Like most people, before I learned to read and write, I taught myself to draw. How easy to pick up a crayon, a magic marker, or a pencil, and make something—anything—on the page (or on the living room wall). As children, we confidently draw what we want to see and what we see, as we see it. Our drawings are not wrong, misspelled or illegible—and if they are illegible, it’s often the kind of illegibility that one reads as poetic, abstract, mysterious, and open to interpretation. Thankfully, we don’t need to speak an artist’s national tongue to read his visual work. Everyone is capable of reading a painting by Rothko or a sculpture by Brancusi, sans translation.

It’s no surprise then that visual images—particularly abstract ones—can lead students to written poetry. When what stands before us is not easily described or defined, we must engage our imaginations and search for our own words to make meaning. In the presence of non-narrative, non-graphic visual images, we are forced to let go of our reliance upon narrative and focus instead on sensitizing ourselves to tone, color, mark, mood, and feeling. Perhaps most importantly, we are left to trust our own readings.

Here is a playful lesson that brings together written and visual poetries:

Genre: Poetry, Art
Grades: 6 – 12
Student needs: general ed, especial ed, visual learners
Common Core Learning Standard: E2: Response to literature
Interpret, analyze, and evaluate narrative, poetry, and drama, aesthetically and philosophically by making connections to: other texts, ideas, cultural perspectives, eras, personal events, and situations.

Workshop Objective: To explore mood and develop connections between visual and written languages.

Do Now: What’s your favorite song? How would you describe its mood?

• Students share. List words on board.
• Distribute three poems: “I’m Nobody—Who Are You?” by Emily Dickinson, “Winter Moon” by Langston Hughes, and “miss rosie” by Lucille Clifton.
• After each reading, ask: “What is the mood of this poem?” “What feeling/s does it bring up?” Add to the list on the board.
• Distribute visual images on a color printout, or display using a projector.
• Activity #1: Pick a visual image that you feel goes with each poem. In your journal write down the name of the poem and the # of the visual image that you picked. Let us know why you paired the poem with that particular image.
• Activity #2: Pick a visual image, but don’t tell anyone which image you picked. Write a poem or a story that evokes the mood of that image. Remember, you’re not trying to EXPLAIN the image—you’re just writing something that relates to the image in terms of mood or tone. Repaint the picture using words.
• Students read their poems out loud and the class tries to guess which image they chose.

Student poems:

The Sunlight

I see the clouds
are the shape of the moon. The clouds are the shape
of Mexico. They fill the air with gases that spread
far and near. They feel
like wind blowing,
and the clouds are shaped like
blue waves.

The moon is around like the sun.

–Anonymous

Except For You

A love cast away
Endless memories of home passing by
The heart beats slow and soft
Fruitless trees and flowerless fields
The blood pumps through the veins
Cast away, alone, except for you

–Anonymous

–Maya Pindyck

Maya Pindyck is a poet and T&W teaching artist. You can read more about Maya here.

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.