Infusing poetry throughout the school year rather than restricting it to just one unit is one of our goals. There are many benefits to having more poetry in classrooms. One of them is the supportive structure it provides for student writers. During this school year, we used pastiche as a tool to help our writers celebrate the beauty of the poetry they were reading. Pastiche is a technique that mimics the style, the structure, and even the content of an author (or artist) in a way that is intended to be a tribute.
Using pastiche allowed our writers to pay homage to the authors of the poems they have read and admired while enabling them to practice the techniques and styles of these authors, essentially using poems as writing coaches.
Getting Started with Pastiche
We’ve done this type of activity in one class sitting, but we’ve also used the same poem for different purposes for a week before using pastiche as our final culminating activity. The process that we follow is the same one that we would use with any mentor text. If you haven’t used pastiche with your poets, here’s how we help students channel their inner William Carlos Williams, Billy Collins, or Natasha Trethewey.
We start by displaying the poem on the document camera and either telling students a few things about the poet or having them do some quick (five-minute) research of their own. Knowing even a few things about the poet often helps us understand the poem better.
After we read the poem aloud, we have a brief, informal discussion about what the poem is about. We allow a free discussion without any judgment of anyone’s interpretation. We want students to feel comfortable sharing what they notice and what they think. If we know something about the inspiration for the poem, we’ll share it now. Or we may try to imagine what the inspiration for the poem was. For example, when we read “History Lesson” by Natasha Trethewey, we imagine the photo that inspired it.
Next, we ask students what they notice. The first time or two we do this, we’ll model noticing something about the poem. For example, in “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams we may point out how we notice that the whole poem is a total of 16 words. We encourage students to notice structure, craft, and content. They may notice details like the amount of white space, use of interesting punctuation, word choice, or line length.
We are open to any conversation about the poem and mark things up as they share, creating a list of the things students have noticed to support them during the next step. At this point, we may have some teachable moments if the poem contains a literary element that we haven’t previously spoken about. We can give it a name when we notice it, giving students another craft move to add to their repertoire.
Excerpt from “History Lesson”
Here is a chart of student observations from “History Lesson”:
After this activity, we ask students to write their own poem following the style and structure of the mentor poem. Sometimes we’ll have a prompt to help students. For example, when we’ve done this activity with “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams, we’ve asked students to think about an event from their lives that “a lot depended upon.” Other times we haven’t given any other guidance other than the steps above. In both cases, we’ve seen amazing work, so we’re sure that giving extra guidance isn’t necessary.
This is our modeling of “History Lesson,” thinking aloud as we use the chart to mimic Natalie Trethewey:
I am nine in this photograph, sitting
on the red brick steps of 18 Brighton Ave,
my hand stretching across my brother’s back
across a freshly washed t-shirt.
Student Pastiche Samples
Both of these poems are based on a structure used by Kwame Alexander in Crossover that we called definition poems. Both of these students used the structure to write a poem as a reading response to a text they were reading.
These student poets are mimicking the style of the Billy Collins poem “On Turning Ten”:
Using pastiche has given our students a way to express their ideas while they stand on the shoulders of published poets, copying style, structure, and conventions until they’ve integrated some new writing skills into their own writing repertoires.
