Poetry To Enliven Prose

Posted by Kimberly | 0 comments

Holding up a red box adorned with a red satin bow I remind my writing workshop students, “Great writing is a gift.”

I’ve discovered that the Japanese form of poetry, haiku, is a perfect way to teach students that practicing poetry will improve their prose.

Any sentence can be transformed to a haiku:

Three lines, word picture in seventeen syllables, haiku are small poems. 17

Three-lines, word picture 5
in seventeen syllables, 7
haiku are small poems. 5
17

We begin our brainstorming:

“What do we see on the outside?”

red box
enormous satin bow
sunshine gleaming

“What do we imagine?”

something small inside
something special

I open the box to reveal a single folded piece of notebook paper. The students’ eyes are wide. I unfold the paper and show them the gift is a poem.

“What do we see on the inside?”

letters scratched on paper
not perfect cursive

After reading the poem to the group I ask, “What did you hear?”

kindness

Now begins the task of teaching my students to write a poem. But this time we begin in a different way, “Now let’s write a sentence.” When they look confused. “Yes, a sentence,” I explain that real writers use poetry in their sentences.

We begin the exercise by crafting what I call “speedy statements”:

Outside the red box is tied with a red bow.
Sun shines on the smooth surface of the box.
I imagine something small inside the box.
Inside the box is a piece of folded notebook paper.
A poem is written on the paper.

Now we combine the statements to form longer, more complex sentences:

Sun shines on the red box tied with a red satin bow.

Something small might be inside, folded notebook paper with a poem scribbled on the lines.

Then we combine the two sentences to write one sentence that captures the essence of the image we are trying to capture. It is important to remind the students at this point that writers don’t always tell all the details, but rather show just enough imagery to spark the reader’s imagination:

Sunshine on a red box tied with a red satin bow, something small might be inside, a poem scribbled on lined-paper.

We talk about word choice, “Are their words that we want to make more interesting?”

Sunshine on a red box tied with a red satin bow, something small might be inside, a poem scribbled on lined-paper.

I encourage the students to play:

Sun shines on a red box adorned with a red satin bow, something small whispers from inside, a poem kindly scratched on lined paper.

Next we talk about syntax, “Can we re-order the words in our sentence to make it more interesting?”

Something small whispers from inside a red box adorned with a red satin bow drenched in sunshine, perhaps a poem kindly scratched on lined paper.

“Now let’s transform our sentence to a haiku.” We begin by counting all the syllables in the sentence and discover that it has 35 syllables, “We need to pare our sentence down close to 17 syllables.”

Something small whispers from inside a red box adorned with a red satin bow drenched in sunshine, perhaps a poem kindly scratched on lined paper.

After one round of revision we were down to 24 syllables.

Drenched in sunshine a poem kindly whispers from inside a red box adorned with a red satin bow.

When the sentence is pared down to 18 syllables I show them how we simply break the lines at the appropriate syllables for the three lines of a haiku:

A poem whispers from / inside a sun drenched red box / wrapped in a satin bow.

A poem whispers from 5
inside a sun drenched red box 7
wrapped in a satin bow 6

To begin our haiku revision, I have the students look at the last word on line one of the haiku, “Is there a more interesting one-syllable word that can replace “from”?

A poem whispers from 5
Inside a sun drenched red box 7
Wrapped in a satin bow 6

They come up with:

A poem whispers ideas 5
Inside a sun drenched red box 7
Wrapped in a satin bow 6

“Now, what about line three, do we need to reduce the syllables?” I am pleased that the group agrees that the last line is fine as is because syllabication is a flexible rule.

Use haiku, word pictures, just seventeen syllables to enliven writing. 19

Use haiku, word pictures 6
just seventeen syllables, 7
to enliven writing. 6

Kimberly has been a homeschool mom for 16 years and is an advocate for reform in education. Her book, Habits of Being: Artifacts from the Classroom Guild, is a collection of snapshots from this experience woven to a philosophy of education. She is a founding partner of Blackbird & Company Educational Press, which develops and publishes innovative literature, writing, and poetry curriculum, plus collectivebanter.com, an online opportunity for young writers, visual artists, and musicians to compete and publish their work. She is also a regular contributor to fourandtwenty.typepad.com. Her writing and visual art students have received numerous awards including regional and national recognition by the Scholastic Alliance for Young Artists & Writers and have been published in online and in-print journals. Long ago the California resident, mother of four, received her Bachelor of Arts degree in biological psychology and fine art, graduate training in clinical art therapy, and more recently earned her MFA in creative writing from Antioch University in Los Angeles.