Then we start making fun of poets.

Okay, I say, imagine that you’re writing a parody of a poem and you want to make it wonderfully bad—full of clichés and cringe-worthy sentimentality. What are some key words you might use? “Heart,” someone always offers. We look for a little more specificity. “What should a heart not do in a poem?” I ask. “Skip a beat,” says one student. “Break,” says another. “End up in your throat,” offers someone else. Once we exhaust the heart possibilities, we move on, looking for the big offenders. What are some other words or tropes that might lead to sentimentality? I can usually get someone to come up with “soul,” which affords me an opportunity to write the word “soul” on the board, then draw a giant X through it—something I always like leaving on the board for the next class to see and fret over what sorts of things are being taught in creative writing classrooms. Usually someone mentions roses. Someone mentions the single tear. All of these go on the board (and I always offer the disclaimer that none of these rules is absolute—certainly, fantastic poems can be written using any number of potentially problematic words or images, provided the poet is savvy about how he or she uses them). Finally we move on to animals—butterflies as symbols of innocence, a bird as a vision of freedom. And, of course, there’s cuteness to be reckoned with—puppies, kittens, any three-legged quadruped. Sometimes I tell my students that they can only use a kitten in a poem if the kitten is dead.

I’ve found that letting students poke fun at hypothetical poems before writing their own helps them to a) stay attuned to the siren song of schlock so that they can better resist it and b) maintain a sense of humor about the whole thing so that when someone does write a poem featuring that single tear or an alarmingly mobile heart, we can talk about it without the writer feeling defensive. After all, the battle against sentimentality is one we’re all fighting.

Oh—and the dead kitten thing? A grad student took on that challenge, and wrote a beautiful, spare, weird poem that opened with a dead kitten in a shoebox. The poem surprised at every turn and was just accepted for publication. Of course a dead kitten could be even more sentimental than a live one, depending on how it’s rendered—the moral here, I think, is that if we as poets choose our words and our images with an eye toward circumventing the expected, we stand a much better chance of writing poems that are resonant, moving, and completely inappropriate for Hallmark.

Conceptually, I like this exercise. Logistically, I hate it. So I’ve adjusted it to suit my needs. I simply create a list of questions, print each on a separate sheet, and give each group all but one of the questions.  Students take their time – often the bulk of a 50 minute class period – answering the questions as thoroughly as possible, then we redistribute and evaluate.

For example, I frequently use this exercise with James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues.”  I’ve taught the story every year for the past 6 years, and I’ve taught it from a number of anthologies, including Ann Charter’s The Story and Its Writer and Abcarian, Klotz, and Cohen’s Literature: The Human Experience and I’ve drawn some of my questions from those authors.  I also write my own questions, based on the themes that we’re talking about in class – essentially questions that ask students to define concepts based on the story.

Here’s how it works in my classroom:

Prep:

• I write (or select from the instructor’s guide to the text) 6 or so questions for the day’s reading.  Each question is designed to require significant thought on the part of the group – and requires students to find specific quotations to support their claims. Here are some questions that I’ve used for “Sonny’s Blues.”
  • How do you react to Baldwin’s change of prose style in describing the scene at the nightclub? How does his change in style contribute to his message? In what ways does it make his message harder to decipher?  What does it suggest about the narrator’s change as a character? (Charters)
  • How should we read the reference to the “cup of trembling” in the last paragraph of the story? Should we read it to mean that trembling and fury will be visited on whites (“them that afflict thee”)? Or pushers? Or is the full biblical passage not relevant? Explain. (Charters)
  • What function does the narrator’s encounter with Sonny’s friend at the beginning of the story serve? (Abcarian, et al.)
  • What effect does Baldwin achieve by rearranging the order of events? (Abcarian, et al.)
  • How does Baldwin this story define family in this story?  What does it mean to be a member of a family?  To have connections with family members?  Is this something culturally specific? (Mine)
  • Who is the protagonist of the story? How do we you know? What is the central conflict for the protagonist? (Mine)
  • I create a Word document that presents each question on a separate page, and number the questions 1 through 6.
  • I make enough copies of question sheets so that each group (students will be divided into 6 groups total) will have 5 of the 6 questions.
  • I sort the questions and provide each group with a set of will get all the questions except the one that corresponds with their group number (i.e. group 3 does not get question 3).
  • I label each stack with a big post-it note indicating with the group number.

In class:

• Students self-select into 6 groups (in my classes, that’s typically 4 students per group).
• I distribute the stacks to each group.
• I circulate while students write out their answers (and I discourage students from writing their names on the sheets).
• Once students have had a set amount of time with the sheets, we redistribute, so that every question 2 goes to group 2, etc.
• Once each group has a complete set of answers to a single question, they evaluate the responses.
• I encourage students to select the best answer, add where necessary, or combine more than one answer to make the most complete answer
• Each group then reports to the full class.

I like this exercise because it puts a lot of responsibility on my students.  It also gives them time to wrestle with complex discussion questions without the pressure of having the whole class listen or while the impatient instructor (me!) stands waiting.  Finally, I think it’s useful for students to examine how other people try to answer questions – it’s good for discussion and for their own written work for the class.