Summer SAVY 2016 (Session 3, Day 2) – Poetry in Practice

Posted by hallep on Tuesday, June 28, 2016 in Grade 3, Grade 4, SAVY.

Great poets turn to the world around them for inspiration, so we turned to our Vanderbilt campus to inspire us in our own poetry. We walked around campus listing and writing descriptions of the campus buildings, trees, wildlife, and people to use in our poems.

Then, we turned to the work of poet Tomas Transtromer to see how we can punch up our imagery to make more memorable and engaging poetry. After creating more abstract and creative ways to describe our surroundings on campus, we used these arresting images to write about our emotional reactions to these surroundings at SAVY.

We then turned to Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for death–” to discuss her use of the ballad form as well as her discussion of the themes of death and mortality. We then used the ballad form of her poem to help us revise our own poems.

We wrapped the class up by reading from famous collections of poetry and analyzing what they all had in common.