Free Verse from A Particular Point of View

There's a video version of this very article at Byrdseed.TV ➔

My go-to writing task is a free verse poem written from a particular perspective. I learned this idea from my boss, Sandi, who learned it from Joan Franklin Smutny (I think!).

  1. You can use ANYTHING as your prompt. A piece of art works well to introduce the idea, but you can move to writing once students get the hang of it.
  2. Take time observing and thinking about the prompt. Get students looking closely.
  3. Students pick a point of view from within the piece. This can be a person, obviously, but encourage students to be creative in their choice. You can scaffold this step by brainstorming possible perspectives as a class. It could be an animal, inanimate object, or even something from outside the image.
  4. Then, students write from that perspective, describing the scene as well as their feelings about the scene.

Scaffolding Free Verse

For writing, we’d use free verse poetry. This allows students to let go of grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc and just focus on picking interesting words and assembling clever phrases. But if you keep it too free, students will be stumped by the openness. So, again, I’d scaffold. Give them a set number of lines (5 or 7)? Give them some structure for each line (you could use anything here):

Line 1. a smell
Line 2. a sound
Line 3. a simile
Line 4. a verb ending in -ing, repeated three times
Line 5. an overall feeling

A Sample

The key to success in classrooms is scaffolding and modeling, so I’d always do a sample for my class.

Let’s use a classic piece of art for our sample: Wanderer above the Sea of Fog from Caspar David Friedrich.

  1. We’d just look and notice and think.
  2. Then, I’d ask students for possible points of view. Sure, there’s the guy. But there’s also several mountains. The fog. Perhaps the person who is looking at the man. There’s the rock he’s standing on.
  3. I’d pick a perspective.
  4. Then, let’s use that 5-line structure from above.

Here’s a sample from the rock’s point of view, writing about the man:

  1. the odor of your leather boot (a smell)
  2. the rustling of a coat (a sound)
  3. supporting you like a parent (a simile)
  4. waiting, waiting, waiting (-ing verb repeated thrice)
  5. I already miss you (an overall feeling)

Cool, huh?

And it’s easy to differentiate, since you can encourage different perspectives, adjust the structure, or even let students go totally free. This is high ceiling, low floor.

Here’s another possible structure:

  1. prepositional phrase (describe where)
  2. noun + verb (-ing)
  3. noun + verb (-ing)
  4. noun + verb (-ing)
  5. “even though…”
  6. start with a pronoun

From the man’s perspective:

  1. above the clouds
  2. wind whistling
  3. mist moving
  4. eyes watering
  5. even though I’d move on
  6. I knew I’d never forget

You can see a bunch of examples here at Byrdseed.TV including this Thanksgiving one.