Color Poems

 Begin by choosing a color.  Write a list of everything you can think of associated with that color.  This can include things that are that color of course, but try to move beyond this to feelings and concepts associated with the color, such as green being associated with jealousy for example, or blue with peace.  You can use the five senses, asking students to speculate on what their color would smell like or taste like.  Select and arrange these ideas into a poem.
As you revise the poems, have students eliminate repeated words and substitute more specific words for vague ones.

Here are some examples of color poems to share with students:

"White" by Mark Strand

"Is White a Color?" by John Matthew

White by Meg Petersen

the color of cold,

the sliver that settles in the snow queen’s heart,

the faint smell of bleach rising up from tired hands, and

crisp school uniforms, hospital corridors,

sheets on a line and most underwear, the straps of the beaters

against my sons’ dark skin.

streaks in an old woman’s hair

vampires and clown faces.

White, the skin which betrays me

the history I wear and am never without,

the legacy of privilege, aura of power

and imposition, the presence of all

color, emerging from a spinning color wheel

reflecting back all the light in the spectrum

                                                                                                                      

Aglow with purple under the blackest of lights,

as if revealing its own deepest secret,

how it is not what it seems, more than fresh

diapers on a mother’s shoulder or the erasure

of winter which reduces the world

to chiaroscuro.  It is all color and it is nothing—

the paper before the poem. 

 And a simpler example, for younger children: 

Green

Green Green is apples, markers, and cool. 

Green is the taste of vegetables. 

Green smells like grass and rain. 

Green makes me feel envious.

 Green is the sound of a lawnmower and a sigh.

 Green is a garden, forest, and a swamp. 

Green is renewal. 

Green is beginning again. 

Writing a poem as a group exercise

Hello Friends, I am going to post some poetry exercises on this blog leading up to your work on the writing contest through APEC.   This one is one you can work on with your whole class.

For this exercise, each student should bring in an object with an interesting history.  All students should have an interesting object they can talk life into and which might interest and inspire other students in the class. Each student presents his or her object and the objects are passed around while the student explains the object.  (If your class is too large, you can do this in smaller groups).
Once the storytelling is over, the students make a poem using the objects in the manner and order they choose. One way to do this is to write lists that combine the names of the objects with something about them.

This exercise helps students with oral language skills as well and is a wonderful way for students to get to know something about each other and build community in the class.


A variation of this kind of exercise might be to do a simple list poem.  A student can propose a category such as "Things Found in my Backyard."  "Things I want to do Tomorrow," "Things I Regret,"  "Things in your pocket (or purse, or wallet)" Each student makes a list of as many things as they can think of.  Here is an example poem with a list of things found in pockets:

SONG FOR THE POCKETS by Gary Soto

They carry the spoon that unearthed another tin spoon,

A magnet furred in iron filings,

A shag of lint.

They carry fiddle-neck and arrow-face foxtail,

Aa harmonica grinning with rust.

 The salt that forgot the palm it was rubbed from.

They carry the key whose door was burned,

A rattle of seeds capsuled in foil—

All that was lost in the street raised by its own rules.

Here is a simpler example:

What Bugs Me

When my teacher tells me to write a poem tonight.
When my mother tells me to clean up my room.
When my sister practices her violin while I'm watching TV.
When my father tells me to turn off the TV and do my homework.
When my brother picks a fight with me and I have to go to bed early.
When my teacher asks me to get up in front of the class and read the poem I
wrote on the school bus this morning.