Words Matter: An Approach to Teaching Poetry
Many students find poetry daunting because it seems opaque and requires multiple readings in order to reach true comprehension. At the same time, the short form, attention to sound, and quotable quality of poetry can be appealing to a generation of young people used to expressing themselves in 280 characters and minute-long videos. The study of poetry is especially compatible with the way we study Tanakh and Gemara, as both subjects operate on the assumption that words matter–an individual word choice ripples with connotation and connections to other contexts where that word appears.
At SAR, the tenth grade poetry unit builds on the foundation of its ninth grade counterpart. Having learned about poetic devices and forms and studied poems both classic and modern, students delve into close reading by analyzing diction and connecting figurative language to theme. Typically, small groups of tenth grade students choose a poem and compose a lengthy commentary on it. In these “poetry packets,” students choose how to divide the poem into smaller chunks according to its meaning and offer a Rashi-style analysis of specific word choices, connecting these choices to the poem’s larger themes. After receiving feedback from their teacher on their first packet, they form new groups and repeat the process with another poem. As students become more adept at close reading, their commentaries become more cohesive and sophisticated.
This year, my colleague Arielle Cohen and I asked how we could foster more curiosity and excitement in our poetry unit. We love the sense of ownership that comes with extensive study of a single poem, but we wanted to expose students to more poems, giving them a chance to read multiple poems with close attention to detail and word choice. We also wanted to use this unit to foster community in our classrooms and allow students to study poems not only in small groups but as a whole class. Finding inspiration from education blogger Brian Sztabnik, we arranged our poetry unit as a March Madness competition. Sztabnik, who uses March Madness brackets in a variety of classroom contexts, writes that March Madness tournaments are “a context for student engagement—they make students look forward to class each day.” The format of the unit we envisioned would allow each class to select the poems they wanted to revisit and add an element of friendly competition that appeals to teenagers.
Arielle and I selected sixteen poems that we felt would be both relevant and challenging for tenth graders, and we began our first-round bracket with class discussions, identifying potential themes and big ideas in each poem. Then, students voted for the eight poems they found the most compelling, and the winning poems progressed to the next round. Over the four rounds of the tournament, students re-examined each poem, presented their findings, and debated technical merit, until at last each class crowned one poem the winner. In each round, the results came with cheers and surprise at the landslides and close calls. Students felt passionate about the poems they wanted to keep in the tournament; the more they revisited a poem, the more they wanted their classmates to appreciate it.
When we were down to our final two poems, our classes conducted Socratic Seminars to determine which poem deserved the honor of winning the tournament. In these discussions, students came ready to defend their favorite poems. It was truly remarkable to see how far they had come and how passionate they were about the poems they read. We celebrated the end of the tournament by reaching out to the winning poets to congratulate them and invite them to join a Zoom with us. To our delight, some of them accepted the invitation, so students had a chance to meet with the poets whose work they admired. One of the poets, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, told us that she writes around twenty drafts of each of her poems. The students and I found this insight into her process incredibly gratifying since students constantly wonder aloud whether poets actually put as much effort into creating a poem as we put into analyzing it. Our four rounds of analysis start to seem like a breeze compared to twenty rounds of composition!
The most meaningful moment of this unit, for both my students and myself, came from our Zoom discussion with Carla Rachel Sameth, whose poem “Unspooled” offers a remedy for feelings of sadness. Sameth explained that the lines “imagine freshly baked challah,/imagine a Friday night when you allow yourself/ to rest your shredded senses” emerged from her memory of attending Jewish summer camp as a child. Sameth called upon that memory when she wrote “Unspooled” during the COVID pandemic because she was longing for the feeling of community that comes with dressing in white and welcoming Shabbat together. My own students, who have experienced the beauty of Kabbalat Shabbat in a camp setting and have sung the Kabbalat Shabbat tefillot with their classmates on a school Shabbaton, understand how these moments offer a respite from the stress of daily life. The students also remember how COVID robbed them of these moments in their early adolescence. Seeing these memories as fodder for poetic imagery, and coming together with a Jewish poet to share our love for and attention to the written word, demonstrated yet another reason why studying poetry is integral to a Jewish education: the power of words can be harnessed both to create art and to create community.
