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Showing posts with label verbs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label verbs. Show all posts

Go Poem #15 -- "All Nouns and Verbs"

by Brett Vogelsinger

One of my favorite (and perhaps the truest) quotes about poetry is from Marianne Moore and serves as the title of today's post.  "Poetry is all nouns and verbs."  Pick your favorite poem and look at it closely.  Your favorite words, the pieces that really make it tick, will be the nouns and verbs.

Many students know the poem "dog" by Valerie Worth when they come to me because it was memorably used in the short novel Love That Dog by Sharon Creech. My students have frequently read this book in late elementary school.  Now we examine it in a different way. 

After the first read, I ask them to count how many verbs they can find.  Following this initial census, I have the kids start calling them out while I circle the verbs on the screen.  Instead of giving the poem our customary second reading, this time I only read the title and the verbs.

Does the poem still work? Can you still get a similar picture, even if we use just the title and a list of verbs?  Why is this?  What makes action verbs so powerful for vivid writing?  Sometimes students associate adjectives with helping the reader see something in their writing.  Why can verbs be just as effective, if not more so, in helping readers visualize a scene? 

What I love about this activity (beside the brevity and straightforwardness) is that it blends in a review of parts of speech and provides a skill that can be extended to any genre, for essays and short stories are just as improvable as a poem is when the writer gives full attention to the verbs during revision.

While this activity focuses on verbs, consider using Jeff Anderson's idea, published previously on this blog, to focus on the power of nouns.  

Brett Vogelsinger teaches freshman English students at Holicong Middle School in Doylestown, PA where he starts class with a poem each day. Follow his work on Twitter @theVogelman.


Go Poem #4 -- Flash Images: Creating Movement Without Verbs

by Jeff Anderson

After reading aloud the poem "Flame" by C. D. Wright twice, students look at it’s structure with the poem displayed on the screen or on paper. “What do you see when you look at the words?”


Possible Responses:
  • Lots of "the's"
  • No verbs
  • Feels like it’s moving with the white space
  • It’s a list of things, random, but not

If any of these things are not mentioned, ask about them.

“Are there any verbs—actions? I see this poem as flashes. Anyone else? Just flashes of nouns and we make our own poem as readers."


A great reading theorist, Louise Rosenblatt, wrote it takes two things—the reader and the text -- to make the third thing—the poem, the beauty, the meaning, the image, the connection, the picture, the life. The reader, the text, and the poem.


“What poem is this text making with you?”


“Let’s reread.”


After the third reading, students can jot down what’s being created in them. “What’s the poem resulting from you and this text?” Or, if inspired, students my try their own imitation.


If you try an imitation, use the or try another article like a or an. Experiment with the meaninglessness of the article, which also gives rise to something. Here’s my imitation in response to C.D. Wright’s “Flame.” I jotted it in three minutes, all at once, revising as I went, trying to keep it nouny. This was the poem inspired in me.


The Forgetting


The darkness The voices The scent
The hand The hush The tingle
The stillness The movement The light
The door The opening The closing.
The dark The forgetting The


Invite students to share poems aloud. At the end, students lift their creations into the air to C.D. Wright so that wherever she is now, she knows her words live and breathe and inspire. Her words are a flame.


Discuss: “How can we move what we learned from C.D. Wright’s poem to any writing we do?”


Jeff Anderson is a celebrated author of the middle grade fiction with the Zack Delacruz series as well as his numerous books on teaching writing and grammar, including 10 Things Every Writer Needs to Know and Mechanically Inclined. Follow him on Twitter: @writeguyjeff


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