Standing amongst the small desks, I nervously await my youngest class ever. Marilyn Kaggen, a special education teacher here at the Patrick Daly School in Brooklyn, must sense my anxiety because she smiles and quotes poet and professor Kenneth Koch: “The power to see the world in a strong, fresh, and beautiful way is a possession of all children. Their degree of literacy does not form their imaginations.”
“Right!” her paraprofessional colleague, Joanne Barnes, adds. “And it’s great when they see their own words made into something others want to hear!”
Their words buoy me. I’m here, in this small special education class in a public school, because I have several poetry games that I’m hoping to refine for younger students. For the next month, I have weekly sessions to adapt the games to hold the third and fourth graders’ attention.
The power to see the world in a strong, fresh, and beautiful way is a possession of all children. Their degree of literacy does not form their imaginations.
— Kenneth Koch
They arrive: outsider kids, surface-tough and deeply vulnerable, at once gifted and challenged. Ms. Kaggen and Ms. Barnes have worked with this class since first grade, painstakingly creating and lovingly maintaining a classroom community, and will see them through their formative primary school years. Veterans of decades teaching special needs children, they work as a smoothly practiced team: organizing belongings, fielding questions, and resolving conflicts as the kids shuck their coats, gather their materials, and take their places in a circle of tablet chairs, each with a pencil and blank sheet of yellow legal paper.
I take a seat in the circle, too. On a table beside me, a green and yellow turtle with brilliant red stripes on both sides of her head stands on her hind legs and regards us through the glass of her tank.
Today I’ll begin with my all-time favorite, “Word into Idea.” It’s one of those lesson plans I return to again and again in the college classroom—always engaging, always a hit, and I’m hoping it will be as successful here.
To begin, we fold the paper once, long edge to long edge, then fold the folded page again so that the creases form four vertical columns. Then we number the columns at the top and put our initials beside the number for column 1.
I ask them in turn, “What’s your favorite letter of the alphabet?” It’s a question many adults have to consider, but every kid in this colorful, foliage-rich classroom immediately knows theirs. We talk about why: “It starts my name!” “‘Cause S is a slithery snake!” “Put teeth in C and it’s a cat’s mouth!” “M is like two mountains!” “M is my momma!” As they call them out, we list our favorite letters down the left edge of column 1, one letter for each writer, in the order they provide them.
“Now use them to start words, one word for each letter,” I instruct. We take time for this, pencils scratching along paper.
With roots in a tradition of aleatory poetry that includes Louis Zukofsky, Gertrude Stein, and William Burroughs, “Word into Idea” emerged in 1972 during “Writing About It,” an experimental writing class at the Free Association in Manhattan. For the next 25 years, the activity—which reverses the usual assumption that ideas should be put into words and instead uses words to generate ideas—has been a favorite and has remained unchanged through settings from middle and high schools to college classes and poetry workshops.
When everyone’s done filling out their words, we each pass our page to the writer on our left.
“Put your initials at the top of the next blank column, column 2,” I say. “From here on, forget about the letters; we’re all about words now!” This direction is important, especially for this class: some writers have trouble understanding this change, so it’s important to preemptively dispel confusion. “Look at that top word in column 1. What other word does it make you think of right away? Put that next to it in your column 2 and then do the same for each word below.”
Everyone fills the second column. There’s lots of conversation as the writers help each other, but when it trails off, we proceed as follows:
- After filling the second column, we fold the first column over to the back of the sheet and agree we won’t look at it.
- We pass the sheet with only column 2 showing to the left.
- After we initial the top of column 3, we fill it with a list of associations to the words in column 2.
- We fold column 2 to the back and pass the sheet on.
- Finally, we initial column 4 and fill it with a list of associations to the words in column 3.
I wait until everyone’s done and say, “Now unfold your page and look at the lines across. How do the words connect?”
“Cat makes me think of purring.” “Trucks make lots of smoke.” “Ice cream is cold and good.” “My mom is pretty.”
Once they’ve shared, I define the term “association,” and I have them practice the term out loud. Giving them a name for a concept they already understand helps build confidence in their literary abilities.
“Pick some lines you’d like to read to your classmates,” I say. “It’s not a poem yet, but we’re getting there!”
“Door, front, back, side,” one girl reads.
“Backside!” someone guffaws.
“Dog, cat, rat, afraid.”
“Oo, it gets different at the end!” a boy says.
“X-ray, doctor, shot, 3-pointer.”
“Trey!” a boy pantomimes a long throw.
“Bomb!” another responds.
“Sun, moon, star, Tina Turner.”
Several girls cheer.
“Shirt, jacket, pants, underpants.”
“I know who wrote that!” someone hoots. Giggles fill the room.
It’s easy for me to laugh with them now. My qualms at the start of class have faded as I see the students work. We are leading with imagination, and they have no trouble keeping up.
We are leading with imagination, and they have no trouble keeping up.
Next, the surprise: we tear the columns vertically and everybody gets back the four they wrote—their own words. We read those across. These connections are funnier, stranger, not like the first associations yet still . . . related. . . .
“Fire, stars, dream, love,” a girl reads with slow cadence.
“That’s pretty!” another girl, who has sat back from the circle murmurs.
“Bike, dark, white, rain.”
“Can’t you see that?” Ms. Barnes asks.
“Uh-huh!” several reply.
“Sneak, broke, curb, splurd,” a boy reads.
Another boy puts his hand up. “What’s ‘splurd’?” he demands.
“I like how it sounds,” the author answers.
I want to bring up onomatopoeias, but I feel any more instruction would add unnecessary complexity at this stage.
“Are these more like . . . poetry?” Ms. Kaggen asks.
The students respond with thoughtful nods.
Ms. Kaggen is preparing them for the biggest leap of the exercise: from picking single letters and words to building bigger and more complex pieces. This is the moment when it can feel like the exercise could change from a fun game to a taxing writing assignment.
I will have to wait and see. And trust.
The circle breaks up into couples and trios at tables. We hand out blank sheets, pencils and crayons. “Pick four or five lines across that are funniest, strangest, or just ones you like best,” I say. “Copy them onto your sheet. Now write something with those words. You may change those words however you want and use any other words you need to connect them. The only rule is to make something you like.”
I leave space for questions, and we allow them to talk to each other, but soon, talk fades as they write. For this room, silence is unusual, but their generated words focus them. I relax. The exercise has prepared the associative and imaginative parts of their brains, and they write with concentrated attention for 10 minutes.
After they finish, they share.
The Music
It came from Jamaica
and it sounds scary
the color of the music is black.
It has horns
Blue and brown
Silver and gold.
It is a fast dance
with the arms and the feets
on a hot day
fire, the music is a hot fire.— R.K.
Tigers are nice
They sound like a crocodile seeing its food
They smell like the deodorant my step-dad has
They feel soft like a cat rubbing against your face
Tigers are nice— D.A.
My mind is like a dinosaur.
With my mind I play.
My mind likes to remember about teachers.
My mind would like to forget about fighting.
When I sleep my mind thinks about caves.
I think my mind is my family.
My mind thinks about poetry.— J.V.
The Quack Master
I jumped all day today
Popeye growed a tree
Seeds was in an apple
The duck quack is
the master
The second master gets
to get a kite
Strings god caught
into a violet— E.M.
When the period ends, the writers gather their words and images to take home. They have each written something—a complete and unique creative piece. Ms. Kaggen and Ms. Barnes stay behind until, once again, we are alone in the crowd of small empty desks. Ms. Barnes and Ms. Kaggen remark on how the exercise channeled the enormous energy in this class, which might otherwise have flown off in less focused ways. Ms. Kaggen points out how, for special needs children who have had little literacy in their lives, seeing and hearing their own language, the vocabulary of home and the street, rearranged into poetry and read aloud enables them to make the connection between spoken and written words and motivates them to read and write.
And I feel a wave of confidence because this exercise reinforced one of my key beliefs as a teacher: like nothing else, poetry bridges the gap between the spoken language and the written word. It’s one of the reasons I love teaching it so much and try to bring it into every classroom.
That commitment was challenged in 2020 when the pandemic forced classes online. As I struggled to teach, I found myself thinking back to my time in that classroom of third and fourth graders, when I also worried about how I could engage students. And I knew I needed to find a way to do “Word into Idea” with my online classes.
But on Zoom, there was no good way for students to pass around papers, to read each other’s work, laugh, and talk about it and have the surprise and joy of creating something together.
So I created an online version of the exercise. Working with Samantha Tamburri, a talented web designer who serendipitously appeared in my first online class in 2021, I was able to obtain support from the CUNY Open Educational Resources Initiative that, over the next four years, enabled me to combine “Word into Idea” with two other exercises that had branched from it—a rhymed poetry exercise “Plackets” and a group poem on romantic relationships based on Melissa McCracken’s poem “I always know it’s over when they say . . .”—into a suite of online and pen-and-paper exercises that are now available via this online hub.
Grateful Acknowledgement: for access, insight, and inspiration, Marilyn Kaggen, teacher, and Joanne Barnes, paraprofessional, at The Patrick Daly School in Red Hook, Brooklyn; for logistical and technical support at The College of Staten Island, CUNY. Grant Manager Christina Boyle, OER Librarian, and Doriann Pieve-Hyland, Director of Technology Training; for poetry, Melissa McCracken; for brilliant web development, Samantha Tamburri.
Featured photo by Anna Danilina.
