Following a webinar entitled “Creative Writing in the Language Classroom” on 9th and 15th March, Jane Spiro, author of Creative Poetry Writing (2004) and Storybuilding (2007), presents 8 Collected Poems generated by the participants of the webinar over both dates.
During our two webinars we experimented with language and language play, and ‘wrote’ together 8 poems, which I am delighted to share with you in this blog.
The poems here have all been generated by you the participants, coming from 52 different countries and writing your lines and ideas online during the sessions. I have merely organised them, pared down words here and there where less might express more, cut out repetition where several of you said the same thing, sometimes grouped ideas together that seemed to fit semantically, creating verse forms of 2 or 3 or 4 lines. So, although I have acted here as editor, every word in these poems comes from you, the participants.
Download the full PDF of Collected Poems generated from the webinar.
We started by sharing and comparing ways in which we write ourselves, and use creative writing with our learners. I have collated some of these comments into the first poem Writing Creatively.
We then experimented with the different components of language, starting with the phoneme, the smallest unit of language. Here we tried to ‘describe’ to one another in writing, the sounds participants were hearing all around the world in their rooms and classrooms. This led to the second poem Our sounds with spring and summer sounds from Brazil, Italy, Portugal, India.
We then looked at the next biggest component of language, the morpheme, with our example being the prefix ‘man’. This idea comes from a poem by Andy Brown which we used as a starting point. Which words can be constructed with the prefix ‘man’? Participants wrote their ‘man’ words and built this into the sentence ‘It’s a man—– world’, as in the poem by Andy Brown. Our results are in the poem Mankind World – just as good as the published one, which became part of the UK school exam syllabus!
Next we looked at negative and positive connotations in words: how do we interpret words and where do our associations come from – our experience of life, stories, cultural influences? We compared responses to the words ‘red’ and ‘rose’, and all these associations formed the poem Rose Red.
Our next activity looked at the way words collate – or do not naturally collate – with one another. So, for example, if we compare someone human to something inanimate, we have immediately generated a metaphor – ‘finding similarities in dissimilarities’ as Coleridge said in his treatise on poetry. We listed people in our lives: then objects in the natural world, and joined the two with the verb form ‘is like’. Participants very rapidly joined in with this idea, creating metaphors about mothers, boyfriends and girlfriends, wives and husbands, sons and daughters. The results are in the poem My mother is like a flower.
Another way to create a metaphor is to compare something abstract – for example, ‘learning a language’, with something concrete such as seashells, a white room, or a mountain. Participants were asked to choose which metaphor they related to most from a choice of three, and to explain their choice. The results are in the poem Learning a language is like…
Next we moved onto sentence patterns. The first pattern ‘I remember’ was used to trigger memories of schooldays, and in particular first days at school. This very simple sentence opening could be completed by just a single noun or noun phrase, or a whole clause – but all convey past memories and even a sense of nostalgia. The results are in the poem I remember schooldays.
Finally we looked at complex sentence patterns, and the structure ‘If I were ____, I would’. When we introduce ‘language play’ and allow ourselves to ‘be’ inanimate as well as animate, abstract as well as concrete, this sentence structure yields all kinds of interesting metaphors. You can read these in the poem If I were, I would.
These ideas and examples are offered to you, the reader, so you can try them out for yourselves, in the classroom and outside, and compare and add your own results to those we have here as our poems become more and more international. Happy writing!
