Tuesday, November 28, 2017

Found Poetry Assignment

For the found poetry assignments, we'll be taking several different approaches. Found poetry is, essentially, a collection of bits and pieces of other things put together for a poem.

The first found poem is due Monday, December 4. For our first found poem, you'll take samples from anything you've written for school. You can choose from multiple sources. Here's an example of a found poem put together from various lines of different blog posts I did for a class about teaching To Kill a Mockingbird:

Heart’s Race


Student discomfort, student defensiveness,
and my own worries about language and perspective-
I think of how it's a white man's story about race.


We've reintroduced "separate but equal."


I’ve enjoyed my students of color so much.
Somehow a barrier sprang up
that by adulthood, we would be separated from that option of mixing.


The bigotry was all supposed to be on the down low,
nuanced,
not spelled out in big capital letters
by a man, with the mouth of a megaphone
in order to keep and wield power.

For our second found poem, we'll be stealing lines from other students for a mash-up.

Wednesday, November 22, 2017