3 Creative Ways To Teach Poetry

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Introduction

TP-CASTT is perhaps one of the few good and creative ways to teach poetry. It’s something I’ve used since my very first year of teaching.

Not only does it provide my students with an effective structure for analyzing poetry, but it provides me with a simplified method of engaging students with poetry, the literary genre that many of them tend to avoid.

To this day, I still use TP-CASTT, but even I realize that it may not be enough for students who struggle to tackle this literary genre. Therefore, I’ve incorporated three instructional strategies that have helped engage students more deeply in poetry.

Let’s explore each one in depth.

Poetry Posters

The poetry poster is the first of three creative ways to teach poetry, and it works as a great supplement to TP-CASTT. In this activity, students can either work alone or in groups of no more than 3.

The idea behind poetry posters is simple: after students have conducted a close reading and analysis of a poem, they have to think about how to visually design something that effectively represents the poem. While students might consider most of their TP-CASTT analysis, the three areas that work well with poetry posters are:

Theme
Connotation (literary devices)
Attitude (tone)

Students have to know what the message of the poem is; similarly, they have to think deeply about the connotation and attitude of the poem.

To give students an idea of how they should go about creating their poster, I show them several movie posters. The idea behind this is to show them how movie posters do a good (or good enough) job at visually representing a movie. We talk briefly about any images or illustrations on the poster as well as colors used.

Once students have a strong understanding of the poem and have seen and understood how the movie posters they’ve seen work, they can begin brainstorming ideas or visuals that represent the poem.

Upon completion of the posters, students do a gallery walk of posters done by their peers, identifying things they liked about their classmate’s posters and what stood out to them the most.

What I really like about poetry posters is how it challenges students to justify their visual interpretation of a poem that might not be possible in a traditional literary analysis. Hence, it really is one of many creative ways to teach poetry that engages students.

Found Poetry

Found Poetry is the second of three creative ways to teach poetry. As a matter of fact, found poetry is probably the simplest method of engagement because it doesn’t involve or require TP-CASTT to analyze a poem.

Instead, with found poetry, students create poems from existing texts, and these texts aren’t limited to what stories, poems, or novels they’ve read in class or throughout their academic lives: it also includes newspapers, magazines, comics or manga, movies or TV shows, or even online content.

While conducting a close analysis of a variety of texts, students pick and choose words, phrases, or lines and rearrange them to create a poem. This process tasks students with thinking critically about word choice, context, and different interpretations of words and phrases.

To guide their thinking, students are told to focus on the following elements:

Figurative language
Imagery
Rhythm and sound
Themes or ideas

After their close reading, students will write their selected words, phrases, or lines on separate sheets of paper, cut them up, and glue them to a poster board. Once they’ve finished, they’ll share their newly created poem and talk about what inspired them to choose the content of their poem and their thought process in creating the poem.

What I like about found poetry—besides it being one of several creative ways to teach poetry—is how much it challenges students to think about what to use in creating their poem from multiple texts. It also gets them to better understand how poets might carefully consider word choice to convey their ideas.

As an aside, a nice introduction to found poetry is blackout poetry, with the exception being that only a page from one text is used in the process, and students black out (scratch out) words or phrases from each line.

Poetry Journals

Poetry journals is the last of three creative ways to teach poetry, and it happens to be the method that really engages students with their creativity and critical thinking.

With poetry journals, students are expected to reflect on poems they’ve read in class (or on their own), either by writing a response to the poem or what captivated them about the poem. From there, they also write about possible inspirations the poem has given them to write their own poem.

To begin their process of writing their own poem in the journal, students are tasked with simple, introductory activities like personification story to get their creative juices flowing. From there, we talk about possible ways to convert their ideas into a poetic structure of their choosing (e.g. free verse or formal verse).

The first type of poem I have students try to write in their journal is a poem that focuses on emotional exploration. For example, students might be asked to write a poem that shows—not tells—emotions such as happiness, sadness, joy, anger, hope, or loss.

It’s the showing part that often troubles students as now they’re figuring out how to use literary devices such as similes, metaphors, personification, or imagery to capture the essence of the emotion. At the same time, though, that’s the beauty of this activity, making it one of the more challenging creative ways to teach poetry.