Happy World Poetry Day!!

As World Poetry Day approaches, which is celebrated on the 21st March,  it would be a nice idea to incorporate poetry-based activities in your English lessons.

1) Starting with the following poem Ars Poetica by Archibald MacLeish, you may request students identify the figurative language used in poetry such as metaphors, alliteration, onomatopoeia, personification, similes and hyperboles.
2) Next step is to underline the words that rhyme in the poem.
3) Since Ars Poetica, that means the Art of Poetry, was first written by Horace in which he advises poets on the art of writing poetry, you can have students read both poems and compare them. You may even resort to other poems as well which have been influenced by Horace's Ars Poetica like the Uses of Poetry by Williams Carlos Williams (1909),  Poetry by Marianne Moore (1919) or even a more modern one like Teaching the Ape to write Poems by James Tate (1991).
4) Another activity would be to urge students come up with a way to depict the poem either with an illustration or arrangement in the text.
5) Students should select some background music for the poem.
6) You may even ask students to sing the poem to the tune of a popular song or read it out loud in a hip-hop style.
7) Finally, an extremely interesting activity is asking students dramatise the poem. If you read the poem carefully, you can point out scenes that can be acted out or you can help students represent different images of the poem in a stand-still frame using their bodies as if they were in a photo.
8) Another group of students may even dry to portray their classmates' representation of the poem or take photos using their mobile phones. Next step is to make a collage of the photos taken or a short movie using user-friendly movie- making applications which students love to use. Advise them to use the background music for the poem which they have selected in Activity 4. In this way you can bring students closer to poetry through technology and up to date software.


Ars Poetica by Archibald MacLeish

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown -

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind -

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs

A poem should be equal to:
Not true

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea -

A poem should not mean
But be


Source: Collected Poems 1917-1952 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt , 1952) 


Have fun!
Maria P.!