Of eagles, chickens, french fries, and potato salad
06 Sep 2010 Leave a Comment
I heard this quote over the summer at an AP conference and fell in love with it. It seemed to unfold the more I thought about it–as does all great poetry.
Sitting in my classroom deciding what to do for the first couple of weeks, I decided that I wanted to begin/end every class with a poem this year. To get the class started and thinking about poetry on day one, I created a Prezi to start a discussion with my class. Each class had the same discussion and focused on surface level observations. Well, I kind of manipulated that with the addition of the videos in the Prezi. I ended up getting them to think outside of the word “bird” and “potato” to where I believe Collins was wanting his listeners to go. We then talked about what I now call “chicken poetry” versus “eagle poetry.” We’ve all read poems that speak to us and somehow crawl into our skin and live there for the rest of our lives. Those poems help us to fly and take us to places we never want to leave (eagle poetry). We’ve also all read poems that are–for a lack of a better word right now–nasty (chicken poetry). Those poems are usually the ones our teachers made us sludge through (or in my case, the teenage “love” poems that a high school English teacher must sludge through). They are the ones we want to forget and never read again.
I challenged my students there that I would do my best to never give them “chicken poetry.” I admitted that I could never please everyone, but insisted that instead of dismissing a poem upon first read, the students take the time to see a poem for what it says and then what it really says. Therein, I believe, lies the heart of what makes poetry so great.
Click here to see the Prezi presentation.
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