TWC

Coming Soon: WITS Alliance Digital Resource Center

twco8850 — Wed, 09 May 2012 16:43:47 +0000

In fall 2012, T&W will launch a searchable Digital Resource Center (DRC) on our website. Initially drawing on material from T&W’s 45 years of print publications, the DRC will also include resources provided by other members of the WITS Alliance–a professional network of literary arts education programs and individuals who serve K-12 students and provide professional development for their teachers.

Help us shape this new resource by completing our short survey here. Thank you!

Voice Choice

twco8850 — Mon, 07 May 2012 15:52:43 +0000

Voice Choice
by Caron Levis

Take 1: HOLLA TO MY PEEPS! O.M.G!!! I am, like, so totally PSYCHED to be posting MY FIRST BLOG EVER!
No, that’s not me.

Take 2: Greetings, readers, I am honored to have been invited to partake in this online adventure of Teachers & Writers Collaborative and am pleased to present to you my inaugural posting—
Oh, definitely not.

Take 3: Hello my dears, goodness, now isn’t this exciting? My very own, how do you call it? Oh yes, Blog Post. Blog. What an adorable word, what will they think of next? Oh, for goodness sakes, I hope I’m doing this right. I mean who would’ve thought? Me, blogging?
Yeah, I don’t think so.

Argh. So what, then, is my blog voice? What is Voice anyway?

I had to ask myself this question when I was hired to teach “voice” to seventh-graders. Somewhere I read that it is “the essence of the self.” What’s essence? What’s self? Wonderful questions, but I had forty minutes, and I wasn’t expected to philosophize, I was expected to get kids writing. People speak of the “elusive voice” as if it is some intangible, magical element of writing. Now, I enjoy intangibles and magic, but I needed something I could write on a chalkboard. I got out my dictionary, I Googled, I read works of authors with “strong voices,” found notes from grad school and acting class, searched my own experience, and in the end I had to teach voice the only way I knew how. I decided that for me, voice is HOW who tells what.

I introduced myself to the class three different times, as three different characters: one was a pretentious middle-aged professor, another an apathetic teen, and finally a shy five-year-old. Then I tossed a pack of tissues on the table.

I asked how each of the characters might describe the pack of tissues. Students called out that the five-year-old might think the tissue looks like a snowflake or a cape, the professor would remember the embarrassment of having to blow his nose during a lecture, the teenager would say whatever, they’re just a freaking bunch of tissues. We kept a list and we compared.

Voice is CHOICE

I wrote it on the board and students brainstormed all the choices a writer makes about HOW to tell a story: details, vocabulary, length of sentences, emotions, memories, images, metaphors, similes, spacing, secrets…

Was I teaching voice? I’m not sure but I hoped so; according to NORC’s recent report, about “Teaching Artists and the Future of Education,” Voice—with a capital V—is something most teaching artists want their students to develop. Merriam-Webster defines voice as “an instrument or medium of expression.”

I couldn’t give them their instrument, all I could do was encourage my students to listen, imagine, take risks, and… throw more objects on the table, and ask them to choose one, describe it, and tell a story. “Don’t worry about spelling or grammar mistakes for now,” I said, “Those are important, but those things can be taught. Voice is something you have to find for yourself. So, look at the tissues. Tell me what you see, feel, remember. Make choices and let me hear you.”

Caron Levis is a playwright and T&W teaching artist. You can read more about Caron by clicking here.

Become a T&W Teaching Artist!

twco8850 — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 19:00:31 +0000

T&W is accepting applications until July 2 for writers to teach during the 2012-2013 school year. Our roster of teaching artists includes writers whose work has been published, staged, or filmed; and who have experience teaching in K–12 schools and/or youth-serving community organizations. Preference is given to individuals who have taught in New York City or other large urban school districts. People who can teach in Spanish are especially encouraged to apply.

Writers who teach for T&W do so as independent contractors. We will acknowledge your application within one week of receiving it; we plan to conduct interviews beginning in late July.

To view our application, please go here.

How Does a Poet Teach Persuasive Writing?

twco8850 — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 14:46:04 +0000

It’s not as hard as it seems. For who is more adept at the art of persuasion than poets and revolutionaries? When I think of who convinced me to drop my fears and limitations, my boundaries, to pick up my anger or to set it down again, to love or to know when to cut love off, to stand for life even when it meant injury, I think of the poetic revolutionaries: Alice Walker, Malcolm X, Harvey Milk, Audre Lorde, Sojourner Truth, Angela Davis, and Assata Shakur.

For one of my first lessons for a persuasive writing residency at a high school, I shared SojournerTruth’s “Ain ’t I a Woman ?” speech given during the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio in 1851. A debate was raging about whether women “deserved” the right to vote. After a male critic stated women were too physically, thus mentally, weak to vote, Sojourner stepped to the podium and spoke: “The man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or give me any best place! And aint’ I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman?”

Through her refutation of someone else’s definition of what it meant to be a woman, Truth touched upon the vast divide between the experiences of white and African-American women. She questioned not only the notion of womanhood but personhood at a time when slavery was still legally practiced.

Born into slavery in 1797 in Ulster County, New York, Truth escaped with her baby daughter in 1826. After receiving a spiritual message to travel the land, she re-named herself Sojourner Truth and journeyed the country speaking on the rights of slaves and women both free and in bondage. Once students were intrigued by Truth’s background, we read the speech aloud. In one class, we listened to Maya Angelou ’s recording of Truth ’s speech (a fabulous suggestion made by one of the classroom teachers with whom I collaborated on this residency). We discussed how Truth persuaded her audience to understand her point of view by re-defining the central term in the conflict and how she used repetition, refrain, and poetry.

For the writing portion, I asked students: “What is it that people say you can’t do?” Through a group brainstorm, we wrote phrases on the board: “Can’t finish high school,” “Can’t go to heaven,” “Can’t be in love,” etc.

Based on the brainstorm, students wrote their own “Ain’t I a —-?” pieces. They wrote funny pieces, mocking stereotypes of being Asian, thoughtful pieces about being gay and denied entry into heaven, as well as gender-bending pieces which upturned Sojourner’s original question.

Sojourner Truth is considered to be one the first to openly address the peculiar position of women of color in American feminism. For further development of this lesson, I have taught her speech alongside Angela Davis’s essay, “The Anti-Slavery Movement and the Birth Of Women’s Rights” Howard Zinn’s “Slavery without Submission, Emancipation without Freedom” and Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.”

Through these juxtapositions, deeper historical questions can be asked about the relationship between abolition and suffrage, the realities of slavery and emancipation, and notions of womanhood, personhood, freedom, and truth.

-Bushra Rehman

Bushra Rehman is a T&W teaching artist who writes poems, essays and short stories. You can read more about Bushra here.

Kenneth Koch

twco8850 — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 17:27:34 +0000

Kenneth Koch (1925-2002) is often linked to the founding of the New York School poets in the 1950s, a group that includes John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and Barbara Guest. The seemingly spontaneous, cosmopolitan and exuberant poetry he wrote helped define not only characteristics of the New York School, but Koch’s work in New York City public schools.

“I was onto this new way of writing that I could tell people about, and help them to write, give them feelings of power, confidence, excitement,” Koch told Teachers & Writers Collaborative in an interview. Often, getting students to feel this excitement involved opening them up to poetry in the first place, which initially proved difficult. “A lot of the best writers in that school already hated poetry,” Koch said, when talking about his work at P.S. 61, where he started teaching in 1968. He blamed some of this hatred on what he called “essay-poems,” poetry that was overly academic and that contained obligatory allusions to figures like Helen of Troy or Cuchulain. Koch wanted to make language fresh and concrete for his students.

“When I had kids write directly –I mean directly in the sense of, when they write about what they think about the President or what they think about their block, they always wrote dull,” he said. “I obviously wanted very quickly to make people do something else when they seem to me to be stuck in other people’s language, other people’s ideas.” Koch urged students to write about their own wishes and dreams, to make things up if they wanted. “You can put in a lot of colors, wishes, lies, dreams, bananas, grapefruit, songs,” he told a class.

His success in the classroom led him to write several books about teaching poetry to children, including Wishes, Lies and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry (1970) and Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? (1973). He credits his work through the Teachers & Writers Collaborative as the seed behind these texts. “One thing I liked, that was wonderful about Teachers & Writers, was I had to keep a journal. Without that, I don’t think there would have been a book.”

Koch produced many books in his lifetime, in many genres: over 30 volumes of poetry, plays, fiction, nonfiction, and even several librettos. Still, he saw his teaching as among his most valuable work. “I discovered a way really to help a lot of people,” he said.

Still, the accomplishments of Koch’s poetry shouldn’t be overlooked. In Poetry magazine, Paul Carroll wrote that’s Koch’s works “embody the poetic imagination as it rejoices in the ebullience of its health and freedom, its fecundity, its capacity for endless invention, its dear, outlandish ability to transform everyday, pragmatic reality into an Oz or a tea-party at the March Hare’s house, its potency in, possibly, achieving a bit of immortality as a result of having brought forth some children of the soul.” Not only did Koch help bring poetry to children, but his poetry is credited with drawing out the inner child of adults.

-Lee Conell

Lee Conell lives in New York. Her writing has appeared in the Chronogram, on Women’s Studio Workshop Blog, and in The New York Times.

Celebrate Poetry Month with a Student Writing Program!

twco8850 — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 08:30:11 +0000

Your students have been working hard to prep for the ELA tests. Reward them with a springtime poetry program that will recharge their imaginations and remind them that writing can be deeply satisfying and (wait for it…wait for it…) FUN.

A T&W poetry program will not only celebrate Poetry Month right, but it will also increase your students’ participation in class and their motivation for writing.

Take a look at the T&W poetry programs that are already underway:

With funding from the New York Community Trust’s “Beyond Teaching to the Test” initiative, T&W has partnered with CFN #534 to implement several poetry writing programs in middle school social studies and science classrooms.
Students at Booker T. Washington (054M) are writing poetry as it relates to the American Revolution with one T&W writer.
Two T&W writers are leading poetry workshops with first and second graders at Adolph Ochs (111M).
Spoken word and performance poetry are getting shout-outs at Liberty Partnerships Program/LaGuardia Community College and at VISIONS @ Selis Manor.
T&W writers have been teaching poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and even bookmaking in Gifted & Talented programs at four schools: Mamie Fay (122Q), Louis Marshall (276K), Adam Clayton Powell (153M), and Helen Keller (153X).
At the Newbridge Road School in North Bellmore, New York, one T&W poet is in his sixth year of residence.
And after our successful pilot program at two schools last year, T&W and the Center for the Art of Translation have trained additional writers in Poetry Inside Out, a curriculum that increases students’ ELA skills through translation and exploration of world literature.

To learn more about the details and costs of our student programs, contact us at 212-691-6590 or workshops@twc.org today!

Three Classroom Writing Exercises for National Poetry Month

twco8850 — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 17:58:34 +0000

April brings us National Poetry Month,and to mark the
occasion the spring Issue of Teachers & Writers Magazine
features three exciting new exercises for bringing poetry
to the elementary, middle, and high school classroom.
Written by experienced teaching artists, these exercises offer suggestions for using contemporary poems to inspire fresh writing from students. This week we feature Sarah Dohrmann’s exercise, inspired by Ross Gay’s poem, ”The Truth.”

Three Classroom Writing Exercises for National Poetry Month
Three:

Because Poems:Teaching Ross Gay’s “The Truth”
to Middle and High School Students

Sarah Dohrmann

At the age of 14 my first “real” job was at Wendy’s. I worked the potato ovens for several weeks until I burned my hand badly. I was then switched over to cashier, but when my drawer was forty bucks short one day, I was demoted to sweeping up the dining area. This presented another problem in the form of a school nemesis who’d come into the restaurant, order French fries, sit in the dining room, and toss her fries one-by-one onto the floor so she could watch me sweep each one with a broom into a long-handled dustpan that I could never seem to hold right.

At the same time I worked at Wendy’s, my family was about nine years into a disperate attempt to patch itself together after my mother’s death. The patching process is still underway these thirty-odd years later, because recovery is slow when no one talks about loss. We prefer to mime our way through innuendo and pain, making our non-actions as weighted and important as anything we might actually say or do.

Perhaps it’s my personal background, then, that first drew me to Ross Gay’s poem “The Truth”, which appears in his first collection, called Against Which:

The Truth

Ross Gay

Because he was 38, because this
was his second job, because
he had two daughters, because his hands
looked like my father’s, because at 7
he would walk to the furniture warehouse,
unload trucks ‘til 3 AM, because I
was fourteen and training him, because he made
$3.75 an hour, because he had a wife
to look in the face, because
he acted like he respected me,
because he was sick and would not call out
I didn’t blink when the water
dropped from his nose
into the onion’s perfectly circular
mouth on the Whopper Jr.
I coached him through preparing.
I did not blink.
Tell me this didn’t happen.
I dare you.

(From Against Which by Ross Gay (CavanKerry Press, Ltd. 2006). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

Like all poems we choose to teach, Gay’s poem moved me. It moved me not because of what the narrator chooses to do, but because of what he chooses not to do. I liked that it is a humble reflection, and that the narrator made a choice that others may not approve of. And I liked the repetition of the word “because,” how it lilted me along until I came to a full-stop of truth. Naturally I also liked that the narrator is fourteen years old, working at a fast food restaurant just like I once did—only this narrator is the better version of me, the less narcissistic one capable of thinking beyond his own discomforts while he works at a job he probably doesn’t love.

The youngest age group I’ve taught “The Truth” to is eighth grade. Children are often asked to reflect upon what they did over the summer, but rarely are they able to write their way to a truth that may cast them in an unfavorable light. So often I overhear angry and self-righteous people talking to their friends and loved ones on city streets and in subway cars, telling everyone how they sure did show that guy or how it’s the last time that sucker will mess with them. That kind of thing. Sometimes I feel like I’m walking through a world in which everyone—myself included—is feeling awfully proud for being such a tough guy.

When I teach this poem, I want my students to think deeply about a time when they were not the tough guy. I want them to focus humbly not upon what they said or did, but instead on what they didn’t say or do. What’s more, I want them to narrow this non-action down to a gesture, to something that may not have been noticeable to an onlooker. I want them to think of a time they showed deep compassion for another, or maybe like me in the case of my mother’s death, they chose not to speak about something very important because they felt afraid. I want their poems to be quiet.

I ask my students what word is used most frequently in “The Truth.” I then ask them why it is a person would keep repeating himself: Because he wasn’t heard the first time around? Because what he’s saying is important? Because he’s trying to explain himself clearly? What does the repetition of the word “because” have to do with the title of the poem? How did he come to the truth? I tell students to mimic Gay’s structure if they like—to repeat the word “because” in order to lilt yourself downward toward your truth, using it as a means to peel back the translucent, barely detectable reasons amassed to justify a non-action. At the end of these layers I ask students to reveal the core of their Because Poem, their truth. (It should be noted that Because Poems could also work as an excellent starter for asking students to write a reflective essay.)

After the first read, “The Truth” speaks only to a few teenagers. Some students can’t get past how gross it is that the narrator said nothing about the man’s “water” dripping from his nose into the burger. They say the narrator should’ve been fired and somebody should’ve called the health officials. I agree that a guy’s dripping “water” is unsanitary, but why’d the narrator not even blink when it happened? What do we know about the two characters in the poem? Why does Gay choose language like “he had a wife to look in the face”? I mean, why not just say the guy had a wife who expected him to support the family? High school kids know very well the difference between a 14-year-old fast food manager and a 38-year-old man who’s got real responsibilities like a wife and two kids and two jobs. They know what it means to have to look somebody in the face. They know it cuts deeper.

“The Truth” can cut deep. When I ask students to think humbly about their own lives, there are often only a few takers. Many students can’t help but make their poems into another opportunity to list this reason they did that thing and that reason they didn’t do this other thing, until they’ve written themselves into a tizzy with no real end. But some students are able to use this writing as a way to come to a quiet truth. When these students write, they are writing about the most interior parts of their lives, the parts they’d prefer, maybe, to hide even from themselves. They write about not passing important tests, disappointing others, breaking up with lovers, fighting with friends, and not always coming out the winner. In short, they write about real life.

Untitled

Travis J.

Because he had a beef with my friends
Because he had a fight with my friend
Because he chose me out of everyone to pull a knife on
Because I woke up the next day not in a good mood
Because when I approached him in breakfast to speak about the situation, he disrespected me
Because even though I left him alone, he had the nerve to still talk about me
Because I got tired of hearing his mouth run on and on
Because he was trynna humiliate me in public
Because I snapped and made his mouth stop running for a while to come
Because I should have just went to class instead of making my biggest mistake ever
Because I turned into a person completely out of character
Because the shy and quiet shell that covered me for so long finally cracked
Because he continued to embarrass me and broke the shell completely
Because my friends were there and I felt as if I had to prove myself
Because I stopped and tipped my peak
Because he swung and tried to hit me
Because I swung back and actually hit him and my anger was being unfair and wouldn’t let me stop
Because of all that…
I ended up in hell for three months.

Tragedy

Ben P.

Because when I saw her on the street with another guy
she looked like she wasn’t doing anything wrong
Because maybe she thought she could fool me with anything
Because she thought it was okay to go out with another guy
Because she actually looked happy when she was with the guy
I could only stand under the streetlight
with my broken heart
looking at her from far away.

Why I Wanted to Cry

Rosemary O.

Because you were seven years old
and couldn’t do subtraction
Because I was failing you
and letting you fail
second grade
Because I took every mistake personally
Because I had number lines,
buttons,
and flashcards
and I let you count on your fingers
Because there are only
so many ways to explain
that subtraction
means getting smaller.
I asked you what
four minus two
was
You looked at me
like I had kicked a puppy
And answered,
“Seven?”

Sarah Dohrmann was a teaching artist for Teachers & Writers Collaborative for ten years before becoming its education director, and has been teaching creative writing in Special Programs at Sarah Lawrence College since 2003. She has been awarded a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts Award in Nonfiction Literature, and a Fulbright Fellowship. With photographer Tiana Markova-Gold, Sarah won the 2010 Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University for their joint project on prostitution in Morocco. Also in 2010, she was a finalist for both the Iowa Award in Fiction and the Iowa Award in Nonfiction.

Three Classroom Writing Exercises for National Poetry Month

twco8850 — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 20:31:13 +0000

April brings us National Poetry Month,
and to mark the occasion the spring Issue of
Teachers & Writers Magazine features
three exciting new exercises for bringing poetry
to the elementary, middle, and high school
classroom. Written by experienced teaching artists,
these exercises offer suggestions for using
contemporary poems to inspire fresh writing from
students. This week we feature Bushra Rehman’s
exercise, inspired by the poems of Ishle Yi Park.

Three Classroom Writing Exercises for National Poetry Month
Two:

Rosebuds Folded Over in Sleep:
Teaching the Sonnets of Ishle Yi Park to High School Students

Bushra Rehman

“Peer closer: a soul and a soul. He folds over her like a rosebud in sleep.”
~ Ishle Yi Park

How to bring a love of sonnets to my high school students? Easy. I was a student, once upon a time in the old hip-hop life of Queens, and I am armed with sonnets so fierce that whenever I’ve taught them, students are unable to resist. I teach the work of Ishle Yi Park, a Korean-American woman who was a touring cast member of Def Poetry Jam and whose book, The Temperature of This Water, was the winner of the pen America Beyond Margins Award. The poems I teach are drawn from Angel & Hannah: A Love Story in Sonnets, published alongside Park’s performance in the 2006 Hip Hop Theater Festival. They center on what is still forbidden for most students: interracial teenage love.

As the sound of a fight on a playground makes the ground electric, Park’s poems shock and excite students, spur them to keep reading. Her sonnets trace the trajectory of love between Angel, a Puerto Rican boy from Brooklyn and Hannah, a Korean-American girl from Queens. I prefer to teach the entire book, but when short on time, I choose the following three poems as touchstones: “Quinceañera Sonnet,” “Wind Sonnet,” and “Gold Hoop Sonnet.” ( “Quinceañera Sonnet,” “Wind Sonnet,” and “Gold Hoop Sonnet” all reprinted with permission of Ishle Yi Park)

Quinceañera Sonnet

On Friday nights, Karin & Hannah drink Old Es
 on a peeling bench at 109th Street Park,
 til an amber, foamy buzz blurs the dark edges of night.
 They watch boys shoot hoops like lean,

heartless seraphim and test chain-linked swings,
 Nike soles pointed towards heaven,
 towards star-shaped leaves. Sometimes, she
 wonders why they spend  long hours preening like two peacocks,

shadows huge on an abandoned playground.
 But tonight is Tasha’s sweet fifteen
 in St. Mary’s church basement. Hannah licks her lips,

draws on scarlet liner. She puckers.
 Paints herself darker, more dangerous:  
a girl who can scar in the shape of a Kiss.

I’ve taught this sonnet to high school students from Oakland to Queens. In the conversations that follow, the more worldly students explain the meaning of Old Es. This always leads to much laughter and the “aha” of why the night is becoming amber and foamy. Others explain the importance of Quinceañeras in a girl’s life. We find references to heaven, look up the word seraphim, and discuss the enchanted feeling of the night.

Park’s language is uniquely her own, her vision of the urban world one of living, breathing magic. In “Wind Sonnet,” Park infuses Bushwick, Brooklyn, with Technicolor surrealism. Students feel the thrill of decoding her imagery: the flags like teeth, the grains of light.

Wind Sonnet

June. Grains of light sift over Wyckoff  Avenue,
dusting strollers shoved
 by thick-hipped mamís with slick, gelled hair.
 Tattered triangular flags blow and click
 like sharp teeth above all heads.  
Angel struts, clasping Hannah’s fingers.
 A cool wind ripples his undershirt,
 dares to lift her skirt. Young fools with easy
 grins, they stroll loose-hipped down Hart Street,
 say wassup to boys ribboning Dee’s
 Phat Beatz, Sal’s pizzeria.  
Young street king and queen; everyone knows
 his name: mira Angel y la China,  
they hiss. The two own the block,  
walk straight into a hot wind.

In the third of Park’s poems I show my students, “Gold Hoop Sonnet,” Park provides an essential moment of self-love, and as long as gold hoops are in style (forever) this poem will sing to teenage girls who understand.

Gold Hoop Sonnet

One day she will be brave enough
 to venture away from those typical gold hoops, 
from parroting her mean friend’s laughter, or  sitting on the stoop 
for hours, trying to look half-fly/half-tough,

sucking on a sour apple Blow Pop,
 listening to the boom box’s latest version of bad hip-hop… one day  
she will look at her rough, scarred face 
in the compact mirror without her Mac eyeliner and stop

hating those young, haunted eyes.
 I hope a slant of gold light will hit her cheek 
just right, and it may come as a surprise

to her how fine she really is. Fabulous. Sleek
 Soulful—full of her own juju and mystique…
 a rose fury! Black lightning when she hits the street.

Students are hooked. I remind them they are reading the dreaded sonnet. They disbelieve. I show them the 14-line pattern, rhyme schemes, iambic pentameter. We count syllables, label rhymes, and discuss how Park’s sonnets weave loosely through the forms, Petrarchan, Spenserian, Shakespearean, both celebrating and shunning the form’s limitations.

Finally, I ask students to imagine a moment of intense feeling, whether it is desire, loneliness, hatred, or awakening. I have them spend a little time entering this moment. Then I ask them to write, not directly about the emotion, but about their surroundings, to give place details, such as the ones Ishle Yi Park used to describe 109th Street Park, and to imbue these details with the chosen feeling through original metaphors and description. Students have the option to write in sonnet or sonnet-inspired form.

The blessing of writing with youth is that they sometimes just need to be given permission. Ask them to write something strange, funny, and unique, and they will.

Bushra Rehman is co-editor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism, a seminal text on women of color and feminism. Her poems have been featured on BBC Radio 4, KPFA, the Brian Lehrer Show, and in The New York Times, India Currents, and New York Newsday. Her book of short stories, Bhangra Blowout, is forthcoming through Upset Press.

T&W Accepting Submissions for 2012 Ellen Levine Award

twco8850 — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 15:10:57 +0000

T&W is serving as a nominator for the 2012 Ellen Levine Award, which is administered by the New York Community Trust. The $7,500 award is given to the author of an unpublished fiction book.

Award criteria:

A nominee for the Ellen Levine Award must be a previously published (not self-published) author of a print edition of one or two works of fiction.
Manuscripts submitted for the award must be works in progress of at least 75 pages for which there is not yet a publishing contract.

If you want T&W to consider nominating your work for the Ellen Levine Award, please send the following to aswauger@twc.org by Thursday, May 31:

Brief bio listing one or two previously published works of fiction.
Outline of manuscript submitted for consideration.
Unpublished manuscript of at least 75 pages to be considered for the award.

Please send the bio, outline, and manuscript as Word document attachments to an e-mail. T&W will not review submissions that are not sent via e-mail and in Word format.

Note: T&W will nominate only one author for the Ellen Levine Award. Individuals who submit their work to T&W will be informed by early July if they were selected as T&W’s nominee. The New York Community Trust will announce the winner of the 2012 Ellen Levine Award in the fall.

Please send questions regarding the Ellen Levine Award to aswauger@twc.org or call 212-691-6590.

Three Classroom Writing Exercises for National Poetry Month

twco8850 — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 04:32:36 +0000

April brings us National Poetry Month, and to mark the occasion the spring Issue of Teachers & Writers Magazine features three exciting new exercises for bringing poetry to the elementary, middle, and high school classroom. Written by experienced teaching artists, these exercises offer suggestions for using contemporary poems to inspire fresh writing from students. This week we feature Jane LeCroy’s exercise, based on a poem by May Swenson.

Three Classroom Writing Exercises for National Poetry Month

One:

Exercising the Imagination:
Teaching May Swenson’s “Cardinal Ideograms” to Elementary School Students

Jane LeCroy

‘‘Cardinal Ideograms” by May Swenson is a poem that works like a puzzle; experimental in form and appearance, it engages the imagination by inspiring playful connections with the familiar. Poetry is so much about the play of language leading one to see things in a new way. A successful poem, like Swenson’s, creates space for new thoughts to emerge, expanding our world and our thinking. Students in a classroom setting generally focus on being correct; this impulse is often detrimental to experimentation and creativity. Here is an excellent exercise in playing with language that can encourage students to imagine and take risks as writers, and to see things in a new way.

I introduce “Cardinal Ideograms” by inviting the students to think of it like a game. “Who can figure out the game of this poem? I know you won’t know the meaning of every word but you can figure out what the poet is playing with. Listen and look closely, follow along as I read, and see if you can figure it out.” I read aloud, without clarifying any of the vocabulary so that the students have a raw experience with the text, giving them a chance to discover what is happening within it themselves. It’s a great way to get them to take responsibility for interacting with the poem, and it builds confidence in kids when they discern meaning from a text without having a complete grasp of every word in it.

Cardinal Ideograms

May Swenson

0 A mouth. Can blow or breathe,
be funnel, or Hello.

1 A grass blade or a cut.

2 A question seated. And a proud
bird’s neck.

3 Shallow mitten for two-fingered hand.

4 Three-cornered hut
on one stilt. Sometimes built
so the roof gapes.

5 A policeman. Polite.
Wearing visored cap.

6 O unrolling,
tape of ambiguous length
on which is written the mystery
of everything curly.

7 A step,
detached from its stair.

8 The universe in diagram:
A cosmic hourglass.
(Note enigmatic shape,
absence of any valve of origin,
how end overlaps beginning.)
Unknotted like a shoelace
and whipped back and forth,
can serve as a model of time.

9 Lorgnette for the right eye.
In England or if you are Alice
the stem is on the left.

10 A grass blade or a cut
companioned by a mouth.
Open? Open. Shut? Shut.

After I read the poem aloud while the students follow on their own copies, I ask, “Who thinks they can tell what the poet is doing?” Sometimes that’s enough to make hands shoot up from students eager to explain that the Arabic numerals are being looked at as if they were pictures. Sometimes the students will feel baffled and say they don’t get it, so I’ll offer, “Here’s a clue: let me tell you what the words in the title mean.” I tell them that “cardinal” means “of prime importance”—really, a super important thing—and that the counting numbers are also referred to as cardinal numbers. Ideogram, I say, means a written symbol that represents an idea or object directly, like using a picture instead of a word, similar to how Chinese characters are or how the bounding deer silhouette on a road sign lets you know to watch for deer crossing, or how a simplified picture of a radio with a line through it means no loud music.

I’ll also ask, “What big things stand out in this poem that we don’t usually see in poems?” Students will notice that the numbers appear larger than the text and that usually numbers aren’t in poems. “Why are the numbers there?” I ask, “What do the words next to the number have to do with the number?”

After I define the title and instigate a discussion with the above questions, most students will excitedly exclaim that they get it. I give the class up to five minutes to recognize that Swenson is seeing the numbers as if they were pictures instead of quantities; I let the students converse and try to show each other. It’s an exciting moment when the whole class comes around to seeing numbers in a new way.

If a class has a particularly hard time figuring it out, I ask them to just look at 1. “Why might the poet say a grass blade or a cut right after 1? Can you imagine 1 looking like a blade of grass or a little cut?” You’ll finally hear your students sigh, ohhhhhhhh! Next, I encourage students to explain another line of the poem; I invite them to use the board to illustrate for the class how Swenson’s description works by drawing the number and pointing out the features that Swenson writes about.

To model this type of thinking, I then ask the class to imagine something else one of the numbers could be. Students of mine have said: 8 is a snowman, 9 is a balloon floating away, 10 is a baseball bat and ball. Then, to take it further, I choose one number and challenge the class to see how long a list of visual comparisons we can create for that number. The longer we spend on one number, the more interesting and rewarding the images that emerge. For any number a few obvious things get listed first, but when we push ourselves to be inventive, that’s when it gets exciting. 3 has been a backwards E, a broken pitchfork, a mermaid’s comb, a pair of lost front teeth, a plug without a cord, half an 8, hills knocked over, a boxing fist, a broken ladder, a baby’s curl. Students love getting to experience numbers in a non-mathematical way and they feed off of each other’s ideas and the class gets into a creative frenzy. We have successfully broken through the literal level that students bind themselves to at school!

Once excitement is built up, I announce the writing activity: Choose a letter of the alphabet and write a poem playing May Swenson’s game of looking at the letter in a new way. I ask students to choose a letter because we spend so much time in the Swenson poem modeling with numbers; letters are a fresh start and there are twenty-six of them! I also pose questions such as: Where does your letter live? What does your letter dream? Worry? Fear? Like? Try? What does your letter want? Say? Have? Students have lots of fun being creative and inventive, taking a break from our attachment to prescribed meaning as they play with language, creating a poem that reinvents a familiar symbol. I tell them that direct practice at being inventive with how and what you see expands our minds, taking us beyond the literal. I point out that when we feel like things are getting difficult, that’s often when our most interesting thoughts arise.

Here are some fun poems that came from this exercise done with fifth-graders at PS 33 in the Bronx.

Z is the Copy of Capital N

Kevin R.

Z we think you are the cousin of capital N
You are just a sideways capital
You get written with a pencil and a pen
Z you and capital N are just the same one letter
But I think you can do better
You’re not like other letters
Z and capital N are the same
In a way that makes
All the other letters seem lame
Z thinks about capital N stealing his spotlight
Z dreams of if capital N and him could fight
Z worries capital N will take his place
Z lives in the alphabet in last place
Being written at a slow pace

Phil F.

O stop being thrown like a ball
Stop being like a loose tire
Rolling down a hill
You look like science
Like cells coming together
Like the planets we travel to
Like a cylinder and wider
Like the sun that we get heat from
Do you ever look for your lost brother, ZERO!?
He’s stuck in math
You see him in a word problem
He’s evil in multiplication
He’s easy in adding
You look like a hand lens
You look like a ball of yarn
And you are two Cs facing each other
You’re like a cap for a bottle
You make too much noise
Did you kidnap two U’s too?
What time is it?
You know you’re a clock face tick-tock
Are you negative or positive?

Haddijatou B.

F, you’re so lazy
You’re not even in the word alphabet
gh and ph do all the work for you
While you’re flirting with the letter E
Come on ma, pump those muscles
Get back to work!
You better hurry before the word fun
Is spelled phun or ghun

Jane LeCroy is a poet, performance artist, and educator, a graduate from Eugene Lang College of The New School University. Since 1997 Jane has been publishing student work and teaching writing, literature, and performance to all ages through artist-in-the-schools organizations like Teachers & Writers Collaborative and DreamYard. Jane’s latest book of poetry, Names, was published by Booklyn in 2007 and she fronts the avant-pop band Transmitting, featuring multi-instrumentalist Tom Abbs and beat-boxer Kid Lucky.