Tips for Teaching POETRY at High School

A few tips for teaching poetry!

Choose wisely.

• Does it tell a story?  (Eg: Mother to Son by Langston Hughes, Six Young Men by Ted Hughes, After the Board Meeting by Fleur Adcock, Customs: A Love Story by Mohamed Hassan’s, and many, many poems by Glenn Colquhoun)

• Can students visualize it?

• Does it have punctuation in it?  This often makes poems easier to read (with a more familiar prose-like flow), and therefore easier to understand.

• Start with a short, easily accessible poem, especially if you’re planning to move on to…see the last tip!

A poem is a jigsaw puzzle, so start your unit with them!

Surprise your students by giving them fifteen minutes or so to spend on jigsaw puzzles.  (Usually easily found and inexpensive in second-hand stores).  When time is up (it doesn’t matter if they’ve finished or not), point out how:

• They couldn’t see the picture to begin with.  (Well, obviously, it’s on the box, but they’ll get your point by the end of this activity.)

• They’re looking closely at the smaller pieces to see what their features are, what they do, and how they fit in with other pieces of the puzzle.

• They’re putting all the pieces together to be able to see the big picture.

Now your students are primed for your big reveal!  Here’s where you tell them, that’s exactly what we do when we read poetry!  (I suggest writing those three bullet points on your whiteboard to help with the analogy.)

Oh!  And the BONUS?!  There’s often a piece of a jigsaw puzzle missing so we might not see the perfectly complete picture.  Well, we can’t always work out every line in a poem, but we can see enough of the picture to enjoy it.  Boom!

Just getting the ‘gist’ at first is okay!

Students often hate poetry because they don’t get it right away, but it’s enough to get the gist in the first few readings!  It’s important they understand that.  Later, when they’ve looked at all the puzzle pieces (see above), they’ll see the whole picture!

Start early with quick responses

For several lessons prior to your poetry unit, begin the lesson with a quick starter (aka bell-ringer) where you write on the whiteboard one line from a poem you’ll study in the next unit (don’t tell them this).  Ask them to write a two-minute response to it.  This gets students used to focusing on the ‘small stuff’ as well as helping them become familiar with an upcoming poem.  (Do choose the lines carefully.)

Highlight the punctuation

Get students to highlight the punctuation in the poem.  This includes everything that signposts a pause or stop – ie: full stops, commas, colons, semicolons and em-dashes (and obviously question and exclamation marks, though you’re less likely to come across these).

When you read the poem, pay attention to the punctuation, not the end of the line.

Stopping at the end of every line – knock that on the head!

Students usually pause or stop at the end of each line of poetry, often making it more difficult to understand.  See the previous tip – encourage them to look for punctuation too (assuming there is some).  You can see in the example on the right that, ultimately, we should pause at the end of the second line, but you can add that to your conversation later.

Another helpful tip is to put an excerpt of prose on your screen and pause or stop at the end of each line.  We don’t read prose like that because it will lose its meaning.  Have students imagine a poem as a piece of prose with the margins squashed in.  Of course this is not true, but it helps them rethink stopping at the end of a line!

Check your students know what punctuation means

Seasoned teachers may not be surprised to discover that even seniors seem unaware that a comma means a pause while a full stop means a full STOP and a breath!  Cry!  Many of us know this when we see students (yes, including the seniors) reading their work aloud and stopping to take a breath for commas!  Grrr.  Might pay to mention this stuff!

Take out the extras

If your poem has em-dashes or brackets in it, ask students to ignore the extra information between these.  Students can then more easily focus on the key information.  Eg:

Scales are sticky missiles,

Dad’s knife forcing take-off as he

Runs it – the sound like a shaver

over thick whiskers – along a stiffened snapper.

Rewrite the poem as prose

Have students write the poem out as prose.  They can make this as dry or creative as they like – this activity is simply aimed at getting them to understand the story the poem tells.  (But getting some writing mileage in isn’t a bad thing, either!)

Annotation is EVERYTHING

Students MUST have a hard copy of the poem.  They must annotate it.  Show them what this looks like.  Model it yourself on the board or as you move around small groups.

Nail those poetic features

Students must know their poetic features like the backs of their hands to free up pace in their minds for thinking about the content.  To help them with this:

A. Always give lists of language techniques in categories.  I give out separate lists for:

• Figurative language – ie: metaphor, simile, hyperbole, personification.  For seniors or more able juniors, I’ll add apostrophe (speaking to an inanimate object or to someone who isn’t there) and synesthesia (Using one sense to describe the experience of another – eg: the fragrant (smell) sound of laughter (sound).

• Sound devices – eg: alliteration, sibilance, assonance, consonance, rhyme, onomatopoeia, repetition, elision.

• Structural devices – eg:  rhyme scheme, rhythm (yes, these can also be considered structural), caesura, enjambment, end-stopped lines, extended metaphors.

B. Give students clever ways to remember this vocabulary.  Eg:

• Simile has an ‘l’ in it for ‘like or as’…so metaphor is the other one! (Students always get these two confused.)

• Personification has ‘person’ in it. 

• Assonance is an ass of a rhyme! 

• Hyperbole is ‘hyper’ – too much….

C. Have students rote learn this vocabulary.  Yes, good old-fashioned rote-learning!

Get students discussing the example, not the technique.

Have students discuss the example, not the technique.  While they should name the technique, of course, students must focus on the example.  Often, as soon as students name the technique, they gravitate toward giving a definition of it, forgetting about the example they should be analyzing.  Eg:  “He was a lion in battle” compares the soldier to a lion.  Yikes.

Ensure students imagine figurative language

Ask students to imagine this metaphor:  He was a giraffe on the basketball court”.  Next, do a bit of a ‘chalk and talk’ on the whiteboard to discuss what they see when they imagine that.  Now, we’re talking about effect.  After that, students can tack on why the poet has made us imagine the boy like this (so, there’s your purpose).

Note:  the same thing applies to sound devices.  Students must hear the sound to describe the effect.

Look out for contrast

Students find it easy to find opposites but won’t do this unless prompted.  Look for:

• Contrasting vocabulary and contrasting figurative comparisons.

• Look also for the swift U-turn – the big ‘but’ where the poet might, for example, spend two stanzas discussing the beauty of something, then the last two stanza describing its evil.  Another example would be contrasting seasons (think of the colours – apricots v. blues and greys, shiny green leaves v. dead boughs of skeletal trees etc).

Read behind the lines

Imagine the poet sitting at their desk.  How are they feeling?  Do they have tissues beside them?  Are they bashing the keys in anger, or working with a big smile on their face?  Why?  What’s going on in their world (personal and wider context) that they’re feeling passionate about?  Study the context of the poet and their work. 

Think critically

As with any text, push students to link the poem with their personal lives, the world (events and people of the past, present and possible future), human nature, other texts.

Let students choose

Spread copies of YOUR favourite poems around the classroom.  Ten or fifteen should be plenty.  Ask student to each choose two poems.  Once you’ve shown them how to analyse a poem – annotate, analyse language and structural features, think critically etc, let them loose on their own poems.

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