students individually completed a set of pre-residency reflection questions (e.g., What is poetry? Where do you see poetry in your life?)

Following a brief segue conversation about what poetry is, Marj wrote on board and discussed Lawrence Ferlinghetti quotes: “Poetry is the voice within the voice of the turtle.” “Poetry is the face behind the face of the race.” “Poetry is news from the frontiers of consciousness.” (Kristie made poetry bulletin board and put these three quotes and Ferlinghetti’s poem on it.) Students wrote their own poems based on Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poem “I Am Waiting” (IAW). Marj reinforced generating specific details via concrete images that stick to the body/senses rather than philosophical/intellectual abstractions. She encouraged a mix of private & public, silly & serious, local & global for tension (e.g., “I am waiting for my locker to shut right, and I am waiting for my folks to just stop fighting.”)

Day 2: Wednesday, April 26
Marj wrote the following quote on the board & discussed Ferlinghetti quote: “Words are living fossils. The poet must piece the live beast together and make it sing.”

Students wrote their own poems based on Gustaf Sobin’s poem “What the Music Wants” (WTMW), which is an extreme example of experimentation with form, punctuation, syntax. Marj cited examples of metaphor, repeating imagery, and language-as-material constructions in WTMW; discussed how the poem’s form serves its content/meaning. She asked the students to choose a desert-island CD (couldn’t be compilation/anthology), the one they’d want to have if stranded on a desert island for the remainder of their lives, and write a poem about what that music wanted, with emphases on experimenting with form, punctuation, & syntax; and generating fresh images & metaphors (“What the music wants is a fast dribble down the court and a slam-dunk” instead of “a driving beat”) to convey the music’s rhythm, energy, mood. She encouraged them to eventually riff such that they’d be generating language that says what they want and what life wants.

Marj instructed the students to complete their IAW & WTMW poems for our next session, to rewrite on a name-free page what they would allow to be seen by their classmates, and to keep all drafts of both poems. The students worked the next 3 days to complete their two poems under the guidance of Kristie Fuller.

Day 3: Tuesday, May 2
Peer review for revision purposes: Marj arranged IAW & WTMW poems in two groups around classroom, and instructed students to circulate, reading all the poems & putting a check-mark next to the language that surprised them by way of its originality/freshness/inventiveness of idea and/or structure, not simply next to ideas that they related to. Students shared their impressions of the poems as two collective bodies (IAW and WTMW): they noticed that WTMW generated richer, more varied language, while IAW contained more predictable teenage responses. She told them that what they’re waiting for & what the music wants can elicit the same responses, so for their ensemble pieces, they would be able pull the best language/ideas from either poem, but would need to distinguish the respective tones they wished to create in ensemble IAW & WTMW.

Day 4: Wednesday, May 3
Demonstrated what Marj calls insta-edits: specific vs. generic nouns, concrete vs. abstract nouns, objective/inarguable vs. subjective/arguable adjectives, replace adverb-verb combination with stronger verb or with simile/metaphor, experiment with verb tense & point-of-view (1st, 2nd, 3rd), experiment with changing a statement to a question, excising unnecessary words (e.g., conjunctions, connector/transition words), identifying clichés & turning them on their head if want to use them. The students broke down word “revision” into “re + vision” = seeing again/newly. They emphasized that art-making is simply a series of choices: no, no, no, yes.

Demonstrated how to hone language by revising commonly used phrasings typical of teenage IAW & WTMW poems, and how to make choices to forward music/rhythm and accuracy/authenticity.

Marj showed the students her revision resources: The Synonym Finder, Random House Word Menu, The Macmillan Visual Dictionary. She demonstrated ways they can extend their language for performance purposes: repetition, multiple voices, crescendo/“descendo”, irony/sarcasm/humorous effect. For the next eight days the students worked on their collaborative poem including blocking under the direction of Ms. Fuller.

Day 5: Tuesday, May 16
Kristie requested this fifth day so that Marj could view and critique each class’ performances of their work-in-progress ensemble piece. Marj also saw the design class’ backdrop, which was a brilliantly cohesive composite of images/ideas elicited from the class ensemble poems.

Marj worked during and after school with six students selected by Kristie and Marj. Their objective was to write an ensemble poem for the June 15 showcase; they chose to write a WTMW poem, and because their one collaborative session prior to this day produced weak results, Marj gave each one a book and told them to blindly open to one page after another, blindly pointing to a word on each page, and shouting out only the words that interested them for whatever reason. Filtering their choices, she generated a list of rich words that had poetic/metaphorical possibility, and pushed the students to compose lines built around those words. They then ordered the lines into a poem, honed it for rhythm, and thus completed the written piece for them to next choreograph movement to.

Marj believed the 6 students did not initially feel ownership of the poem because she had to really prod them beyond their easy, predictable responses (they had said that they want their ensemble piece to wow the crowd on its own merits, not because they as kids had done it). They were alternately discouraged and engaged by the collaborative process and by her challenging them. After they ordered the lines and Marj read the finished piece, however, they lit up, as if they couldn’t believe they’d created such a knockout piece in such a short period of time. During the arduous process, they couldn’t see the potential of the finished product, and we were all amazed by the poem that sprang to life.