We conducted this activity with a small group of mixed-age students ranging from fourth to ninth grade. First, we read Carl Sandburg's "Pennsylvania," a short poem which is rich in images and concrete referents to Pennsylvania's landscape and towns--elements we felt would make the poem accessible to young students with limited and varied knowledge of how to read poetry. In our discussion of the poem, we focused on these images, and talked about what made them specifically Pennsylvanian. The students related to the coal, mountains, miners, and rivers present in "Pennsylvania." We then asked our students to write about their own Pennsylvanias--for them, Bellefonte, a small central PA town not far from Penn State's campus--in isolated sentences that focused on images from their experiences. They came up with some rich stuff, including family rituals and landscape description, food and cultural details. We read our sentences aloud and began the process of combining our sentences into a found poem of sorts, one that would stand as representative of our collective PA.
This activity could be easily adapted to suit any town, city, or state. I've discovered that strong resources for poems about place come from anthologies organized by region, though "Pennsylvania" came via some past reading experience with Sandburg and, admittedly, some intrepid Googling--in my opinion, an inestimably helpful teaching tool! We found that the students' enthusiasm for their hometown and home state contributed quite positively to the writing experience and to the quality of the overall discussion. For reference, here's the Sandburg poem:
Pennsylvania
I have been in Pennsylvania,
In the Monongahela and Hocking Valleys.
In the blue Susquehanna
On a Saturday morning
I saw a mounted constabulary go by,
I saw boys playing marbles.
Spring and the hills laughed.
And in places
Along the Appalachian chain,
I saw steel arms handling coal and iron,
And I saw the white-cauliflower faces
Of miner's wives waiting for the men to come home from the day's work.
I made color studies in crimson and violet
Over the dust and domes of culm at sunset.
Pennsylvania
I have been in Pennsylvania,
In the Monongahela and Hocking Valleys.
In the blue Susquehanna
On a Saturday morning
I saw a mounted constabulary go by,
I saw boys playing marbles.
Spring and the hills laughed.
And in places
Along the Appalachian chain,
I saw steel arms handling coal and iron,
And I saw the white-cauliflower faces
Of miner's wives waiting for the men to come home from the day's work.
I made color studies in crimson and violet
Over the dust and domes of culm at sunset.
Thanks for posting this exercise. As a fiction writer originally from New Jersey who often chooses to set my stories within the marshes, cranberry bogs, and lagoons of my childhood home, your writing exercise for PA inspires me to find the richness of the place where I currently live. I also think your prompt represents a good way to ground young writers. By having young writers examine the specific place where they live and the people who surround them you are helping them tap into a place they may carry within them no matter where they go as teenagers and adults.
ReplyDeleteunrelated fun quote: "Words are clamor-filled shells. There's many a story in the miniature of a single word!"--Gaston Bachelard
I suppose writing about home, or one's home region, is an almost universally useful prompt: an open-ended question that allows almost anyone to open up about a variety of experiences and details that are interesting and personally important to them. The question, combined with the poem by Sandburg (who, granted, I think of as being an Illinois poet, not a Pennsylvanian), is indeed inspiring after a certain fashion. I'm glad you had some good results with it.
ReplyDeleteI wonder how successfully the activity could be ported to discussing places people have visited, and thus have a tangential (but perhaps very vivid!) connection to. ?