Adapted from Whispering in the Wind by Linda Rief.
In the author’s notes at the end of Pachinko, Min Jin Lee (2017) describes how reading poetry and recognizing the verse in prose became a pivotal part of her writing process. She began to see the “music in sentences and paragraphs,” and she wondered how the author took her into new worlds and made her feel things so strongly. She also “read every fine novel and short story I could find, and I studied the ones that were truly exceptional. If I saw a beautifully wrought paragraph, say from Julia Glass’s Three Junes, I would transcribe it in a marble notebook. Then, I would sit and read her elegant sentences, seemingly pinned to my flimsy notebook like a rare butterfly on cheap muslin. Craft strengthened the feelings and thoughts of the writer.” (Lee 2017, 508)
It is this crafting of phrases and sentences that I want my students to notice in any of their reading. I began to think that it might be in the reading of poetry that they might first notice that tight, purposeful writing that would lead them to see the poetry in all kinds of prose. When I did book talks of recommended books, I used passages such as the following to not only give the students a sense of the style of the writing but also to notice the poetry in the prose.
Read the following passage from Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens (2018) and marvel at the poetry of this excerpt:
| A great blue heron is the color of gray mist reflecting in blue water. And like mist, she can fade into the backdrop, all of her disappearing except the concentric circles of her lock-and-load eyes. She is a patient, solitary hunter, standing alone as long as it takes to snatch her prey. Or, eyeing her catch, she will stride forward one slow step at a time, like a predacious bridesmaid. And yet, on rare occasions she hunts on the wing, darting and diving sharply, swordlike beak in the lead. (88) |
As I read this novel and copied so much of the metaphorical language into my notebook, I realized her extended metaphors offered the reader deeper connections into all we learned about the main character, Kya. She is the great blue heron.
Or consider this passage from The Astonishing Color of After by Emily X. R. Pan (2018):
When he finally got the words out, his voice crawled through an ocean to get to me. It was a cold cerulean sound, far away and garbled. . . Where I was that day: on the old tweed couch in Axel’s basement, brushing against his shoulder, trying to ignore the orange wall of electricity between us. If I pressed my mouth to his, what would happen? Would it shock me like a dog collar? (2) |
Falling in love but not wanting to believe it. What’s it like? An “orange wall of electricity,” shocking, “like a dog collar.” The metaphors heighten the intensity, and we shake our heads, yes, that’s what it was like.
Or this passage from Jason Reynolds’ (2016) Ghost:
I squatted down, pushed my feet back against the blocks, stretched out my thumbs and index fingers and placed them on the edge of the white starting line. Rested my weight on my arms. Closed my eyes. Thought of us running to the door. Running for our lives. “Get set!” said the starter. Butts in the air. The sound of the gun cocking. The sound of the door unlocking. Heart pounding. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Silence. This. Is. It. And then . . . BOOM! (180) |
These books are novels. But this is poetry. Poetry. The just-right words, their intentional placement, the feeling that comes over me as the pace, the rhythms roll off my tongue—the slow silence of the “patient, solitary hunter, standing alone as long as it takes” or hearing “his voice—a cold, cerulean sound—crawl through an ocean to get to me” or the feeling of my heart pounding, beating louder, faster, like the “gun cocking, the door unlocking, breathe, breathe, breathe.” Poetry. This is poetry. The chosen words and their arrangements force me to slow down, to “pay attention, be astonished,” says Mary Oliver (2008), as she invites us to really see the world.
Read the lead to Michael Christie’s (2015) article “All Parents Are Cowards” and marvel at the poetry of his writing.
Read Naomi Shihab Nye’s (2008) “Gate A-4” and ask yourself and your students: Anecdote? Personal narrative? Editorial? All of these, and yet, poetry. Poetry.
Owens, Pan, Reynolds, Christie, and Nye make us feel something. They put us in the experience with them. We look up from the page of writing we have just read—and most likely have reread—and think, That is poetry. I want to write like that. I want my students to write like that.
Immersed in the reading of all genres, especially poetry, our students may begin to see and understand that the best writing, the strongest writing, is poetry. My greatest hope is that they begin to recognize the strength of poetic language in the crafting of their own writing. Reading as writers. Seamless transitions from reading to writing.
Yes, finding ways to get students to read more poetry, to recognize the poetry in any writing, and to believe they, too, could write like this, is definitely worth doing.
Whipsering in the Wind
In this book, master educator Linda Rief provides a cure for poetry agony. She introduces “Heart Books,” a project inspired by the Heart Maps of Georgia Heard. Linda has used Heart Books throughout her career to help students read more poetry, connect with it, and see how they, too, could write poetically. She also shows how to easily weave poetry into your already busy schedule.
