Celebrate National Poetry Month with a revealing take on close reading!
Blackout poetry to reveal the most important message of Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy.” Students rolled RPG dice to determine how many words per stanza they were allowed to keep, them blacked out all remaining words, and illustrated the results. @ncte pic.twitter.com/nuYWxu26Qy
— John Meehan (@MeehanEDU) March 31, 2019
If I’ve learned anything about poetry in ten years of teaching the stuff, it’s this:
“This is Thunderdome. There are no rules.”
Poetry is all about self expression, unexpected discovery, and the power of close reading and artistic craftsmanship. But how you get from point A to point B is entirely up to you.
When studying the works of American masters like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, my American Literature classes staged a “March Madness” style tournament bracket, pitting different poetic techniques against one another in head-to-head showdowns, and asking students to make a case for which singular element of each poet’s craft was the most important to unlocking the meaning of their work.
For modernist poets like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, we engaged in a heated debate on what constitutes a poem — down to the placement of a single period.
And for living poets like Daniel Beaty and Nikki Giovanni? We challenged students to make cases for redefining “the canon” to better reflect a myriad of contemporary voices, experiences, and perspectives that have far too often been ignored by the conventions of the craft.
But perhaps my all-time favorite approach to poetic close reading?
Blackout poetry.
More jaw-dropping student work. Blackout poetry is SUCH a cool classroom activity! pic.twitter.com/R0dqm3l4FK
— John Meehan (@MeehanEDU) March 31, 2019
If you’ve never played before, it’s a hoot. Setup is super easy, and this can be done with any work of poetry (or prose). The rules are simple:
1. Have each student identify “anchors” in each stanza that he or she feels is most important to the poem.
2. Circle those anchor words in pencil, and…
3. Use black Sharpies to color in over everything else around those words — using only the words remaining in the poem as a sort of miniature “found poem” within the larger work, designed to convey it’s most essential or striking image. And since we’re talking about creativity and self expression…
4. While blacking out the majority of the text of the original poem, students are likewise asked to use the same page to illustrate a visual representation of the poem’s most evocative image.
For my class, we took a look at Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” a masterpiece of confessional poetry — but the same activity can be done with any printed work of poetry or prose (which makes it a great fit for non ELA classrooms! Like The Declaration of Independence, or a page from Don Quixote, etc.). And to add a random element of chance to our blackout poems, I had each student use a few role playing game dice to determine how many total words from the original poem they were allowed to keep in their finished creation. If you’d like to adopt the same approach, we used:
d4: Maximum number of “anchor” words you were allowed to use in a row from a single stanza.
d8: Maximum number of words in total you were allowed to keep from a single stanza.
d12+d20: Total number of words in all that you were *REQUIRED* to use in your finished blackout poem.
Blown away by the depth of engagement and the creative attention to detail. This is such an empowering approach to student-centered poetry analysis! pic.twitter.com/TYmIqiHat2
— John Meehan (@MeehanEDU) March 31, 2019
But from there, the game was totally up to the students imaginations! Some poems started from the bottom and worked their way up the page and backwards. Others reduced this 16 stanza poem to a single heartbreaking sentence. And others still used their blackouts to provide fascinating windows into the life, biography, and trauma behind the broader work of Sylvia Plath — providing a stunning display of insight inside the mind and writing of this immensely talented but tortured master of the craft.
Happy National Poetry Month!
