POEMS


 * POEMS**

As a novice teacher of poetry, and for that matter a novice student of poetry, I found myself teaching several tools for reading poetry with little overall design. My students and I learned plenty of vocabulary terms about poetry, and had a general idea of how those pieces fit together, but no guiding plan for examining a given poem.

When it came time for the final exam, I wanted my students to show they understood the vocabulary elements, and the process of explicating a poem. They would go through the process of explicating two of four given poems, and would have to use their vocabulary terms correctly, and completely. I was worried, though, that they wouldn't be able to remember all of the general areas of things to look for in a poem.

So, I found some poetry explication mnemonic devices, and tried them out with the class. None of these worked. A mnemonic only works if it complete, but also memorable. After trying out a couple on my students, one student, “CC,” piped up. “Why not just POEMS?”


 * **P** is the author's purpose. Why is this being written? Who is the audience?
 * **O** is an overview. What kind of poem is it? What is the theme?
 * **E** is emulation. What is the reader taking away from the story of the poem? What elements of poetry stand out as vital to the poem's theme and purpose?
 * **M** is mechanics. What kind of literary devices, imagery, metaphor are used in the poem?
 * **S** is sound. What sound effects are used? What is the rhyme and rhythm, and where is there alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia?

Of course, this worked brilliantly. The word is, obviously, memorable in this context. The “P,” the “M,” and the “S” were exact categories we had previously talked about in class. The ideas behind the other two letters were a bit squishy, but they each did fill a need. My students in CC's class did spectacularly on the final. I brought her idea to the a later period of the same class, and they understood it, but for some reason didn't latch on to it as well. There was something about CC's creation process that sparked her classmates, and it didn't translate well.

Adapting this idea to other explication ideas (for example visual arts, or story problems from math, or primary sources in social studies) may work. The ideas are sound, but the mnemonic is pretty particular. My students were in the sixth grade, and I can see this idea working for anybody of that age or older. Younger kids will probably be enjoying poetry on a different level, so this kind of tool is unnecessary.