I believe most lesson plans can be tweaked to fit writers at all levels. This idea came to me a decade ago while getting an MFA in Creative Writing.

During a workshop, Honor Moore, author of The Bishop’s Daughter, gave us a writing prompt and quickly added: “Don’t forget to use descriptive detail. Appeal to all five senses.” 

I found her words humbling, because hours earlier I’d conveyed them to twelfth graders. Yet the message can’t be repeated often enough as many writers, young and not so young, often share only what they see, omitting the other senses.

Fast forward to today, and I just finished teaching the use of sensory details to second- through fifth-graders whose skills vary depending on their age and placement in general education or a gifted and talented program.

The challenge: How to adapt one lesson plan to fit many needs?

With younger students (say first- through third-graders), I suggest spending a lot of time brainstorming, followed by creating a group description of their classroom.

As inspiration, I offer passages from The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, and Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings.

I then ask students to write a description of a place they know well.

“Your goal is to be specific,” I explain. “Don’t just say the cafeteria is noisy. Who makes the racket? What exactly do you hear?”

Here’s a second-grader describing Jamaica:

“I hear the birds chirping nice and loud and sometimes the rustling between coconut trees. Also, I hear the nice orange rooster crowing in the early morning when the sun starts to come out.”

Younger students may need a second session to polish their portraits of a place. It’s an opportunity to encourage them to include details they left out.

With older students (fourth grade and above), I go deeper, using their descriptions as a jumping off point. Writers compose descriptions of places for a reason—to create a setting that will frame, if not drive, a story. Isn’t theHogwartsSchoolin the Harry Potter series the perfect setting for learning wizardry? 

During this second session, I ask students to use their descriptions as the setting of a story, whether true or make believe. 

I use an excerpt from James Baldwin’s short story “The Rockpile” to show how a hill of rocks evolved into a story about a boy forbidden to play there.

Here’s a fifth-grader describing her tomato garden: “I can hear the bugs eating a spoiled tomato as they buzz by racing to it. Starvation in their eyes.  Thanks to some magic water, one stalk grew sky high.”

A fourth-grader transports readers to a basketball court: “You can hear sneakers squeaking from running on a silk floor. You also hear basketballs dribbling up and down the court….One day, a boy shot a ball and it grew arms….”

I encourage students to take a closer look at their world, sharing its sparkle and bumps, rhythm and scents, and whatever they feel.

-Linda Morel

Linda Morel is a nonfiction writer and T&W teaching artist.  You can read more about Linda here.

For a two-part lesson plan that guides students through sensory description of place, go here; for how to utilize the descriptions to develop a story setting, go here. 

For a sample of student writing that came out of this exercise, go here.  Continue to check out our tumblr page at teachersandwriters.tumblr.com for more student writing from Linda’s residency, as well as other student writing from other T&W writers’ residencies, too!

Wednesday, February 29:

4:30-5:45     WITS Membership Meeting, Joliet, Hilton Chicago, 3rd Floor

Thursday, March 1:

9:00-10:15    Celebration in Any Language: Teaching Bilingual Students, Grand Ballroom, Palmer House Hilton, 4th Floor

3:00-4:15     What You Need to Know Before You Stand and Deliver: K-12 Teaching 101, Empire Ballroom, Palmer House Hilton, Lobby Level

7:00-8:15     WITS Reception, Astoria, Hilton Chicago, 3rd Floor

Friday, March 2:

1:30-2:45     Finding a Common Language in the Public Schools, Private Dining Room 1, Hilton Chicago, 3rd Floor

3:00-4:15     The Wired Writing Classroom: The Marriage of Technology and Teaching, Lake Huron, Hilton Chicago, 8th Floor

Saturday, March 3:

1:30-2:45     Marketing the Literary, or Putting Some Poetry in Your PR, Boulevard Room A, B, C, Hilton Chicago, 2nd Floor

3:00-4:15     Crisis Economics for Nonprofits, Grand Ballroom, Palmer House Hilton, 4th Floor

There are few things more comforting than committing a poem to memory. To know that if everything around you suddenly crumbled, you would have—safely tucked in the deepest part of your heart—Ruth Stone’s “Mantra” or Robert Frost’s “Snowy Evening” is to understand that, eventually, everything will be okay. Because of this, I begin every poetry workshop I teach by having students memorize Langston Hughes’s “Dreams”:

Hold fast to dreams

For if dreams die

Life is a broken-winged bird

That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams

For when dreams go

Life is a barren field

Frozen with snow.

This tiny two-stanza poem replete with poor bird and cold, barren field has proven to be accessible to people of all ages and abilities. Years ago when I was working with children with autism who were mostly nonverbal, I found that, with the use of simple hand gestures and repeated motions, the children were able to “memorize” the poem themselves. Their sense of accomplishment in “performing” the poem for others never failed to delight me or their classroom teachers.

The hand gestures are straightforward: a quick clasping of the hands for “hold fast,” followed by a waving of the fingers at the temples for “dreams.” You can surely imagine what “die” looks like (and how funny it can be to enact), as well as, that limp arm of the “broken-winged bird that cannot fly.” “Life” is the most exciting: a shooting-up of the arm into the sky, and a pronouncement of “Life,” often followed by my request to “Say it like you mean it,” which leads to an even faster extension of the arm and an even louder saying of “Life!!!”

Just this past Tuesday, I taught this poem to a group of three-year-olds at my daughter’s preschool.  I was amazed not only by how quickly they were able to take it in but also by how much they grasped it on a conceptual level. “Life without dreams,” I explained to them, “is like a bird that can’t fly. It would be like…like what?” I urged them. “A ballerina,” Zoe said, and then she frowned a little as she went on: “A ballerina that can’t dance.” And yet, I told them, all we have to do—so we can dance and dance and dance!—is hold fast to our dreams.

Last winter, walking down the street in Brooklyn late one evening I ran into a classroom teacher that I hadn’t seen in years. “I still know the poem!” she said. “The poem?” I asked. “Dreams!” she said. “I still know it by heart. I say it to myself over and over on the subway sometimes!”

Imagine if that’s what everyone on the subway was doing—not going over the endless to-do list or mentally drafting out yet another e-mail or staring blankly at the rows and rows of advertisements, but instead, reciting poems that they’ve carried around in their hearts for years—oh, what a different city it would be!

-Nicole Callihan

Nicole Callihan writes poems, stories, and essays, and has been a T&W teaching artist since 1998.  You can read more about Nicole here.

Our blog will feature lesson plans for teaching the craft of writing to children and adults in schools and communities; student writers’ poetry and prose; sample articles from Teachers & Writers Magazine, a print quarterly that’s winner of 10 Educational Press Awards for Excellence; T&W news and events; writing prompts, Haiku interviews, and a compelling history of T&W’s early writers such as June Jordan, Kenneth Koch, Anne Sexton, Herbert Kohl, and many others.

And who knows what else? Like all good writing projects, our blog is a living experiment.

As part of the T&W community, we encourage you to read, comment, read, respond, write a few lines of poetry, start your next book project, learn some great teaching ideas and expand upon them as you see fit for your own writing practice, for your students, or your writing group. We look forward to hearing from you!

Janet L. Bland

It started with a possum running right in front of the van. There are many things that I don’t want to happen when I am driving a van full of my students (including, but not limited to, vomiting, flat tires, love triangles, and snowstorms), but I really don’t want to run over a possum. My vanload of students had spent the afternoon wandering through and working in the galleries of the Kennedy Museum of Art at Ohio University in Athens. After an introduction to the permanent collection by Jolene Powell (chair of our art department), their assignment was to select a piece of art from the permanent collection and write a poem employing vivid imagery, representing the visual with language. Once they had claimed a particular piece, they each sat down on the floor in front of their paintings or their sculptures and started working in that absorbing intensity of learning that we hope for more often than we get. Then, after our dinner at an Indian restaurant, we were heading for a quick stop at Starbucks before driving home.

These Marietta College students were all enrolled in a learning community being team taught by Jolene and myself—taking both Introduction to Creative Writing and Introduction to Drawing together. We had combined our courses to teach creative process by having the students work in two mediums simultaneously. Having taken each other’s classes in preparation for the learning community, Jolene and I focused on how creativity in our different fields (and by extension, the creative process) might inform imaginative development and combine for a more meaningful and organic artistic experience for our students—just as it did for us. We believed that the struggle to control a contour line was no different than trying to construct a metaphor, and that working to create both would be more fruitful than working on just one or the other. We agreed that creativity was the natural and inevitable response to being alive, an idea we wanted our students to both share and understand.

The possum had appeared suddenly, running into the glare of our headlights as if compelled to do so. It’s common in this part of southeast Ohio to observe a variety of wildlife (dead or alive) in the road. But it was too late to do anything when I saw the possum; I had been focused on finding the Starbucks. Students in the first row of seats saw it dashing into the street. I hit the brakes, and there was bump, as if the front wheel had run into or over something. A few students moaned at the bump, and several turned backwards to see if the second van driven by Jolene Powell would hit the possum. Christina, who had called shotgun after dinner and was sitting in the front passenger seat gasped—“Eye contact!” she insisted. “I made eye contact with the possum!” The first line of Christina’s poem about the possum encounter—assigned on the spot to encourage my students to connect art to reality (assigned on the spot to change the topic of discussion)—brought home the creative immediacy, and the anxiety, of her perspective.

He looked me in the eye, the way you’re supposed to in a job interview.

Creativity brings meaning to our experiences, and I strive to teach my students that the creative process is a way to negotiate our thoughts, feelings, and our lives. Writing a poem about a possum offers a means to focused consideration—helping students determine what exactly they might want to say about that shared moment in a dark van. 
But can you really teach creativity? It is not an uncommon question for a teacher of creative writing to hear. At times it seems that the world is largely populated with folks utterly compelled to inform writing teachers that we are deluding ourselves, perhaps because when writing teachers consider creativity we are not thinking about the same thing. People who question the purpose of teaching creative writing at the college level, or the likelihood of successfully teaching creativity, are actually asking if we are going to produce best-selling authors. They mistake genius for creativity. This is no different than asking the chemistry department why they continue working if they can’t transform a student into tomorrow’s Nobel Prize winner, or demanding that the business department immediately produce the next Warren Buffet. Discussions like these reflect the profound disconnection between our society and our art—we often don’t know how art or music or literature is created and so assume creativity at any level of competence is out of reach. Creativity and the creative process can be taught; indeed, they can be explored, enhanced, and informed. 

It’s important to connect the creative impulse to the tangible elements of students’ own lives. While I urge these young writers not to base characters just upon themselves, I also encourage them to consider what ideas and experiences they might have had that would have meaning for their audience. Point of view determines perspective. Students who actually saw the possum tended to write poems that were more narrative—they had seen something happen and worked to create a story of what they had observed within their poems. Often they grounded their language in the terms of their majors, as Vince the biology major did in his first few lines:

In the western hemisphere no one ever knows,

it’s actually called an opossum.

His poem went on to tell the story of the observers and the opossum getting the details wrong—like what to call the marsupial and why the road was not the shortest distance between two points. He was able to quantify the experience of bad science through creative process from his own considerations of the natural world.
Creativity is not a rare and fleeting exception—but all too often we consider creativity an abnormal state, and so we don’t imagine it to be part of a typical educational experience. I spend a lot of time in class promoting the idea that my students are actually writers, that they can call themselves writers and that is enough to make it so. This is not always easy. My students always know who Emily Dickinson is—she is that crazy lady who wore white and never left the back yard. Emily—my students, convinced that they know all about her, call her by her first name—Emily wrote about nature and death. Emily probably spoke Greek to all the possums in her neighborhood. She capitalized words whenever the heck she wanted, ignored grammar, and chatted up the Grim Reaper because, as one of my students once wrote in an essay, “that’s what you do when you’re crazy and a poet—which is pretty much the same thing.” Under those terms how might my students, who worked at McDonald’s in the summer, find the time to wander among the flowers and write poetry? Ernest Hemingway was also easily explained away. Hemingway—my students refer to him almost exclusively by his last name as if his life was far too dangerous for a name like Ernest. Hemingway would have eaten the possum. Raw. And my students are fairly certain that Hemingway only wrote when drunk or watching a bullfight or perhaps immediately after shooting someone. So was it realistic for me to expect my students to write fiction when they had never been on safari? My students often insisted that they were too normal (too boring) to be creative.

Kay Redfield Jamison, professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, has spent much of her career investigating this perceived relationship between mental illness and mental achievement and can attest to our devotion to the idea that “a possible link between madness and genius is one of the oldest and most persistent cultural notions; it is also one of the most controversial” But creative process made exotic or pathological is also made unreachable for the average student. And it goes without saying that classroom application would be unworkable if the goal was to teach creativity by confusing it with insanity or alcoholism. 

I consistently draw parallels between the choices that published authors make and those made by my students—where to break a line, how to create an extended metaphor. Robert Frost faced the same issues that they do in the creation of a poem; it’s only in the skill level that we see a difference. I remind my students that they are creative in many ways—not just in our learning community of language and charcoal, but in their majors and larger lives.

Most of my students saw neither hide nor hair of the possum, and their poems tended to be much more lyrical—expressing intense emotion instead of telling a story. They were forced to imagine what the possum had looked like, what it had done, and how it felt. Craig, my varsity basketball star whose dramatic tension had, in his previous work, almost always involved a shot clock, was able to imagine the scene from the possum’s point of view:

I thought I could beat the van, 

Death wasn’t part of my plan.

While Craig never got over his affection for somewhat obvious rhyme (died/cried, rushed/crushed, etc.), I later learned from Jolene that Craig had expanded his possum-based point of view into an assignment for her class. When asked to represent value in a realistic sketch—producing every shade of gray between and including total white and complete black—he drew the undercarriage of his car in remarkably accurate detail. 
No real conversation on creativity can be limited to just this department or only that field of study; its relevance is manifested across the curriculum. In his book On Creativity, theoretical physicist David Bohm imagines the scientist’s desire for answers, the quest for creative insight, in the form of a discovery of something that had been previously unknown. He argues that the desires to discover and create are present across society and typical for all walks of life, not limited to those who create and those who research for a living. And discovery does not require genius.

There is always an unpredictable variable of originality at work, Bohm notes. “There must have been a considerable body of scientists who were better at mathematics and knew more physics than Einstein did,” he writes. “The difference was that Einstein had a certain quality of originality.” Originality, in the context of Bohm’s consideration, relies upon the ability to keep an open mind and avoid preconceived notions. That’s almost starting to sound like something teachable. 

Bohm’s most convincing example of originality is a familiar one: Anne Sullivan teaching Helen Keller to communicate, by spelling out “water” in her palm while exposing her to water in various contexts. Blind and deaf from infancy, Helen Keller was a nearly feral child lacking the means to communicate. After Anne Sullivan was able to reach her and teach her by introducing conceptual abstraction, Keller’s world was forever transformed. Culturally, we have already assigned Sullivan’s innovation to a heady position in history—we called the stage play and the movie about these two remarkable women The Miracle Worker. But it wasn’t a miracle, according to Bohm; it was an example of creativity and originality—both the creativity Anne Sullivan used to reach her wild pupil and the unique abilities she could see in Helen Keller, even before she could communicate.

A few of my students already know they are creative people and believe that they are writers. Marianne, the only English major in the class, evoked Walt Whitman and his famous elegy for President Lincoln in her poem. Having seen drafts of Vince’s poetic efforts towards scientific accuracy, she was able to pun Whitman’s famous title and acknowledge animal taxonomy in her first line:

Opossum, My Possum

It wasn’t just clever; it established context and expressed a light-hearted irony. The van became a ship of state and death was, well, death. But Marianne was the student who had fun with the assignment and felt the freedom of confidence in her work. She didn’t want to get bogged down in sadness, so she didn’t; she didn’t want to get stuck in definitions, so she wasn’t. 

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in his book Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, tends to open up the playing field beyond the individual as he argues that “an idea or product that deserves the label ‘creative’ arises from the synergy of many sources and not only from the mind of a single person.” As something that can only happen within a community or cultural context, “Creativity,” he clarifies, “does not happen inside people’s heads, but in the interaction between a person’s thoughts and a socio-cultural context.” The result of nearly a hundred interviews with creative people, Csikszentmihalyi’s work supports the idea that creativity is not only something that most people aspire to but also something that can be supported and encouraged. So when my students can experience something together, write poems related to that event, and then share them with each other, the whole of the process becomes more than just the sum of its parts.

Creativity is always an opportunity for truth and thus it’s crucial we nurture the creative process in our classrooms. Each of my students was able to take the utterly random occurrence of a possum running out into the road and create a unique poem that spoke to the specific experience, visible or not, from the front seat or the back. They could follow their own creative process to a meaningful end, to the creation of a small piece of art that stood apart from something we had experienced together. There is one last excerpt from a student poem I should share, this one from Sean who had, until they all read their poems in class, been known primarily for his universal rejection of shoes in the middle of an Ohio winter. Sean’s poem was called “Athens, OH” and his first lines contained a key point that no one else’s eye or poem managed to capture—that we hadn’t actually run over the possum:

I saw his tail shoot through the bushes.?

On the other, other side,

Probably a pothole instead?

You people need to start paying attention.

Sean’s poem gave me reason to believe that this assignment worked for all of my students—not in the same way but for the same reasons. Each of them, with his or her own talents and perspectives, created something out of this event… and even when no actual possums were harmed in the making of this poetry, we still have the words we write and the pictures we draw to assert our meaning and being in this world. The possum scooted under the van or between the wheels, with luck or skill, and made it to the other side of the road almost completely unobserved. We’re not aware of how it worked or why, only that it did in a lovely way—poetic justice at its best. The importance of creativity, in our classrooms and in our lives (and in response to the possums that run out into the road before us), is that there are many things that become real and true through the creative process without our thinking too hard about it. It’s possible to bring far more creativity into our lives, and our students’ lives. It’s not hard; we just need to start paying attention.

Works Cited
Bohm, David. On Creativity. New York: Routledge Classics, 2007.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. New York: Harper Perennial, 1996.
Jamison, Kay Redfield. Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. New York: Free Press Paperbacks, 1993.

Dr. Janet L. Bland is a McCoy Associate Professor of English and the Division Coordinator for Arts and Humanities at Marietta College where she teaches creative writing.  Recent publications include her short story collection, A Fish Full of River, which was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award, and The Civil Mind. She recently completed a novel set during Hurricane Katrina.

Joanna Fuhrman

In addition to being a central member of the group of poets whose surreal, funny, and chatty poems came to be labeled “New York School,” Kenneth Koch (1925–2002) is well known as an innovator in teaching poetry writing to children. My pedagogy, like that of many poets who teach in elementary and high schools, has been deeply influenced by Koch’s writing about teaching poetry. In his books, Wishes, Lies and Dreams and Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? Koch explains his method: Students will read a poem, and then use a structural element in the poem as a starting point for their own work. For example, after reading Williams Carlos Williams’ poem “This is Just to Say” (in which the speaker says he is sorry for eating the plums in the icebox, but then brags, “they were delicious/so sweet/ and so cold”), Koch suggests that his students write poems apologizing for something “you are secretly glad you did.” The young writers use the poem as a springboard to unleash their own creativity and wit. As Charles North elegantly describes, Koch’s method:

. . . is something of a “science” of “inspiration,” replacing the Muse, the empty desire to write, and even the celebrated anxiety of influence with the encouraging notion that writers are always and properly inspired by other writers, and moreover, that arbitrary rules (including “gimmicks”) can stimulate the imagination.”

Over the last few years, I have found Koch’s own poems to be particularly fruitful models to use in conjunction with my own take on his method. The relationship between wildness and structure in Koch’s poetry makes it a rich source for poetry exercises and inspiration. Koch’s poetry, like his teaching method, is seriously playful. The emblematic Kenneth Koch poem is a game of mind that employs all five senses and convinces you there might be three or ninety more senses yet unnamed. His poems often start with a conceit and run with it until a pattern has been established and then broken. Some famous examples include his poem “You Were Wearing,” in which almost every line refers to some fashion item inspired by literature or history. (The first line starts, “You were wearing your Edgar Allan Poe printed cotton blouse.”) In his poem “On Aesthetics,” each section describes a tongue-in-cheek brand of aesthetics (e.g., “The Aesthetics of Taking a Walk,” “The Aesthetics of Moss”). The pleasure of these poems comes from the freshness of the twists in the pattern, how with each repetition Koch finds a way to make the idea new. In addition, there’s a feeling of pure, disobedient joy that comes in the moments when Koch breaks an established pattern, as in “The Magic of Numbers,” where after writing in each section about a couple and how old they are when they meet, one section reads simply, “You look like Jerry Lewis (1950).”

The other element that draws me to Koch’s work is the way he is able to juxtapose surreal imagery with naturalistic, even autobiographical elements, so that one is no less strange than the other. Observations from life and surreal imagery are both figures to play with in Koch’s poetry circus. Take his early poem “Pregnancy.” It begins:

Inside the pomegranate is the blue sky.
?We have been living out the year in Wisconsin.
Sometimes it rains there—tremendous green drops!

This fusing of styles and elements is what gives even his shortest poems a feeling of being overstuffed, teeming with ideas and physical sensations.

Over the years I have taught many of Koch’s poems as models for children and adults. One of my favorite poems to teach kids is “To My Heart at the Close of Day” (see p. 15) from Koch’s book New Addresses (2000). In Koch’s poem, he addresses his heart as it swings a bat at a baseball game, the crowd cheering it on. I enjoy teaching this poem because it allows me to ask the students: What other games or activities might body parts play? What type of game would it be fun to imagine your heart, your lungs, or your stomach playing? Imagine your nose living in a dream world. If it took up a hobby, what would it be? In response, my students have written poems about brains driving trucks in the night, fingers dancing ballet, livers bowling in the swimming pool, and eyelids taking a math test.
Here are some student responses to this exercise:

To My Hair Growing Slowly
Eddy, High School
Why are you so short?
I want you to grow long and bushy.
What can I do to make you grow?
Would you like a gasoline shampoo?
Would you like to be painted blond?

My Heart
Kanika, 5th grade
My heart played basketball into the hoop of my eye and I cried
and cried and cried.
Heart, cut that out before I can’t breathe.
Swim Swim in the liquid food of my stomach.
Splash Splash
it flows into my mouth. You’re not good at anything. Are you?
No. I’m not. I’m just here to keep you alive.
Don’t you have anything to do?
No, stop asking questions. It’s boring in here.
If you don’t stop I’m getting a heart transplant to replace you.
Okay, I’ll stop.
You better, I say.
I go to bed that night breathing fine. I’m just glad
my heart isn’t playing games anymore.
Then suddenly swim swim… oh oh.

And here’s a poem by a student at PS 10 in the Bronx:

To My Brain Going Booooom
Giovanni, 4th grade
I know you are mad, but don’t explode.
I’ll buy you a monkey if you are good.
You’re just pink so don’t get mad. I could
paint you white or black or even gray.
I know these are your favorite colors
so don’t get mad. You are just
a little brain. You will grow.

I find this last poem deeply moving and full of pathos. The structure of Koch’s poem gives Giovanni a means to describe the feeling of not being able to understand or control his own anger. It’s a profound sentiment, and a useful reminder that the emotional life of children is just as weighty as that of adults.

Another favorite poem I started teaching just this year is “To You.” I brought the poem in as a response to a high school English teacher’s request that I teach a love poem for Valentine’s Day. Like many poets and poetry teachers, I dread having to read teenagers’ love poems. I tend to think the purpose of poetry is to create moments where language has the opportunity to be reborn, to be fully alive, or to become “new” as Ezra Pound championed, but most of the love poems I’ve seen from my high school students are full of clichés. How can I ask young people to avoid these clichés when for most of them the cliché itself is the most appealing and known part of love? At the same time, I would never say to a student that certain subjects are off limits. While for me poetry is primarily about linguistic play, imagery, and the music of language, for young people it’s usually primarily about self-expression (perhaps naïve self-expression), and I am not interested in taking that use of poetry away from them. In fact, just the opposite: I feel that I have much to learn from my students’ more direct approach to language and poetry. The beauty of poetry is that it can explore the unknown—the subconscious and the magic of chance—as well as serving as a means to communicate emotion and ideas. The best poetry, like Koch’s, straddles this tension between different ideas of how meaning works in a poem.
I hoped that by bringing in Koch’s poem “To You” I could show the students a more complicated and playful approach to the subject of love and give them some tools to delve into figurative language, while still giving them some room to explore emotional states.

To You
Kenneth Koch
I love you as a sheriff searches for a walnut
That will solve a murder case unsolved for years
Because the murderer left it in the snow beside a window
Through which he saw her head, connecting with
Her shoulders by a neck, and laid a red
Roof in her heart. For this we live a thousand years;
For this we love, and we live because we love, we are not
Inside a bottle, thank goodness! I love you as a
Kid searches for a goat; I am crazier than shirttails
In the wind, when you’re near, a wind that blows from?
The big blue sea, so shiny so deep and so unlike us;
I think I am bicycling across an Africa of green and white fields?
Always, to be near you, even in my heart
When I’m awake, which swims, and also I believe that you
Are trustworthy as the sidewalk which leads me to
The place where I again think of you, a new

Harmony of thoughts! I love you as the sunlight leads the prow
Of a ship which sails
From Hartford to Miami, and I love you
Best at dawn, when even before I am awake the sun
Receives me in the questions which you always pose.

One way of approaching this poem is to ask what emotion it evokes. If I ask students how the poem makes them feel, most will say “confused” or “weird.” While not the terms a literary critic might use to describe the poem, they do get at the tone pretty accurately. What is it about these images that makes a reader feel so off-balance, so “whack,” as a student might say? I think it’s that so many of the images or concepts in the poem are of things that are incomplete or concealed. We don’t know how the walnut relates to the murder case; we only see part of the woman in the window (and only her head, which might suggest decapitation). We don’t know if the speaker is really in the fields of Africa or in the Africa “inside his heart.” The poem is full of rich, sensual imagery, but it also evokes a feeling of confusion and dizziness. Most tellingly, we never know if the as that repeats throughout is the as of a simile or the as that means while. This ambiguity is, for me, what makes this poem such a rich source of inspiration and, for more sophisticated students, a chance to talk about how metaphor can work in contemporary poetry. 

Many teachers and students think of the two parts of a metaphor or a simile as being connected by a sort of equals sign. Often when I observe English teachers explaining how figurative language works, they use clichés to do it. For instance, a teacher might use the example “busy as a bee,” and then say something like, “You are busy,” and, “the bee is busy,” so therefore “busy as a bee” is a good simile. There’s a feeling that the more “accurate” (and obvious) a metaphor is the better. Recently I watched a third-grade English teacher correct a student whose metaphor she thought wasn’t true. As a poet, I have a different idea of what makes figurative language successful. I am interested in metaphors and similes that create the feeling of something new, the feeling of surprise. I often reference French poet Pierre Reverdy’s description of the “image” as a useful way to think about what a makes an exciting metaphor. He wrote,

The image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities. The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be—the greater its emotional power and poetic reality.

To relate this quote to the construction of a simile, the larger the distance between the two parts of the metaphor, the greater the chance that the line will create a jolt of surprise in the reader and thus be an effective enactment of the chaotic feeling of being alive. What makes Koch’s poem so inspiring to me is that when he writes as, we never know if he is comparing two things, or whether these things are happening at the same time. If I ask students to use Koch’s syntax as a model, what I am really asking them to do is to juxtapose two images in a way that makes it unclear whether they are creating a simile. This ambiguity allows students the opportunity to create metaphors without getting too hung up on whether the two parts of the metaphor are “equal” or “true.” It allows room for play. It gives students space to discover what they feel, instead of starting from a predetermined idea of what they should feel. When I am working with high school students, I do not usually explain the theory of metaphors to them in these terms. I hope that by modeling a playful approach to language, my students will be able to follow my example and free themselves from narrow ideas of meaning.
Before the students start writing their poems, I hand out worksheets with blank spaces for the following types of words:

1) a job
2) a type of music
3) a period of time
4) a type of food
5) a part of the body
6) a place in the world
7) a type of animal
a mode of transportation
9) a body of water
10) a color
11) a way of moving
12) something in nature

Before they make their individual lists, I ask the students as a class to make a similar list as a way of modeling what I expect from them. I chose the categories of words requested on the worksheet based on the types of concrete nouns Koch uses in his poem. The reason for asking the students to make this sort of list is twofold: I want them to start with some concrete nouns so it will be easier for them to be sure their lines contain specific, vivid imagery, and I also want to challenge them to use their imaginations to make connections between things that are not obviously or usually connected. After they make the list, I read Koch’s poem out loud to the students, as they read along. We then talk about the poem briefly, focusing on the imagery and the emotions it evokes. I make sure to draw their attention to how the word “as” is functioning in the poem.

After reading and discussing the poem, I ask the students to make a list of emotional verbs, words like “love” that can be used to express how one feels towards another. Even though this lesson started as a response to Valentine’s Day, I don’t want students to feel that they have to write love poems if they don’t want to. The purpose of the list is to give the students who might feel stuck an easy place to start. Emotional words or phrases students suggest usually include: “hate,” “miss,” “long for,” “wonder about,” “detest,” “fear,” “think about,” and “forget.” We then pick one of the emotion verbs to use for a class poem that loosely follows the structure of Koch’s poem. Let’s say our emotion word is “fear” and one word on the list of words is “doctor” and another is “jazz.” Our poem might start, “I fear you as a doctor plays blue jazz.” When we are working on the group poem, I will return to Koch’s poem and point out how long and complex his sentences are and how the way he uses connecting words like that, because, and though to extend his sentences gives the poem a feeling of movement. For the group poem I ask students to try to do the same. After we write four or five lines of a group poem, I will ask the students to pick one of the emotional verbs on the board and use the concrete nouns on their worksheets to write their own takes on Koch’s poem.

Here are some examples of student poems that I think do a wonderful job of creating vivid, surprising imagery:

The Farmer on a Motorcycle
Tamar, 10th grad
I wonder about you as
a rabbit pours cereal
on its head in London.
I wonder about you as
a singer sings rock music
in a yellow car.
I wonder about you as
a bike falls through
a waterfall into a ?lake during the day.
I wonder about you?as a chicken swims?
in mud.
I wonder about
you as a scarecrow swings on
a jungle gym.
I wonder
about you
as a dog
walks on a treadmill.

Envy
Molly, 10th grade
I envy you ?as a rock swims to Indiana?
rolling through maple syrup.
(the good kind of course)
whilst watching a firefighter
carry a pig
in a wheelchair,
away from the pop music.
I envy you as
a navy blue sweater
proudly walks down the street
carrying a red balloon.

I love the way both of these poems capture the contradictions, complications, and paradoxes that are at the heart of a rich emotional life. These are the kind of poems that make me want to write. Like Koch’s poetry, they evoke complex feelings without ever giving up a childlike sense of whimsy and play.

Joanna Fuhrman is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Pageant (Alice James Books 2009) and Moraine (Hanging Loose Press 2006). She teaches poetry at Rutgers University and in New York City public schools. Visit her at joannafuhrman.com for more information.