Getting creative: bricks, not straw

I've just spent the greater part of two days trying to come up with some ideas for middle schoolers writing poetry. I've been trying to be non-teacherly, interesting, clever and captivating, all the while managing to deliver what they probably perceive as a teacherly, boring, lame and mind-numbing message that they have all heard before, namely, write, write, WRITE!!!

I keep trying to sneak up on that message from the bushes, so they don't see it coming. I don't think I'm fooling anyone. At best, I hope to make them look at poetry from a new perspective--not as stilted, enforced rhyme and structure imposed upon them by the curriculum, but as communication. Poetry can present their lives as readily as their mobile phone cameras or their continual texting. (It might even be more interesting: does anyone even THINK anymore before snapping off a photo or texting the obvious to their group of friends?) In fact, poetry has more in common with these methods than I'd like to admit. What a poet is doing is condensing his message to the most concise terms, the words most apt; he (or she) is attempting to provide an image, a picture, a snapshot of a moment in time, his time, his life. The differences lie in care and composition. Rather than the haphazard results of spontaneous  text and photo, poetry provides a more thoughtful, more polished nugget of information: one that will withstand some use.

Which brings me to my illustrative example. The Three Little Pigs. We all have the story down. Pigs 1,2 & 3. Building houses. Big bad wolf, doing his huff and puff best. Straw doesn't work. Twigs are not much better. Bricks are the answer. Happy pigs, wolf stew for dinner. 

If you switch the field of play from real estate to communication, you get the same results. Random, impulsive pictures don't hold up without text; abbreviated, unconsidered text doesn't stand up to our requirements either. What people need is communication that is shaped and formed and put together neatly and in workman-like fashion: bricks and mortar, with perhaps a touch of imagination. Writing poetry is like masonry school. You learn by trial and error how to shape your words to the task, how to put them together in meaningful ways, and how to use them economically and to best effect. You may never write poetry on a regular basis, but you can learn from it how to make your communications stand out from the crowd. Just think for a moment about Barack Obama, speaking. Solid brick construction. Then switch the channel to George Bush. So much straw that he could audition for The Wizard of Oz (but can he sing "If I Only Had a Brain"?) There's poetry in our new president's past. I'd bet money on it.

All this would seem to indicate that as poet laureate, I should be a great speaker on Monday. I'm not sure that's true, but I am working on it....