Now that you have read about 2/3rds of your book and have learned enough about WWII, war tactics, and concentration camps established during Hitler’s regime, we are going to practice flexing our creative writing and poetic muscles! The Holocaust and WWII are a gruesome story, one that is not always easy to read about. The cruelty seems senseless, but knowing the truth is important, because as they say, that is the only way we can prevent something like this from happening again.
Your task is going to be to use your “favorite” excerpts from your novel to create a FOUND POEM with a visual to accompany your poem…. A found poem is created from a collection of words or phrases found within the text.
So, how will you create this??
1. Skim back over the selections of your novel you have established as being profound, moving, interesting, funny, etc…
2. Select a minimum of 15 lines, quotes, or short phrases, arrange them into poetry form. Try to do this thematically, for example quotes that all focus on death, camps, fighting/battles, sarcasm, the SS officers, airplanes, treatment of the prisoners, heaven, hell, etc……
3. BEFORE you type them into your blog, write them on paper. This will allow you to rearrange them if something doesn’t make sense, or to remove words that make your passage more like prose and less like a poem.
4. You may choose ANY theme you would like for your poem and any lines, but you must include lines from the novel you read…. That’s right…. Underneath your poem I would like to see fifteen citations for the fifteen lines/phrases you have chosen. You will not get full credit for a blog without these citations (i.e. maximum 10/20).
5. One of your fifteen lines (or a repetition of a line) will become the title of your poem. Yes, the title is also part of found poetry.
6. Finally, after you have written your poem, find a visual from the internet to go with it. These do NOT need to be images specifically from WWII, they can be symbolic to certain words or phrases in your poem! Be creative and have fun with this!!!
EXAMPLE POEM:
CHILDREN IN THE FLAMES (A found poem from Elie Weisel’s Night)
Never shall I forget that night….which has turned my life into one long night
It was a nightmare.
We were gradually drawing closer to the ditch, from which an infernal heat was rising,
Flames were leaping up from the ditch, gigantic flames.
Yes I saw it – saw it with my own eyes,
Those children in the flames.
Bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky
I did not believe that they would burn people our age.
Humanity would never tolerate it.
Humanity is not concerned with us.
Today anything is allowed.
Those children in the flames.
Flames turned to dust.
(ideas for images…. Representation of night, flames, the devil, children, dust…etc.)
1 comment:
When you say you want citations, you're wanting the page number from every sentence right?
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