The Art of Imitation
Cultivating Student Writing through Imitation Exercises
“I learned that Bishop writes as if everything is alive.”
Inspiring words for any writer, the above quote comes from one of my students, after writing a poem imitating the style and content of Elizabeth Bishop. This was one of many insights students gained during a productive, energizing, and affirmative two-day writing workshop that I want to feature in this post.
Context
These juniors are almost halfway through a 2-year IB English course and preparing for their first major assessment: the Individual Oral Commentary (IOC). This assessment comes after they have read three works (Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and selected poems of Elizabeth Bishop). During the IOC, each student enters the assessment room, is given a 40-line passage that I have taken from one of the three works, then has 20 minutes to prepare a 10-minute commentary on the passage. This assessment is worth 25% of the student’s overall IB grade, but more nerve-wracking for the students is the idea of having to talk for an entire 10 minutes about a single passage of literature.
I prepare students for this task in a number of ways: they each offer two presentations so as to get used to planning a 10 minute commentary, they write short weekly pieces to get used to close reading of literature, and they practice the specific commentary a few times.
But in the past, I have found that the most successful preparation has been to ask students to write their own pieces of fiction and poetry. In an older IB rubric, one criterion assessed students ability to “appreciate the writer’s choices” which, though vague, gave me the original insight for this exercise: the best way to appreciate another writer’s choices is to have made one’s own choices as a writer. As numerous teachers, most notably Penny Kittle, have discovered, an essential part of teaching writing is to write beside the students. And likewise for students, I find that writing a poem is crucial in truly understanding Bishop’s choices as a writer.
Although the IOC is initially daunting, when students approach the task as a writing workshop feedback session, identifying and appreciating their fellow writer’s choices in achieving a specific purpose can be “fun” (and yes, more than one student over the decade I have administered the IOC has said that exact word).
Getting There
These poems were written over two class periods using the following structure:
Brainstorming
As a class, we briefly discussed Bishop’s preference for describing small moments or a specific scene in lieu of grand philosophical statements and then I asked students to write for 10 minutes about their own moment or scene.
Drafting
Before drafting their own poem, I asked them to pick a Bishop poem that could serve as their inspiration and then type that poem for 10 minutes. I have used this technique before, having heard of its use in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and I have found it is an effective tool for helping students to better understand such nebulous concepts as the “flow” or “rhythm” of a writer. In doing this task myself last week, I realized how Bishop anchors her lines with identical or rhyming words in a way that I had not understand in over 20 years of reading her poetry.
Immediately following this exercise, I had students draft (or re-draft) their own “Bishop” poem. This took us to the end of class, and I asked students to do nothing over the next two days but let the poem sit.
Revision
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The next class began with a short writer’s workshop. I asked readers to make two types of comments:
- Categorical: “In this passage, your writing is like Bishop because [identify technique]”
- Causal: “In this passage, your use of [identify technique] caused me to [see, think, feel, etc] [insert what you thought]”
Although I offered students these templates, I explained that they should use them in their mind to form thoughts but they only needed to mention the main points in their actual comments.
Student wrote comments directly in a Google Doc, and then writers were given a short time to use the comments to guide their final revisions.
Publishing
And then the students were done. No grade, no assessment, just an exercise in writing that I then asked them to share with the world. Using their school email accounts, they logged on to Medium and published their stories on a quickly created site.
Reflection
Finally, I asked them to quickly complete a Google form with one thing they noticed about Bishop’s writing. The writing was hurried and imperfect, but their insights were astute:
- “She uses plenty more figures of speech than I first realized and there is a decent amount that you can write about and learn from a small moment.”
- “She also likes to create a lot of lists without and combine phrases without using conjunctions, aka asyndeton.”
- “You can definitely hear her voice in her poems, as she likes to question herself and use exclamations.”
- “I learned that Bishop has an almost passive aggressive way of writing poems. It’s often times hard to realize what she is writing about until you read over the poems multiple times.”
- “I learned that in order for Bishop to write a whole book full of poems, means that she has a lot of emotions that she is writing down on paper through poems, and it is impossible to imitate that unless you are truly writing about an emotion that you are trying to let out.”
- “The most important thing that I learned from Bishop was when I found out how many drafts she went through for her poems. However beautiful and complex her ideas may be, she didn’t just naturally produce them. It took lots of writing and revision to get there.”
Lessons reaffirmed
We learn how to write through writing
These two classes reminded me that students can learn more about literature and writing through a short, pleasant experience than an endless series of literary seminars. Clearly, given the references to such terms as “asyndeton,” I have taught these students technical terms and I believe that having conceptual awareness of such techniques enables a higher level of thinking about writing. But learning only truly happens when a person applies skills and knowledge and so I am reminded that students must write.
Writing communities matter
The simple pleasure of seeing each others poems online and the surprised pride of one student to learn that some anonymous reader had “clapped” her piece were bittersweet moments for me. I am happy the students had this moment, but it reminded me that I have not done enough with this class to cultivate a true community of writers. I also wrote a draft of my poem but was interrupted by pressing bureaucratic matters and have not yet revised my piece: this is symptomatic of my teaching experience this year and, I think, part of why I feel this class has not been quite as successful as others.
Writers write, and writing communities write together. These two days reaffirmed these simple truths about the classroom and I look forward to returning to these core principles.
If you are curious, please head to this site to read the students’ poems.
