Lesson Plan 2 : In Another’s Voice

• Introduction
• One of the tools available to poets is persona, the choice to enter into a voice that is not the writer’s own, whether it is a person who lives in another time or place, a person at another stage of life, a person whose experience has been different from the writer’s—or not a person at all, perhaps an object or an animal. In this way, the poet sees the world through other eyes; speaking directly to the reader, the persona helps us see the world differently as well. This is a distinction from dramatic monologues in which the speaker addresses a silent listener who is usually not the reader. In Poetry Out Loud, the performer is already entering into another voice, the poem’s voice; but a young person new to poetry may have difficulty inhabiting that voice. In persona poems, the writer gives explicit cues to help the reader imagine the speaker, so these poems will support students in preparing their recitation. Persona poems often have dramatic elements, which will help students work on the “dramatic appropriateness” of their performance.
• Learning Objectives
•  Students will learn how to
• · analyze the poet’s characterization of the speaker in each poem;
•  · analyze the ways in which the poet suggests a dramatic situation or narrative for its speaker; and adapt his/her speech to the task of recitation. In addition, if you choose the literary writing extension, students will be able to:
• · write an effective persona poem of their own. If you choose the academic writing extension, students will be able to
•  · compare two persona poems, making a claim that is true of both poems and supporting that claim with textual evidence.
•  
• Materials and Resources To teach this lesson you will need:
• · A computer with speakers; if possible, a laptop cart with earphones
• · Printed copies of the poems you select from the Poetry Out Loud Anthology (http://www.poetryoutloud.org/poems-and-performance/find-poems). Recommended selections:
• § John Berryman, “Dream Song 14” (Paul Muldoon reading this poem with others by Berryman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfvwNnKXZc8)
• § William Blake, “The Chimney Sweeper: When my mother died I was

• Activity Description
• Day 1: Model 1. Group your students (groups of 2-4) according to their learning needs, and choose poems that are appropriate to each group of readers, based on reading level, students’ interests, etc. Include at least one poem where the speaker is not human, and you might include a poem by Brenda Cárdenas or Victor Hernández Cruz if you have students with some knowledge of Spanish. 2. Model an approach to one of the poems:
•  a. Choose one of the poems for which you have an audio performance, one that is most appropriate for your cohort as a whole. Distribute copies of the poem and ask the students to think about who is speaking in the poem while they listen—not who is performing, but who is the dramatic character.
• b. After they listen, have them read the poem silently to themselves, annotating the text with the same lens: who is speaking, and how does the poet let us know who the speaker is? What lines show us different aspects of this speaker? What is the dramatic situation in which the speaker finds himself/herself?
• c. Have students meet in small collaborative groups to share their annotations and develop a group description of this speaker. Listen to the discussions and guide the students’ understanding.
• d. Small groups report out to the whole class, with the teacher leading the discussion towards a full understanding of the speaker. Introduce the terms “persona” and “voice” in this discussion, as some of the tools that poets have available to them.
• e. If time permits, you can begin the guided practice on the first day; description is included in
• Day 2.
• Guided practice 3. Remind students of the work they’d completed on the first poem and invite them to read a new set of poems in the same way. Have them think about who is speaking in the poem and describe the dramatic situation in which the speaker finds himself/herself.
•  a. Assign each group another poem. Providing laptops and earphones so students can listen to a performance would enhance their experience, but is not necessary.
•  b. Invite them to go through the same process in their groups, listening first if possible, reading silently while annotating, then discussing. The discussion should focus on developing a description of the speaker and of his/her dramatic situation. Students should be able to identify the lines that led them to understand the speaker and his/her situation.
• c. Their discussion will allow the students to prepare to read the poem aloud, which they can do in the way they feel is most effective: one voice or several voices, together or sequentially or in a pattern that moves between one and several voices.

• Lesson Plan 3 : Poetry, Celebrity, and the Power of Connotation 
• Learning Objectives: In this lesson, students will have opportunities to
• • Read and discuss poems that invoke Abraham Lincoln
• • Decide which associations with that name are relevant to the poem (there will not be a single “right answer,” but several)
• • Learn several contrasting rhetorical “moves” that poets make by invoking famous figures
• • Find, present, and discuss comparable “name-dropping” poems from the Poetry Out Loud website • Write a “name-dropping” poem themselves, using one or more of the rhetorical moves they have learned
• Materials and Resources:
• To teach this lesson you will need:
•  • Access for students to the Poetry Out Loud anthology in its print or on-line versions, preferably both

• Activity Description
•  1. Introduce students to the idea that poems use the names of famous historical figures— politicians, performers, explorers, etc.—as a kind of shorthand. Readers are not just supposed to recognize the names, but also to have associations with those names that are somehow relevant to the poem.
•  2. Ask students to brainstorm the ideas, values, or events that they or other people might associate with the name “Abraham Lincoln.” (Including “other people” is helpful, as students can often imagine someone else having associations that they don’t actually have themselves.) Students might come up with associations like these:
• • “Freed the slaves” (this may provoke some argument)
• • Civil War, or “Saved the Union”
• • Gettysburg Address
•  • Assassinated, died before his time, before he could bring the country back together • A self-made man: went from log-cabin to White House
• • A sad man, or a melancholy one
•  • On the penny and the five-dollar bill

• Lesson Plan 4:Golden Shovel
• Learning Objectives
•  In this unit, students will have opportunities to:
• • Read a wide range of poems from the Poetry Out Loud website
• • Discuss what makes language interesting and surprising (i.e., what makes a “striking line”)
•  • Discuss the importance of word choice in poetry and what makes an intriguing or memorable word choice
•  • Learn a new poetic form—the Golden Shovel
• • Read and discuss sample “Golden Shovel” poems
•  • Apply a “borrowed” line from a poem to create one’s own Golden Shovel poem
• • Learn and apply public speaking skills
• • Read a Poetry Out Loud poem, along with an original poem for his/her classmates in a supportive environment
•  Resources and Materials To teach this unit you will need:
• • Copies of the poems provided at the end of this lesson
• • Student access to the Poetry Out Loud website
•  • Lots of whiteboard or chalkboard space
• • Paper and writing utensils

• Session One
•  This session will help students determine what lines and word choices stand out in good poetry and will provide background for writing their original poetry. It will also introduce the Golden Shovel form.
• 1. Discuss what makes a “striking line” in literature (i.e., a line that is especially interesting, surprising and original; that jumps out at the reader; and/or that makes the reader think).
• 2. Read Jane Cooper’s “Hunger Moon” aloud. Then have students read it silently, while underlining striking lines. For example: “The last full moon of February / stalks the fields” “barbed wire casts a shadow.” “it advances on my pillow” “with the cocked gun of silence.” “The moon, in pale buckskins, crouches” “all the fences thrum”
• 3. Next, discuss the importance of surprising/unusual word choices in poetry. Have students underline those words from the striking lines on the board (i.e., “stalks,” “barbed,” “crouches” and “thrum”).
•  4. Repeat the process using sections from Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Blackstone Rangers.”
•  5. Read Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool.” If you have time, you may play Ms. Brooks reciting the original poem: (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/audioitem/2264). Then have the students read Terrance Hayes’s “The Golden Shovel” aloud. Ask students to look for anything unusual about the form and see if anyone notices that Brooks’s poem, “We Real Cool,” is laid out vertically at the end of each of Hayes’s lines. If no one figures it out without a hint, point out that it is “after Gwendolyn Brooks” and explain what enjambment means (“unnatural” line breaks, or “The running-over of a sentence or phrase from one poetic line to the next, without terminal punctuation; the opposite of end-stopped” (per the Poetry Foundation website). After a few minutes, point out the form that Hayes has created.
• 6. Finally, students should read at least three poems of their own from the Poetry Out Loud website and make note of striking lines that include surprising word choices. They should complete for homework, if need be.

2- You will need to create a worksheet for at least one of those lessons.

3- At least one of the lessons must require students to use a computer.