Student-Led Poetry Workshops

Abstract

whose driving rhythm provides pleasure and places the reader right inside that car as it speeds along. The lines the students later wrote, in which they played with words in their own writing, were quite acceptable. Still, the student's question, which merely smiled at that day, remained with me through the spring and summer. More questions swirled in my teaching brain: Do students even think about the as they write lines of poetry? Are there other elements of poetry that they think of when they compose their own poems? What would students teach about poetry if given the chance? Many students write poems on their own all the time. They say that what they like about writing poetry is that there are no rules or guidelines to follow. In other words, they like to play with words. Their frame of reference for writing poetry is to the poems they write at home, not the poems they write in school, which are seen as assigned. How often do students ask us if they can use poems they have already written for our assignments? how often does our teacher-editor voice rise up and say, Why don't you write a new one for this assignment? Students make a distinction between writing poetry at home and writing it at school. Away from school, students feel safe to write as much poetry as they want to without a teacher's red pen, or editing voice, all over it. At school, they know that eventually their poems will receive a grade, a notion that quite a few students find repugnant. They realize that teachers sometimes take a lower view of their poetic experiments written outside of class than of those pieces that are produced under their informed tutelage. Here, our attitude is like the attitudes of the editors of The Oxford English Dictionary, who view wordplay as a mere playing or trifling with words ... mainly for the purpose of producing a rhetorical or fantastic effect (Cook 173). In order to honor our students' own impulse to play with language, we must turn to poets who extol the value of wordplay. Robert Frost urged, And then to play. The play's the Play's the thing. He added, Poetry transcends itself in the of the toast (Barry 124). Lewis Carroll, one of the great wordplayers of all time, wrote riddles, limericks, acrostics, puzzles, doublets, and the well-liked nonsense poem, Jabberwocky. Elizabeth Bishop, in Brazil, January 1, 1502, has taken wordplay to a level of etymological punning (Cook 186). Coleman Barks, who gave Bill Moyers the idea for the latter's title, Fooling with Words, says about form in poetry, I love a deep playfulness (Moyers