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Three Classroom Writing Exercises for National Poetry Month

~ March 19, 2012 ~

 

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)   (more...)