For this month’s Free First Saturday event, I assisted teaching artist May Lee-Yang with a poetry activity for national poetry month. We had a couple different options for the types of poems participants could create:
List poem– participants follow the prompt “things that make me happy” to create a poem in the format of a list
Cento poem (or patchwork poem)-- participants cut ouyou lines from existing poems on colored sheets of paper and rearrange them to make their own poem
Collaborative poem– participants write their own lines of poetry about spring and add them to the paper taped up to the window
It was a pretty busy event, and a lot of visitors stopped by to create their own poems and were excited to write. We had a few kids who weren’t interested in writing but still wanted to make art, so we ended up with a few construction paper creations, and began presenting those as a “visual poetry” option to entice some of the kids who were hesitant to write to join in the activity. The kids who were excited to participate really enjoyed the activity, but compared to the other activities I’ve assisted with, some kids required a little bit more convincing to participate since they didn’t want to think about words, which is where the visual poetry option came in handy! I think the cento poem was especially helpful in getting participants to work with words because they didn’t have to create the poetry lines entirely on their own, so it makes the activity feel less intimidating for those who don’t normally do a lot of writing.