Teaching Living Poetry in Classrooms
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On a spring afternoon last year, students in Melissa Alter Smith’s class bustled around the room, filling 16 ounce plastic bottles with hot water, food dye, glitter and glue. “You can mix colors if you want. Just use one whatever you think represents the theme of your poem,” Smith instructed as students moved between stations. This was English, not art class, and the goal was not just to make a pretty, calming bottle. Each student had selected a contemporary poem to analyze, a piece of living poetry, and they chose food coloring and glitter that would represent the tone of the poem. When finished with their bottles, they wrote a paragraph on an index card, explaining their choices.
One student, Christina, chose a poem called, “Like When Passing Graveyards” by R.A. Villanueva. In it, the poet recalls holding his breath when riding past cemeteries as a child. “The sparkles are for nostalgia and your childhood and looking back when you have like, you’re growing up with your siblings,” Christina said as she held up her bottle. “But then also the dark color is the whole point of the poem is it’s about a childhood fear. So I wanted to do something that shows the darkness of a graveyard and the fear behind it.”
The “tone bottles” exercise, which was created by teacher Valerie A. Person, is one of dozens on Smith’s Teach Living Poets website. Smith created the website as a place for teachers to share lesson plans as her hashtag, #teachlivingpoets, took off on social media in the late 2010s. The idea behind both the website and the hashtag is to encourage teachers to diversify the literary canon and expose students to the vibrant world of contemporary poetry.
Smith began using the #teachlivingpoets hashtag about eight years ago, after seeing how actively her students tuned in when she invited real poets to class to give readings and talk about their craft. After a few students asked to borrow her poetry books over spring break, she tweeted about it, and tagged the poets. One of them, Kaveh Akbar, replied: “Thank you for teaching living poetry.”
“I was like, that has a real ring to it, doesn’t it? And so that’s how the hashtag was born,” Smith said. “So every time I would share then, anything I was doing in my classroom regarding living poets, I included that hashtag with it, and teachers were liking it. They were sharing it, they were replying to it, they were eating it up.”
As the idea and hashtag grew, so, too, did the need for lesson plans to teach the work of living poets. “You can easily find a curriculum guide for Robert Frost’s work or for Shakespeare’s sonnets, right? But if you’re going to teach a poem that was just published a month ago, there’s no SparkNotes for that,” Smith said. Filling that gap meant getting creative, even weird, Smith said, whether that means asking students to “walk a poem” to feel the rhythm and patterns, having them design shoes based on a poem, or facilitating a March-Madness-style poetry smackdown.
For Christina, making the tone bottle reminded her of kindergarten – in a good way. “It makes it honestly a little bit more fun,” she said. “When you notice the colors and you’re able to point out more techniques and, like, the smaller details of a poem, especially when we’re looking for certain lines and certain words, rather than just ‘Oh, what’s the theme? What’s the tone?’ You’re looking for more specifics.” According to Smith and former students, teaching and studying living poets not only makes poetry more fun; it also makes it more accessible and relevant to current generations and empowers them to find themselves as readers and writers.
This is a portion of an article originally appearing here.