This blog post was written by NCTE member Carol Jago as part of a blog series celebrating the National Day on Writing®. To draw attention to the remarkable variety of writing we engage in and to help make all writers aware of their craft, the National Council of Teachers of English has established October 20 as the National Day on Writing®. Resources, strategies, and inclusion in a blog post does not imply endorsement or promotion by NCTE.
Students often seem to experience the most joy as writers when they are writing poetry. I don’t mean in response to the bald directive to produce a poem out of thin air about the season or a holiday, but rather when they write in conversation with another poet’s work.
One particularly joyful lesson grew out of our reading of Quincy Troupe’s poem “Flying Kites.” I began by asking students to make two lists—one with things they used to do as small children (in school, with friends, in the park) and a second list with the things they do now instead. What I am teasing out here is reflection on the changes they are currently experiencing in their own lives.
When they have jotted down about 10 things on each list, we read and talk about Troupe’s two-stanza poem in which he compares flying kites as a child with flying words as poet today.
Flying Kites
By Quincy Troupewe used to fly rainbow kites
across skull-caps of hours
holes on blue wings
of the canvas of sinking suns
running winged eyes locked to wind
we’d unwind the kite string up & away
then run them down blue tapestry
up the sky again, then down
until a sinking sun rolled
down into a swallowing sky
today, we fly words as kites
across pages of winds, through skies
as poems we shape from holy, bloody
adjectives & nouns
we loop into sound circles, ringing
like eclipse, the sun’s tongue
I then ask students to use ideas from their lists to write a poem of their own modeled after Quincy Troupe’s. There is no need to use all the ideas generated, only the ones that stirred up the most vivid images.
A template can help students get started:
We used to
Today we
A palatable joy bubbles up when students begin to share what they have written with one another. Which is not to say that all the poems they produce are light-hearted or joyful in tone. It is the joy of being seen, of expressing oneself, of thinking about where they have been and where they are now. And the joy that comes from acceptance and applause from one’s peers. The laughter of recognition filled the room as Nancy Carasco read her poem:
We used to go to grandma’s every day,
Listening to her stories,
Eating her tortillas
That filled our stomachs
And our hearts
Today we ignore our once loved abuela
Because she screams at us,
“That hair!
Those tattoos!
Your nose ring!”
During the isolation of the pandemic, Justin Torres wrote the following poem. He put into words what so many of his classmates were feeling:
We used to kill time with dumb conversations
The songs in our head the only escape
We laughed at the threat of viral annihilation
Only fear on our minds was “oh god I’m late”
Sleeping in class
Because we stayed up all night
Wishing for a little bit of change
Now time is killing us
As day and night blends
The songs fill the silence even though we hit pause
Sleep has lost meaning when you’re never awake
In the comfort of our homes but we never felt so lost
We just want this nightmare to end.
The most joyful aspect of this lesson for me as a teacher is that students rarely ask what they got for a grade. They saw their work and knew it was good.
For more poems by Quincy Troupe
Carol Jago taught middle and high school in Santa Monica, California, and is a former President of NCTE. She currently serves as associate director of the California Reading and Literature Project at UCLA.
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