A creative activity in which I involved my junior class before the break required them to use details they took from a passage they respond to in the novel THE THINGS THEY CARRIED by Tim O'Brien. I usually model creative tasks for my students, and I'm sharing my process here with you, as I did with them.
Before we wrote, I took the back to the six war poems we had studied to begin the unit, and we reviewed the "poetic devices" each poet used. They were tasked with imitating one of the poems in every way they could. The exercise required them to note down words, phrases, or clauses that were particularly moving to them. Below is the list of words, etc. which I noted from the chapter called "Enemies".
"One morning in late July
They got into a fistfight.
The fight was vicious.
Went back and forth,
Wrapped an arm around his neck
Pinned him down
He hit him hard
He didn’t stop
His nose made a sharp snapping sound
Like a firecracker
Quick stiff punches"
Following the note taking, we reviewed the words, phrases, and clauses we had chosen, and pulled from them those we would use in our poems. Students chose the poem they wished to imitate, and set about writing their own poem. When they were done, they had to give the poem a title. I chose to imitate Randall Jarrell's "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner", and I titled it "Enemies", after the title of the chapter. Here is the result.
ENEMIES
Two men on our side, one morning in late July,
Got into a vicious fistfight. It went back and forth,
With quick, stiff punches, as one pinned the other,
Wrapped his arm around his neck, and hit him hard.
He didn’t stop. The other’s nose snapped, like a firecracker.
Copyright © 2009 by Teri K D Bannerman
Randall Jarrell's poem is here, with the note he included after it.The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
"A ball turret was a Plexiglas sphere set into the belly of a B-17 or B-24, and inhabited by two .50 caliber machine-guns and one man, a short small man. When this gunner tracked with his machine guns a fighter attacking his bomber from below, he revolved with the turret; hunched upside-down in his little sphere, he looked like the foetus in the womb. The fighters which attacked him were armed with cannon firing explosive shells. The hose was a steam hose." -- Jarrell's note.
