Bringing the ear, the eye, the heart and the mind to poetry creation
Paula Green at Oromahoe School Library
In the first week of term 3, Northland welcomed poet Paula Green. She visited and worked with some schools in Whangarei and the mid North and treated us to two fabulous SLANZA workshops at Manaia View and Oromahoe schools.
She took us into the realm of poetry-making, the place to "play and fall in love with words". Paula herself fell in love with words at an early age, reading the dictionary under the covers at night by torchlight - a self-professed "word nerd".
The work with schools is part of a pilot approach with the NZ Book Council, supported by funding from Unesco, and involves not only the half day visit face to face visit, but also follow up Skype sessions with students to mentor them – and their teachers – in their poetry writing.
Sparking writing
Paula talked about two key things to spark writing - writing about what you know, and writing about what you don't know - ie from your imagination, and then she demonstrated both through her poetry, from the observations of daily life (who amongst us doesn't have a cat who will find unlikely places to sleep?!) and from fantasy, riffing on a some very strange and possibly fearsome combination animals.
Poetry – spoken and shared, before written
Paula showed us ways to get poetry "into the air", sharing it orally, generating rhythm and rhyme, word play and patterns and words that sing or pop, before putting it down on the page. At the SLANZA workshops, she got the teachers all writing a poem themselves, and it was less daunting than that might imply, after Paula took us through the process of first immersing ourselves in a rich memory and identifying and describing the associated sights and sounds, feelings and connections which gave us the wherewithal to get writing and creating. She created "rules" about numbers of words or lines which provided direction and security - but also allowed us to break the rules if needed.
Over the course of the busy hour we were introduced to a variety of strategies to foster poetry reading and writing, from new entrants to secondary students level, and everyone went away with an anthology of ideas and renewed inspiration for sharing poetry in their classroom or library – through the ear, the eye, the heart and the mind.
Children’s Choice Finalist
Now is the time to get your students to vote online for their Children's Choice category in the NZ Book Awards - and if they vote for Paula's The Letterbox Cat and other poems it will send a good message to writers, publishers and booksellers about the appeal of poetry to children and the viability of publishing and promoting it in New Zealand.
Concrete poetry
I suspect that one of the reasons that children themselves nominated The Letterboxbox Cat as one of their Children’s Choice Finalists, is due to the playful nature of the words on the page – orally and also visually in the case of the “concrete” poems, which Paula calls “picture poems”. These are creative visual representations, the result of jamming with words – like notes of music, playing with the sounds and rhymes, juxtapositions and strings of words – and then put on the page to show another way of reading and seeing poetry. There are no rules on how to read them and for some poems each reading may be different. We’ve got quite a few collections of concrete poetry in our Services to Schools collection – such a heavy sounding name for something so lively.
More resources
Explore the National Library Services to Schools poetry page and visit Paula's rich treasure trove of poetry ideas and inspiration on her blogs:
Do you have Paula’s books in your school library? What’s your poetry collection looking like? A Treasury of NZ Poems for Children is a fabulous addition to school and home libraries – and could make a wonderful end-of-year, keep-for-your-lifetime school prize too. Here is a link to the Random House Teachers’ Resource Kit with ideas for introducing this book to students.
Very many thanks to Paula for sharing her passion for poetry and for helping children to discover the same, and to the NZ Book Council, Lynette Hartgill, Programmes Manager for arranging Paula's Te Tai Tokerau tour in conjunction with NLNZ Services to Schools. Thanks too, to the host schools for the SLANZA meetings - Marama Keyte at Manaia View School, and Annie McGlone, Principal and Liz Christensen, Librarian, at Oromahoe School.