Two Poems
We've been working on poetry in my Grade 8 class. The process is to find a poet we admire, explore how they write and adopt an element of their technique in our own poems. As I worked to model for students I wrote two poems. The one I shared for students to work on with me is called "Medusa". Gwen Harwood's cycle of poems called "1927" gave me inspiration. The other poem I didn't share because I'm a little unsettled by it. The inspiration came from a poem I stumbled across by Stephane Mallarme. Every now and then a poem or a piece of prose will reach off the page and punch you: not just because it's a great poem; also, I think, because it is saying something you are just then ripe to hear. My poem responds to the idea of cutting into the future but the metaphor seemed too raw to use as a model for students. Still, I think it's a poem worth sharing. Here's Mallarme's poem and then my own. And below that is the my poem "Medusa...