Early in my teaching career, I sometimes experienced bouts of frustration and self-pity when my gloriously planned poetry writing lessons were met with groans. “It’s too hard,” students would complain. “I’m terrible at writing poetry. Poetry is boring.”

I needed student buy-in and simplification, and I wasn’t above using a bit of trickery to accomplish it. After all, I was the mom who added zucchini shreds to my family’s chocolate cake when they wouldn’t eat their veggies. Trickery increased willingness and simplified the process of healthy eating, why not apply it to poetry writing?

I needed student buy-in and simplification, and I wasn’t above using a bit of trickery to accomplish it.

“Mockingbird” by Judith Harris is a simplistically beautiful poem that describes the experience of hearing a mockingbird’s song. The poem’s beauty comes from the same goodness we find in longer poems: imagery, sensory details, similes, word choice, and emotion. The simplicity comes in its form: one sentence. That’s where the trickery comes in, too. Introduce the poem not as a poem but as a one-sentence description. Students will easily buy into reading one sentence.

For the first read, I present the poem in a traditional sentence format.

Mockingbird (sentence form)

I can hear him, now, even in darkness, a trickster under the moon, bristling his feathers, sounding as merry as a man whistling in a straw hat, or a squeaky gate to the playground left ajar or the jingling of a star, having wandered too far from the pasture.

—Judith Harris

I ask them to discern a tone for the description. Through annotation and discussion, students notice how the words trickster, merry, bristling, whistling, jingling, and playground add a whimsical feel. They label the tone as fun, happy, or mischievous. Simple enough.

On the second read, I provide the poem in its original form.

Mockingbird

I can hear him,
now, even in darkness,
a trickster under the moon,
bristling his feathers,
sounding as merry
as a man whistling in a straw hat,
or a squeaky gate
to the playground
left ajar
or the jingling of a star,
having wandered too far
from the pasture.

—Judith Harris

Something magical happens when I ask them to annotate similes and prepositional phrases. Students highlight in the darkness and as merry as . . . a squeaky gate and ask if there is a second, darker tone. As students read more deeply, the man whistling in the straw hat sounds ominous, especially in relation to the abandoned playground. Because, by now, they are assigning a sinister feeling to the squeaky gate left ajar. They wonder if the playground is abandoned. If so, maybe it’s empty because it is evening, after all the speaker mentions stars. Might the playground be empty for some other reason? Is the man in the straw hat up to no good? Students recognize how the form of the poem encouraged them to pay more attention to certain words and phrases.

Eventually, the discussion returns to that word, trickster. Students use it to defend their position that this entire poem is not what it seems on the surface. Thanks to the accessibility of the internet, someone has already researched and shared that mockingbirds imitate other songbirds for mating and safety reasons. So this poem offers a bonus lesson in biology, too.

After annotation and discussion, I assign the creation of an original poem written in the style of Judith Harris.

The task of writing a descriptive poem becomes not such a chore. Each student immediately grabs a pen and hunkers down to write one emotion-packed sentence, considering how words, phrases, and form collide to create a specific tone.

The instructions are simple: On a separate document, write a one-sentence description of an object. Emulate Harris’ use of word choice, similes, prepositional phrases, sensory details, and tone in your sentence. Make sure you also use correct punctuation. Once you have written your one-sentence description, copy and paste it below your original sentence. In the copied sentence, hit the enter key where you would like line breaks to form the poem version of your one-sentence description.

It’s important for students to reflect on the process, now that they understand the trickery used in composing it. They write an explanation of how various poetic devices, especially form, affect the tone of their poems. With students who sometimes struggle appreciating the joy of reading or writing poetry, you might try becoming a trickster teacher. Like the mockingbird, you may convince your students that not everything is always what it seems, and, sometimes, it’s a lot simpler. Sometimes, it’s a piece of cake.

Student Poems

The Party

When I walk in the door, 
I see a towering light pink cake,
At least three feet tall
on its white sparkly cake stand, 
almost as tall as a basketball goal,
enough to feed an army 
of pink bubbly teenagers with their tiaras raised high.

—Brooklyn R.

Cold Empty Street

I can hear the dog now,
walking down the cold empty street,
his paws scraping on the concrete road
sounding like chalk on a board
and the shivering whines of a brown mammal–
the fear in its eyes while a shinny long barrel pointed at him
then silence
no more whining
just silence
and a cold, empty street.  

—Carter C.

Basketball 

I can feel it,
now even in October,
a ball bouncing on the hardwood,
swishing through the net,
banking off of the backboard,
players getting set–
it’s that time.

—Alexander T.

A Sunset Parade

A sunset parade
Has a very beautiful feeling—
The sun going down into the ground
Onto the next day
As its warm grasp leaves your face
One last time
While hearing and feeling
The beating bass of sounds
And loud friends, family, young, and old
screaming joyful screams, 
as if the sun is still up.

—Terrance W.

Featured image by Robert Havell via the National Gallery of Art.