After a snowy few February days, Hale’s 6-8th grade poets reunited for another week of after school writing. This week, we continued our visual poem theme, exploring ways to creatively play with spacing in poetry. A blank page provides a world of possibility, and students rose to the task of trying something new in each of their poems this week. First, we read Anti-Elegy by K. Iver and marveled at the use of white space in the middle of the poem. The white space looked like a river and students noticed that the poem also included a lot of river imagery. We chatted about how the white river space added a new level of meaning to the poem, and dared to try our hands at poems that played with white space on a page. Ocean shared this poem, check it out:
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by Ocean G.
On Wednesday, we practiced the art of editing our poems together. Students are excitedly preparing poems to submit for a competition so we spent some time workshopping our poems. Students shared helpful feedback and affirmations to their peers, then finally on Thursday shared their new or revised poems with the group. We were even lucky enough to have a performance of “You’ve Got A Friend In Me” by a student’s younger brother! Here’s a poem edited by Miley.
Miley L.
Friends Forever?
You said you would stay
You said you cared but
why did you leave at my hardest?
I grew up with you. I told you
all of my secrets. But before I
knew it, you were gone. Its
like you faded away.
But why? How? Where did you go?
You promised we would be friends forever.
