Lesson Introduction
Poet W.H. Auden said, “Poetry makes nothing happen” – implying that poetry is useless to real life. This opinion is common, and many people – including students – think, “Why should I bother with poetry? I can’t get a job out of it. It can’t help me in any practical way.” But poetry – reading it, listening to it, and/or writing it – can help one to have more psychological, emotional, and/or spiritual resilience. Some things in life we can’t control, or change, and these situations and experiences can make us feel terrible – disempowered. This lesson plan encourages students to investigate, “How might creative writing – including poetry – give me the power to transcend something difficult in my life, even for the briefest of moments, when no other solution or way forward seems possible?” Or, “How might creative writing become part of a wholistic, multi-pronged, multi-dimensional solution to a problem, to be used in tandem with other possible tools or solutions?”
Learning Objectives
Students will hopefully be able to:
- identify experiences in their own lives when they thought or felt they had no control over a
situation
- identify what exact emotions they had, when feeling this lack of control, and where they held
these emotions in their bodies
- gain experience reading poems quietly, reading poems out loud, and listening to poems out
loud, to get firsthand experience of how poems can have emotional impact
- identify a) what situations the speakers of these poems feel they have no control over, and b)
what uncomfortable emotions the speakers of the poems might be feeling because of these
situations
- identify how the speakers of these poems – and the authors of these poems – are using poetry – language itself – to create a psychologically-uplifting ‘way out’ of the difficult situations presented in the poems
Materials and Resources
Doyali Islam’s Poetry in Voice Mixtape, “Poetry is the Power to Transcend”