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Found Poetry and the American Life Histories CollectionBy The Learning Page staffPublished on 01/14/2009 For a moment The room became as black as night Then For an instant Here came a ray of light We all walked out Into the storm Be brave Feel scared Don't give up Cold North wind Blew us half a mile south We let our friends go And continued Alone Animals People Lost To the Storm All while trying to find Their way Home This poem is an example of student-created found poetry based on the American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1940. The document that inspired this student was The Blizzard of 1888. The lesson that engaged the student in the process was created and taught by Alison Westfall and Laura Mitchell, American Memory Fellows in 1998. Their lesson is titled Enhancing a Poetry Unit with American Memory. What is found poetry? A found poem uses words and phrases from another source, generally some kind of everyday written material (e.g., letters, newspaper headlines, lines from a television program, advertisements) but combines them in new ways. Tom Hansen says of the process of creating found poems, "Most found poems begin their lives as passages of expository prose. Their intended purpose is to feed easily digestible information to the reader. Nothing could be less poetic. But suddenly poetry is discovered embedded within the prose. The discoverer is someone alert to the possibilities of irony, absurdity, and other incongruities." (Tom Hansen, "Letting Language Do: Some Speculations on Finding Found Poems," College English 42 (1979), p. 281.) Middle school teachers in particular seem to find American Life Histories and found poetry to be a perfect match. While Alison Westfall and Laura Mitchell recommend using their lesson after students have studied a considerable amount of published poetry, Kathleen Isaacs, a teacher at Edmund Burke School in Washington, DC, reports success with found poetry activities as an introduction to a poetry unit or as an English class accompaniment to a history unit. For Kathy, the message for students is a simple but powerful one: "Students see what happens when you take out all the unnecessary words--strong writing." The American Life Histories make an excellent starting point for found poetry because they use rich and varied language to tell human stories. Alison and Laura do, however, caution teachers that "poets and teachers of student poets would be well advised to approach them with the respect due any human being, and to use them for the good purposes of understanding history and creating art. This caution is necessary because many of the Life Histories will seem outrageous to students because they depict colorful, often difficult lives and may be told in the most vernacular terms. Bad grammar, too, and dialects have their place in poetry; teachers may need to work on this with their students." Alison and Laura provide detailed instructions for introducing the found poetry unit; we recommend that teachers check out their lesson plan and adapt it for their purposes. For example, Laura Wakefield, a teacher at Neptune Middle School in Kissimmee, Florida, reports that her students made a quilt of family stories as part of an oral history unit that incorporated found poetry. They began by looking at the Life Histories collection and making found poetry from selected life histories. Students then interviewed a family member, transcribed the family story they were told, and made a found poem from that family story. The found poem of their family story was then typed on a computer, flipped so that it read like mirror writing, and photocopied. The photocopy was placed face down on the cloth quilt square, and a cotton ball soaked with turpentine was dabbed over the paper. The photocopy page "magically" transfers onto the cloth. If teachers try the Enhancing a Poetry Unit with American Memory, we would be happy to include some student-generated poems in future issues of The Source. [send article to a friend] [print full article] [return to front page] |
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