With flowers for a fire pit and a library floor serving as stones, poet Terry Wooten brought a slice of Stone Circle to Norris Elementary School last week.
Onsite for three days to work with the 31 fourth grade students, the energetic and witty Wooten sparked creativity while tickling fancies. Along the way, students delved into memories before tapping one for a free verse poem they read to the class on Wednesday afternoon. Students shared about everything from making maple syrup to the Sleeping Bear Dunes to a runaway dog.
The exercises brought the students closer together in a supportive environment.
"It was fun because you get to share stuff with people you don't get to on a regular basis,” said Sidney Mains.
Listening to his classmates' poems, Clayton Burnheimer said their words brought the poems to life.
"I really get a clear picture in my mind when they read through it,” he said. "It was fun to hear everyone's [poem.]”
Giving seminars to students throughout the state allows Wooten to share his love of poetry as well as his extensive memory. With more than 500 poems in his head he always has just the right verse to drop into a conversation or spur on a class — or send them into a fit of giggles. While he works with students of all ages, from elementary school to high school, Wooten praised the fourth graders at Norris for their talent, perseverance and artistry.
"This is a very advanced workshop for fourth grade, I do the same workshop for high schoolers,” he noted.
This is the second consecutive year that he has worked with this group; last year he gave a workshop to the students when they were third graders. This continuity proved to be high-octane fuel for the students.
"I think they know me better and know what I expect,” Wooten said. "I kind of teach in a bizarre sort of way, I think they trust me and they like my approach to poetry — it's something different for them.”
"Their little brains were firing on all cylinders,” he added.
Wooten had students drawing the first part of the week: a memory map of their lives and a picture of their home to help spark ideas. Students then picked a spot on the drawings and talked about it, using the cadences of spoken words to flesh out the memories and boost their spontaneity.
Writing down those words became the poem's rough draft that students polished to remove "nerd words” — Wooten's term for dull, overused or non-descriptive words — and transform them into power words. Wooten also required students to insert similes and metaphors to enliven the memories. Wooten also banned rhymes from the works, stretching the students to think of poetry as something beyond the jingles or childhood pieces they know best.
"It was kind of a challenge because you didn't get to rhyme,” said Burnheimer of the free verse format.
After students read their poems to each other Wednesday afternoon, Wooten introduced a game from his Stone Circle gatherings to the students: poetry volley. He started out by saying a line and students spoke a line in turn if they were inspired by something the previous person said.
"We'll make a collage out of our poems,” said Wooten, whose repertoire ranges from Chaucer to Scooby Doo. "This is really cool because watch the pictures that appear in your mind.”
Weaving in the historical context of language and culture, Wooten reminded students that for millennia oral tradition that included poetry passed stories and values from one generation to the next.
"There was a time when there wasn't TV, there was a time when there wasn't radio,” he said. "There was a time when people entertained themselves — you're living in a very unusual time.”