Baseball and Poetry

From now until the end of the school year, my seventh graders will be playing with poetry. What with testing and all, poetry is a simple way to get them to keep them minds open while not overloading them. With seventh graders, it can be somewhat of a challenge because many of them don't believe they can write anything at all let alone poetry. I have about 50 different types of form poetry that I pull out from time to time depending on the abilities of my students. And although I usually despise fill-in-the-blank poems, sometimes they are the little spark that will ignite the fire. If I am being perfectly honest, I think my real interest in poetry was kindled in 10th grade by Mr. Albert, who had us start with acrostic poems. Then we moved on to other simple forms like haiku, and others. By the next year, I was attempting sonnets (holy crap!) and such.

Anyway, one of the poems my students wrote this past week was what I call a Five-Sense poem as the word gathering incorporates all five senses. It is a simple poem, and for the most part, they are quite dry. This year, one class asked me to model for them how I come up with lines without just stating the obvious about a subject. For example: fire trucks are red; they sound like a siren; they feel like metal. Blech! Typically this is what I get, but this year has been a little better as I modeled. Go figure.

Not to say that this is amazing poetry, but here is my example that I created in front of my students. We were working on alliteration, simile, and concrete details:

"Baseball"

Baseball is red dirt stains on ragged road grays.
It tastes like stale seventh-inning bubble gum infused with sunflower shards.
It thumps when horsehide connects with well-worn leather
And smells like overpriced hot dogs humming under the heat lamp and humidity.
It feels like freight trains colliding at home plate.
Baseball pulses through my veins.

And the best part was this morning when a girl came up to me and said, "I don't even like baseball, but that was a good poem." This from a self-proclaimed hater of poetry, too!

(If anyone wants the template, let me know, and I'll send it to you.)