POEMS TO SHARE:
strategies for using the work of contemporary
Australian poets in the secondary English classroom
Tony Britten and Fiona Curran
M
any teachers reading this article may share
my experience of feeling tired of teaching the
same old (frequently dead and English) poets
to their secondary classes. Teachers I have spoken to
have also shared the difficulties I have experienced in
accessing the work of more contemporary Australian
poets that they would like to experiment with and use
in their classrooms. While the poetry of such Australian
luminaries as Bruce Dawe, John Foulcher, Rosemary
Dobson and Gwen Harwood demands continued study
in Australian classrooms it is nevertheless refreshing and
exciting to explore the poetry of new Australian voices.
Poems to Share is a resource that I feel will help students
and teachers in this exploration.
To fulfill the requirements of the NSW 7–10 English
Syllabus, Stage 4 students must study “a wide range
of types of poems”.1 This study must give students
experience of “a widely defined Australian literature”.
Stage 5 students must consider “a variety (of poems)
drawn from different anthologies and/or study of one
or two poets.2 Stage 6 builds on this learning. Poems to
Share will satisfy or suggest approaches to these syllabus
requirements for both stages.
Where to use the Poems to Share
cards
While the Poems to Share boxed set was not designed for
specific use in the secondary classroom I feel it would be
most appropriate for use in Year 10 or Year 11 classrooms
– primarily due to the sophistication of the poetry rather
than its content. It would also be an ideal resource for
gifted and talented or extension groups, and could be
used in creative writing sessions as well as poetry classes.
When I first encountered the set, its immediate appeal
to me was its potential for use with students who have
elected the Poetry category in the HSC Extension 2
course. I have often been surprised to find Extension 2
students who, though they demonstrate genuine passion
for poetry, are not able to name a single contemporary
Australian poet – apart from those they have studied
at school. This resource quickly exposes inexperienced
readers of poetry to the different voices, concerns and
styles of forty contemporary Australian poets, and offers
them strategies to begin composing their own poetry or
to start getting their poetic muscles into shape through
some achievable and appealing exercises. Students can
1
2
NSW Board of Studies 7–10 English Syllabus p19
NSW Board of Studies 7–10 English Syllabus p31
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easily further investigate the work of poets whose style
or subject matter appeals to them through the Red Room
website, which also provides other sites of publication for
the many poets who have been involved in their projects,
and both audio and textual resources for poetic works.
A great part of the appeal of Poems to Share is the way
both the poems and the activities demand the reader
consider the form and voice of poetry. The Notes from
the Marking Centre annually refer to the failure by too
many students, particularly those writing free verse, to
investigate the form of their chosen category.
Perhaps the most useful application I could see for Poems
to Share is that the activities might offer jaded teachers
(and we can all feel that way at times) fresh ways to
look at poems or to teach the composing of poetry. As
I perused the cards I was often thinking of how I could
apply the activity, if not the poem, to invigorate an
existing activity in a unit of work that was becoming tired.
Many of the activities, if not all the poems, would find
welcome homes in Stage 5 classrooms.
English Teachers Association of NSW
POEMS TO SHARE: strategies for using the work of contemporary
Australian poets in the secondary English classroom
Activities from Poems To Share
1. Quick writes, warm ups and focusing
exercises:
Part of the appeal of this resource is its potential for use in
short writing activities that might be used at the start of
a creative writing lesson, perhaps even for a unit focusing
on the composition of short stories. For example, the
activity accompanying the excerpt from Ian McBryde’s
poem Beyond Omerta, asks students to:
“Write three lines that describe what happens to your
street, garden or room as the sun goes down.”
The anxiety many students feel about composing poetry
– indeed any creative writing – can be overcome if they
begin with small and achievable tasks. Whereas this
activity only requires students to compose three lines it
may be that they simply complete an image in a task that
is designed to warm up their imagination.
One of the cards features the following excerpt from
Nathan Shepherdson’s Splice:
/if you force the stars through a sieve light suddenly
becomes edible/
Students could be asked to complete the line and create
an image that explains what happens “if you force the
stars through a sieve”. Post Masterchef it is unlikely you
will need to explain what a sieve is, as I had to do a few
years ago when it featured as a prop in a play Year 8
were exploring. The class could create an interesting
group poem by listing all their single line compositions.
Alternatively this could inspire an “if ” poem where
students begin each line of their composition by
describing a possibility.
What also appeals about Poems to Share is that many of
the activities will be enjoyable to students. The activity
accompanying Hovering, a poem composed by Gareth
Jenkins and students of St Mary’s Public School, invites
students to:
Draw two aliens and in speech bubbles have them write
four line friendship poems to each other.
I can see Stage 4 students enjoying this task. This card would
also allow students to begin their investigation of the truly
wonderful genre of Martian Poetry, a term used to describe
the work of poets such as Craig Raine and Christopher Reid.
It originated from Raine’s 1979 collection A Martian Sends
a Postcard Home. Martian poetry frequently describes
everyday objects from unusual angles by using inventive
mETAphor • Issue 1, 2011
metaphor and simile. The term comes from the title poem
of Raine’s collection, in which the reader perceives the world
through the inexperienced eyes of a visiting Martian. Often
the poem functions as a riddle and the reader has to discern
the familiar object or the action the Martian has described.
Silent or wide reading
Many teachers (of the Cold War era perhaps) open their
English lessons with USSR (Uninterrupted Sustained Silent
Reading), but usually the focus is fiction, rather than poetry,
non-fiction or drama.
• A possible use of Poems to Share is to ask students
to simply sit in silence and read the poems as they are
passed around the class. This could be done in small
groups using more than one set of cards.
• Students could pass the poems, as they read them, to
other students they feel might have a resonance with
the words or imagery; they could note down poems
that seem to pair together, or to be directly opposed
to one another. This would probably work best in
groups who each have their own boxed set of cards.
Student sharing
• Students could be asked to design their own Poems
to Share card by choosing an excerpt from a poem
they have read as part of their wide reading or
investigation.
I have found that this wide reading activity works best
when students have to demonstrate their investigation
of poetry through the use of both hard copy anthologies
and online sources. If students do use online sources of
poetry it is probably worthwhile to provide them with a
hot list of useful sites.
• Students could be asked to select an excerpt from the
poem of their choice and devise an activity for the
reverse of the card.
If they are finding it difficult to select an excerpt they
could be asked to focus on a line or a section of the
poem that includes an image that they find striking or
intriguing.
2. Ideas for poetry anthologies
Many units require students to move beyond the
appreciation and analysis of poetry and require them to
compose their own anthology of poems. Poems to Share
is a terrific resource for allowing students to negotiate the
nature of the writing tasks they might complete for such
an anthology.
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POEMS TO SHARE: strategies for using the work of contemporary
Australian poets in the secondary English classroom
• composing a series of poems which emerge from five
different activities suggested by their peers for a single
card from the set.
• a combination of peer composed activities and
activities from the official Poems to Share cards.
• re-compose poems taking lines from the works in the
Poems to Share box on a chosen theme; for example,
a 5-line taste poem, consisting of lines from five
different poems.
Teachers could also:
• publish the student composed activities on a school
intranet, blog, or wiki.
• recycle the best activities for use with the following
year’s students.
Yellow, orange, red, green, blue anthology
• The cards in the Poems to Share box are printed in
one of five colours. Construct an anthology of five
poems by choosing five (could be less) differently
coloured cards from the Poems to Share pack.
Complete the activity on the back of each card to help
you compose a poem.
Anthology roulette
• Compose an anthology of poems by publicly picking
five (could be less) cards at random from the boxed
set. Alternatively students could select six or seven
cards and choose the five activities that most appeal
to them.
3. Negotiating the curriculum: Student
devised activities
Students could be asked to design their own (teacher
approved!) activities as alternatives to those published on
the Poems to Share cards.
They might design an activity:
• in pairs
• for another student in their class
• for students in another English class
• for students at another (real or imagined) school
Activity notice board
Teacher pins up Poems to Share cards on the back wall
of the classroom and students post their own activities
underneath for their peers to select from. A student
might construct an anthology by:
• choosing five activities composed by their peers for
• share the best of the student composed activities
with the Red Room Company by emailing them to
[email protected]
4. Representation Task
The Red Room Company’s public art projects have often
explored the relationship between poetry and visual arts.
You can look at some of these projects on the Red Room
website.
Activity
Select a card from the Poems to Share pack. Imagine you
are the graphic designer who has been employed by The
Red Room Company and Corban and Blair to select an
appropriate image or images to illustrate or represent the
poem on your chosen card.
You should submit the following to the Artistic Director:
a) a copy of your chosen image (you need not have
designed the image yourself ) with full bibliographical
details.
b) a written report or oral presentation in which you
explain why you chose the image. You should refer to
or quote from the poem in your report/ presentation.
If students are completing an oral presentation they
should begin by reading their poem to the class or the
marker.
5. “Justify your title” activity
Too often students ignore the titles of poems, and their
significance. Here is an activity that asks students to
reflect on how a poem’s title might capture one of its key
aspects.
five different cards
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English Teachers Association of NSW
POEMS TO SHARE: strategies for using the work of contemporary
Australian poets in the secondary English classroom
Phase One: Group work
7. Some other brief activities
• Divide class into groups of no more than four. Each
• change EITHER the first, OR the last, line of a selected
group gets a card.
• One student is chosen to read their poem to their group.
• Each student then composes a new or alternative
title for the poem and a short justification for their
choice (perhaps a maximum of four sentences or four
reasons presented in dot points).
• Each student shares their title and justification with
the group.
• Group votes/ decides on the best new title.
Phase Two: Sharing with the class
• A representative from each group reads the poem to
the class.
• Each group member shares their title and justification
with the class.
• Class votes on the best new title to see if the class
view parallels with the group view.
You could add a layer to this task by asking one student in
each group to justify why they feel the poet’s original title is
the best.
The excerpt from Andrew Slattery’s The Glacier could work
well to model this task to the class.
6. “A rose by any other name?”:
The importance of a word
Poetry has been described as the “best and the least
words in the most fitting arrangement”. This activity is
intended to get students to reflect on the importance of
word choice in a poem and the impact of the drafting
process.
Ask students to select a poem from the Poems to Share
set. Their task is to change one word of their choice in
the poem to see how that may impact on the meaning or
mood of the poem. Teachers might model this activity
with a card from the set before students embark on the
task.
Each student should briefly explain:
• why they chose the word they have changed
• how the change affects the meaning or mood of the
poem
Students might also find a list of synonyms and/or
antonyms for the word they have substituted. Once they
have made a choice from these lists they can then explain
how such a substitution might change or alter the poem.
mETAphor • Issue 1, 2011
poem or poem excerpt. Justify your choice of line to
change; and explain your version of this line.
• find a poem that contains at least one repeated word
in it (for example, Fiona Wright’s poem ‘747’, or
Andrew Slattery’s ‘The Glacier’). Change this word to
another word in order to change the meaning of the
poem.
• rewrite your chosen poem using a different sensory
focus, for example change the strong visual language
in Lachlan Brown’s ‘Evensong’ to a soundscape of the
evening, or the soundscape of David Prater’s ‘Karin
Revisited’ to olfactory language (smell and taste).
• using one of the poems as your inspiration, write a
poem composed entirely of sounds made of nonsense
syllables that tries to convey the same mood.
How to access Poems to Share cards
Poems to Share is a boxed set of poetry cards produced
as a collaboration between The Red Room Company and
Corban and Blair: designers of stationery and life style
products. The pack consists of forty colourful laminated
cards featuring original poems by contemporary
Australian poets from across the generations, all of whom
have featured in Red Room’s national public poetry
projects. The poems are drawn from the archive of works
commissioned by Red Room. On the back of each card
you will also find activities that are designed to tease the
imagination of students, help them enjoy and understand
the poem and inspire them to compose their own poetry.
You may have seen poems by Red Room poets in The Sun
Herald’s “Extra” lift out during 2009 and 2010. Poems to
Share features prominent Australian poets well known
to English teachers in NSW, such as joanne burns, Kate
Fagan and Emily Ballou, alongside the poetry of emerging
and regional artists. Many of the cards feature accessible
excerpts from longer poems but the full text, along with a
biography of each poet, can be conveniently found on the
Red Room’s website – http://redroomcompany.org
The poetry resource pages of The Red Room Company’s
website were included (for illustrative purposes) as a
suggested text for study for Units 3 (Perspectives) and 4
(Making Connections) of the National Curriculum Senior
Literature Course (Draft Consultation Version 1.10).
You can purchase Poems to Share from the Red Room
Company website on the Goodies to Buy page:
http://redroomcompany.org/goodies or directly from
Tamryn at the Red Room offices on 02 9319 5090.
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