While talking to Guillaume about my inquiry project last week, it occurred to me that my exploration of poetry in this class came from my desire to show students that anyone can play with language, and that words have power (to provoke emotions in particular, when it comes to poetry). I started thinking about ways to make poetry seem less daunting to students, ways that they could come to see it with curiosity and playfulness rather than be intimidated/put off by it. We don’t have to be Shakespeare or Camões in order to use language in unexpected, yet intentional ways.

I was reminded of something I learned about in school – a group of writers and mathematicians (!) formed in France in the 1960s called OuLiPo: “Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle”. This group created by French novelist and poet Raymond Queneau used “obstacles” or restrictions as a way to stimulate creativity. For example: the technique called “n+7” required you to replace every noun in an existing text with the noun that follows seven entries after in the dictionary; another exercise called lipogramme required you to omit a letter altogether in your writing (Georges Perec wrote an entire novel in French without the letter e – except for the two es of his last name!).

I think that this playful approach to restrictions could truly encourage students to be creative and interested in poetry. It’s not dissimilar to gamification, in a sense, except it doesn’t require technology. Since then, I’ve been trying to come up with ways to do this in the classroom. The most obvious one, which I explored in this post, is to use magnetic words that students can assemble to create lines of poetry. This could be especially interesting with younger kids, who may still struggle with their handwriting and spelling. Also, it would be wonderful for writing a collective poem, where each group would come up with a couple of lines. (A great way to introduce co-creation and collaboration to little ones!)

I could ask older students to write about their favourite activity while omitting a specific letter, or in a specific rhyme pattern, or with each line ending in a specific sound, or using meaningful alliterations, or using metaphors only (while the other half of the class would use only analogies – learning the difference once and for all!), the possibilities are endless!

I look forward to coming up with more ideas and trying this out in a classroom. Please feel free to leave suggestions below!