Teachers & Writers Collaborative
Having never taught children as young as eight years old, I was nervous about defining and distinguishing poetry from prose for my five sections of third-grade students. The bulk of my experience had been at Friends Seminary School in lower Manhattan, where I taught grades 7-12. I felt uneasy about overshooting and losing third-graders but I wasn’t too keen on using Shel Silverstein—even though he’s fun.
With the first section of my Teachers & Writers Collaborative residency at PS 2 in Corona, Queens, I took a chance and gave my third-grade students the same introduction to poetry I’d been giving to my seventh-grade English classes at Friends. I figured I could gauge where and when I lost the students and then work from there. As it turned out, I didn’t lose them and, from my estimation, nearly all of them came away with the idea I had hoped would stick; that blank space is a distinguishing element in poetry, and that a writer can manipulate space to create poetry.
Once, while at the University of Paris, I attended a lecture on the poet Mallarmé. The professor stressed the importance of “les blancs” or the white spaces on the page and their relationship to theme. While simple, “space” was an arresting concept for me at the time. Years later, I realized that talking about space made it easier for me to teach the difference between poetry and prose.
When I ask students to define poetry, they usually come up with answers like: “It rhymes,” “It’s about love,” “It’s beautiful,” etc. After making a list on the board and acknowledging these as possibilities, I play devil’s advocate: “Can a short story, a novel, or a newspaper article contain rhymes or be beautiful or be about love?” The answer is generally a somewhat baffled “Yes.” Then I hold up a single poem on a page and ask them to take a good look. I do the same with a page from a novel arid ask them if they see a difference between the two, even though they can’t read the text at a distance. Someone’s answer usually leads us toward “space”: a student may point out that one page looks more “crowded” or something to that effect. If they’re stumped, I tell them to consider margins and shape, or I’ll simply ask “Which is surrounded by more blank space?”
This opens up a discussion about the visual effect of space framing and surrounding words, and how seeing this space might affect our experience of the language we see on the page. Like Bemelmans’ Madeleine who saw a rabbit in the cracking ceiling above her hospital bed, third-graders are much inclined to squint their eyes and see all kinds of wonderful shapes in differently-lineated poems. Showing a variety of differently-shaped poems generates a lot of ooh’s and aah’s as students take notice of the various shapes of negative space. I might even use this class as an opportunity to talk about calligrammes (Apollinaire) and haiku.
Once they’re comfortable with the idea that poetry uses space differently, they’re ready to learn the word prose, which we define as all writing that’s not poetry. I find students enjoy having various texts (novels, newspapers, pamphlets around the classroom) held up so they can identify them by shouting out “Prose!” or “Poetry!” Then I make line drawings on the board that correspond to poem and prose shapes and they shout some more.
So far, students have responded well to this introduction. When I asked during my second week, “What the difference between poetry and prose?” I was pleased to hear “white space,” “shape,” and the like. Later on, I found “space” helpful when certain students had trouble shifting gears from writing paragraphs to writing lineated poems. When this happens, a simple “That’s wonderful. Now rewrite your poem using the white space” allows students to edit and rethink their paragraph into a poem. Some students simply decide where to break lines and regroup lines into stanzas. Others send their poems spinning into spiral shapes, calligrammes, or dinosaurs. For many, this process is akin to drawing. One student, lirica Cordillo, studied the space in her poem and entitled it “My Shape of Stairs.”
Here’s an example of a paragraph before a student rewrote it using his newfound idea of “space” as a defining element in poetry:
“I like poetry. It feels like a puppy’s fur. Poetry barks, jumps runs and smells like flowers and is soft. It looks black and white to me. Poetry makes me feel free like a bird. It makes me want to fly in the air.”
Here is the same text re-fashinoned into a poem:
THE POETRY PUPPY
I like poetry
it feels
like a
puppy’s fur
poetry
barks
jumps
runs and
smells like flowers
and is soft it looks black and white to
me poetry makes me feel free like
a bird it makes me want to fly in the air
—Israel Hidalgo
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