Join the Two Writing Teachers blog for March Slice of Life Challenge.
Day 5 is at Penny and Her Jots
Writing poems can be serious business. The first day back after spring break I asked my students to think hard about poetry. We read together a poem from the Teaching Guide for the River of Words Young Poets and Artists on the Nature of Things. (Handout 4:Writing from film) I highly recommend this guide for great poetry lessons written by my friends Harriet Maher and Connie McDonald.
The poem spoke in an ominous tone about the destruction of our earth. Students picked out these word, demented, shattered, purged, and monsters, as negative tone words. They noticed that the poem was a sad commentary on what we humans do to our earth home.
Then I played the first 8 minutes of the documentary of Ansel Adams.
While we watched the video, we collected words and phrases. We all wrote poems. Many of the students’ poems reflected the negative tone of the poem we read together. My favorite student poem is from Erin. She wrote how the silence was too loud. You can read her poem here.
Free image from Wikipedia.
Ansel Adams, 1902-1984
The artist transformed
moments into wild majesty
expressing in
exalted language of photography
how small we really are.Among the tall trees
or the great mountains,
our humanness is separate–
a communion in the presence
of mystery.Even in the absence of color,
in shades of black and white,
fragments are shattered
into a mosaic of truth.We understand the fragile nature of things.
–Margaret Simon
Reflections on the Teche 
What great resource and approach to poetry. Finding the tone and then going with it is powerful. I’m wondering about what could be our (students’) answer to that negative tone. Could it be another poem? Response poems?
Love this video!
Excellent share! I’m linking to your post in my Daily National Poetry Month roundup.
The video – though I didn’t watch all of it yet – was beautiful and even his quotes were poems. “My life has been colored and modulated by the great earth gesture of the Sierra.”
Your poem is also beautiful! I wanted to comment on Erin’s but I guess that isn’t enabled. So tell her I liked it very much and have written similar feelings to hers. Silence has its own type of loudness.
[…] Our State Mag) Carolyn Smart on Careen, her Bonnie &Clyde inspired poetry collection (cbcradio) Reflections on Writing Poems from Film w/ Youth (free guide) Using Persona Poetry to “humanize the abstractions of poverty, war, racism” (free […]
The River of Words competition and resources are wonderful to use, Margaret. Our students have enjoyed the writing from that inspiration so much, and then you added more with Adams’ work in the film. Erin’s poem is nice, and I love yours too: “a communion in the presence/of mystery”.
Just yesterday my co-teacher and I were creating a test online and we read a passage about Ansel Adams. I had never heard of him, and now I see him twice in twenty-four hours. Beautiful poem!
This is such a rich, gorgeous post, Margaret. Ansel Adams has always been a favorite of mine, and your words match his images perfectly. “We understand the fragile nature of things.” This line will stay with me.