When I was teaching high school English, I spent the month of April on poetry. Yes, the state was going berserk doing tests, TESTS, T E S T S but in between all that nonsense, it was the perfect time for poetry. (And it’s National Poetry Month, after all). If you have made a space for poetry in your classroom, meaning that your students know it is okay to experiment with words, to break rules, to have fun with the language, then give them a break with something like this:
For Object Transformation students are given a paper with a photograph of an object on it. They are to transform that object into something that has nothing to do with what it actually is. Then, they write something from the new object’s point of view. I say “something” because I don’t want to say they have to write a poem, but usually what comes out is, in fact, a poem.
For example, “Super Knob,” is a superhero that was once a door knob. He wrote this poem:
I remember getting
my first gold polish.
boy I was clean that day.
I remember saving
all those wood doors
from the evil termites.
I remember
flying around New York
looking for the evil
Rusty Key.
–Mikal
I cut and paste pictures I found on the Internet, centered them on a page, and used those for this assignment. For your convenience, the two documents below have ones you can use.
Have fun!
–Shaun Perkins
Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry 