How to Picture Place?
Throughout fall, Mr. Krantzman continues engaging students with poetry. In early October, he asks students to bring a photograph to class. He explains, I tell them they don’t have to be in the photograph, but they have to have been there when the photograph was taken. They can’t be off in another room. They may have taken the photo or were standing outside the frame, or they may be in the photo.
Students engage in sensory writing using the photograph they have brought to class. The photograph rests before them throughout the writing. They spend approximately 20 minutes in two- to four-minute intervals recording what they recall seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling when the Replica Omega Seamaster photograph was taken. Mr. Krantzman directs this by prompting students to consider aspects related to the senses as they write through guided imagery (Gambrell, Kapinus, & Wilson, 1987; Geske, 1992; Jampole, Mathews, & Konopale, 1994; Lazear, 1991). Next, he collects the photographs and reissues them to the students so that each student has a new photograph. Mr. Krantzman then asks students to tell another peer a possible story related to the photograph. After this rehearsing, students write a quick story. To facilitate this, Mr. Krantzman prompts, “Think about the photograph. Consider where and when you think it takes place and imagine a possible story. What might have happened” This prompt lays the groundwork for the character analysis work students will do later when reading Walter Dean Myers’s 145th Street: Short Stories.
Students spend 20 minutes writing the possible story. Mr. Krantzman returns the photograph and the new writing to each student. Students then have some options as they craft a poem. They might make use of their peer’s writing exclusively and craft a poem lifting words, phrases, and lines from the peer’s work and arranging these much like one might do to craft a found poem (Dunning & Stafford, 1992). They might create their own text based on their original writing, or they might elect to create a hybrid text based on their sensory writing and what their peer wrote. Mr. Krantzman expects students to try each engagement and to bring at least three of the works through a revising and editing process.
In Sofia’s second poem (see Figure 3), based on a photograph taken at a wedding, she explains how Cage’s use of punctuation influenced her writing: My second piece is my picture poem, which I don’t think is my absolute best work. The reason I put it here is because I learned a thing or two about punctuation Breitling Replica Watches in poetry. I can use it to create pauses when I need it to create an effect. I didn’t just learn that by myself. John Cage helped a bit there. Just as Sofia has observed Mr. Krantzman as bricpleur, here she too engages as one: using the photograph and recalled stories to craft a poem with potentially new insights. In “Memories,” we see the sensory details Sofia has included in the final draft, as well as her use of extended metaphor, approximations with line breaks and punctuation. Yet there is also unexplored territory. One thinks here of Vinz’s (2007) notions of missed readings that she characterizes as “disquiet easy responses”. In rereading the photograph through sensory details, Sofia seems to come to a detail that may well have been initially missed: “And when you checked out that dim picture/You weren’t happy./You could barely see/The expressions in faces.” The poem that she makes by repositioning the photograph alongside recalled sensory information and an imagined story is an example of bricolage.
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