Reading A Poem: 20 Strategies (Short Assignment Series)

Students perform Strategy 13: “Perform marginalia. Reading without writing in the margins is like walking without moving your arms. You can do it and still reach your destination, but it’ll always feel like you’re missing something essential about the activity.”

Students read the article out loud. Can be done in pairs, small groups, or with the whole class.

As they read, students underline keywords and unfamiliar vocabulary words; ask questions; mark repetitions; pattern/variation; historical references; names, etc.

Students perform Strategy 6: “If you don’t know a word, look it up or die.”

Students find definitions and synonyms, individually or in groups.

Students perform Strategy 1: “Dispel the notion that reading poetry is going to dramatically change your life. Your life is continually changing; most of the time you’re simply too busy to pay enough attention to it. Poems ask you to pay attention—that’s all.”

The instructor reads a poem out loud. Students are asked to write down all the images and words they can remember. Students can also be asked to illustrate their memory of the poem.

Then, the instructor reads the poem again. Students are again asked to write/draw what stands out. Students free write and discuss what they paid attention to, and why they focused on certain words or images.

Finally, the instructor reads a different poem, and students, hopefully ready to pay attention in a new way, are asked to write/draw what they remember. Hopefully, they will have remembered more, seen more, paid closer attention.

Students perform Strategy 9: “As hard as it sounds, separate the poet from the speaker of the poem. A poet always wears a mask (persona) even if she isn’t trying to wear a mask, and so to equate poet and speaker denies the poem any imaginative force that lies outside of her lived life.”

First, students watch a series of video interviews with Jacqueline Woodson. They freewrite about her persona, presentation, appearance, voice, style, humor, etc.

Second, students read a selection of 3-5 poems, out loud or to themselves.

Third, students freewrite about how they see Jacqueline Woodson in the poems. Do the videos affect their imagination? Do they project the author onto the poems? Did the author match their previously imagined image of the speaker?

Finally, students write about the importance and difficulty of separating the speaker from the persona. What are the benefits and detriments of this separation? What are the benefits and detriments of fusing them?

Students perform Strategy 2: “When you read a poem, especially a poem not meant to be a “spoken word” poem, always read it out loud. (Never mind what they said in grammar school—to subvocalize so that you won’t bother your peers.) Your ear will pick up more than your head will allow. That is, the ear will tell the mind what to think.”

Students choose (or are assigned) 1-3 poems to read out loud to the class. They must rehearse their reading and provide a short presentation of their annotations.

Fellow classmates freewrite about the similarities, differences, and enhancements of hearing a poem read aloud, compared to reading it to themselves.

Students perform Strategy 3: “Try to meet a poem on its terms not yours. If you have to “relate” to a poem in order to understand it, you aren’t reading it sufficiently. In other words, don’t try to fit the poem into your life. Try to see what world the poem creates. Then, if you are lucky, its world will help you re-see your own.”

Students read (out loud, with partners, to the whole class, etc.) a poem from Brown Girl dreaming, and free write about everything they DO NOT relate to in the poem. Have them list all the differences they encounter: location, time, race, class, age, family, emotion, memory, likes/dislikes, vocabulary, etc.

Next, students share and discuss their differences with their poems.

Finally, students free write about what all their differences and dissimilarities can teach them. How do all these differences show them something new about themselves? How does not relating to a poem teach them something about their life and time?