Poetry Madness

         Several years ago my husband gave me a compact white G4 Apple iBook. Fear gripped me for two whole years before I opened the electronic beastie. I had some forced experience previously with the formidable desktop monster,  our daughters taunting me to learn how to use a CD-Rom or to load digital photos.  I finally approached the neglected laptop in shame, only to find a world open up. I took classes at the Apple Store, learning how to use the miraculous machine and the word processing program, and I’ve been hooked ever since. My laptop contains my work; it’s the backbone of my classes. It’s such a small contraption that holds so much. 

         Poetry is exactly the same. Folks first contemplate a poem in fear. What does it mean? Why is it so short? Why is it so long? Is it speaking to me?  Why are the words making no sense?  Why can’t it just say what it means?  What’s the point?  But once inside a poem, having slowed down to take in each word, the package offers a gift. With a few tools in the kit, like the recognition of alliteration, figurative language, imagery, and tone, we begin to notice the little piece of writing does indeed have something to convey.  And what a poem conveys is personal. Often a poem touches different readers in different ways. It might be just a mood, like sadness.  It might trigger a memory. It might be humor or wit. It might be an epiphany.

     I was surfing the net on my iBook when I came upon the perfect enticement for subjecting my students to poems. It’s Poetry Madness, named after March Madness in basketball. I altered the game on the net, and I use it all semester-- in fact, every class. I assign two poems for my middle school class to read weekly (and often more to my high school classes). The following class, we read aloud the poems and discuss them. Then I ask the students to vote on their favorite of the two (or the bunch for the high schoolers). Quite quickly, the students begin to own the poems. They have opinions, likes and dislikes, and they are interested in others’ opinions.  We repeat this each week with the weekly poems, and on the second to last class, we have our semester Poetry Madness vote. We revisit, reading aloud, each of the weekly winners, eliminating by vote as we progress through the list, until we come up with our favorite of the entire semester. 

Poetry Madness is infectious. My new students begin fall semester dreading the notion and hassle of reading poems, but by the middle of the semester, about 6 weeks, they begin to actually like poetry.  The more clever a poem, the more interested my students are.  The stranger the format, such as in a sestina or a prose poem, the more fascinated the students. Poems are surprise packages, pocket fortune cookies to unfold and find bits of wisdom or entertainment inside.  Just like a laptop!