The Lune Link

The students are studying immigration, explorers, or Native American cultures. They are studying community or New York City. The subjects change from class to class, year to year. I’m in their elementary school classrooms to teach poetry, but I particularly love the work they create when the lesson I bring in allows them to link to their newfound scholarly expertise, whatever it may be.

In this lesson I call the Lune Link, students use a haiku-like poetic form called the lune and photographs related to their studies to write brief, illuminating “snapshot” poems that make imaginative leaps from familiar content. The lune is a wonderfully simple form—three words in the first line, five words in the second line, and three words in the third line. It’s easy for even very young students to grasp, but its brevity also means that every word counts. The goal is to have students shine a light on details in the photos that they find compelling, using their recent studies to deepen and enrich their observations. Here’s a lune on climbing Mount Everest written by a third-grader whose class was studying explorers:

Tough spiky snow
Scary wind in the air
Me, like nothing
          —Eli (3rd grade)

Here’s another, by a fifth-grader reflecting on the Manhattan skyline:

New York’s going
to sleep, but every tower’s
still lit up
          —Matteo (5th grade)

Both the students and I are often happily surprised to see, in the poems they write, what a little lune-light can do.

I start the lesson by sharing two poems that model close observation. The first is William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Before I read it aloud I tell the students a little about the good doctor-poet from New Jersey: how he made house calls throughout the towns he served, often jotting down ideas for poems on his prescription pad as he went about his work; how he believed that the ordinary life and lives he saw in his community were fit subjects for poetry; and how he wrote his poems in the everyday—and uniquely American—language he heard spoken around him: informal, unadorned, direct.

The Red Wheelbarrow

So much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens
 

Often the first reaction I get from kids when I finish reading the poem is a kind of delighted confusion. “That’s a poem?” they scoff. It’s not fancy enough, they tell me. It doesn’t say anything important. But almost all are drawn to the poem’s first three words, So much depends. Something about these words beguiles them, and presents a kind of challenge, too. A few students might venture that so much depends on wheelbarrows or chickens because of their practical use to us. Occasionally a student might suggest that maybe noticing these things—the wheelbarrow, the rainwater, the chickens, the red and the white—is what’s important. It’s always a bit of magic when this happens.

The second poem I share is Gwendolyn Brooks’ “The Bean Eaters.” For very young students, you might want to use a poem from Brooks’ Bronzeville Boys and Girls, a wonderful collection of poem-portraits written for children about the young people in Brooks’ Chicago neighborhood. “Cynthia in the Snow” and “Gertrude” are two good choices for this exercise. In “The Bean Eaters,” Brooks creates a portrait of an old couple from the ordinary, unassuming things with which they have surrounded themselves: the “chipware” and “tin flatware” they use to eat their humble dinner, set on “plain and creaking wood.” The poem concludes with a list of things, as if the old man and the old woman to whom they belong are fading into a deeper obscurity even as we read about them; are, in fact, already almost gone, leaving behind nothing but these trinkets, these “beads and receipts and dolls and cloths, / tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.”

Like Williams, I tell the students, Brooks believed poetry should reflect the everyday lives and language and concerns of the people in the community where she lived, which in her case was Chicago’s South Side neighborhood. Her poems speak of the joys and satisfactions of daily life, but also of the racial and economic tensions that plagued the residents of this predominantly African American community. “If you wanted a poem you only had to look out of a window,” Brooks wrote in her autobiography. “There was material always, walking or running, fighting or screaming or singing.”

The Bean Eaters

They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.
Dinner is a casual affair.
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,
Tin flatware.

Two who are Mostly Good.
Two who have lived their day,
But keep putting on their clothes
And putting things away.

And remembering ...
Remembering, with twinklings and twinges,
As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that is full of
      beads and receipts and dolls and cloths, tobacco crumbs, vases
      and fringes.
 

I ask the students about the objects mentioned in the poem, and we talk about what these things might tell us about the old couple to whom they belong. The kids are almost always surprised, once we dive into the details, to see how much information any one of these objects can convey. Those dolls, for instance. What do they tell us about this old couple? The first response I get to this question is usually that the old man and old woman must have had a child once, maybe several children. What does it mean that they still have the dolls now, in their old age? I ask. It means they miss their kids, the students tell me, picking up on the haunting, left-behind feeling of the poem. Or that they’re hoping their grandkids will visit them, a student once offered. Or maybe, as another student once said, they are not the kind of dolls you play with but the kind you keep on a shelf, only for decoration. Any or all of these things could be true, I say. Each detail in a poem is there for a reason, every one a clue to the heart of the poem.

Once the students have seen how these two poets focus in on the details, it’s time for them to try it themselves. Before I hand out the photos I’ve brought in, I pull one from the stack and explain that we are going to write our poems in the form of a lune. I write it on the board, L-U-N-E, then draw an outline of the form so they can see it. Three lines, with blank spaces where the words will go: three blank spaces, then five, then three.

I hold up the photo I’ve chosen and ask for a volunteer to give me the first three words, describing something from the picture. What catches your eye? I ask, reminding them that we are trying to focus on the details rather than the big picture. Pick one detail and describe it as well as you can, I say. The lune is perfect for keeping their observations short and focused because its limited word count encourages such specificity. I fill in the blanks I’ve drawn on the board with the student’s response. Two more volunteers supply the middle and last lines and there it is: we have our poem.

At this point I hand out the rest of the photographs I’ve gathered from various online sources. Each has some connection to what the students have been studying. While they are looking at the images I read aloud two lines by the poet Allen Ginsberg, who shared Williams’ and Brooks’ desire to reshape and redefine American poetry. (It’s interesting to note that as a young poet Ginsberg was mentored by Williams, and years later he invited Brooks to speak in a course he taught called African American Poetic Genius.) In a poem called “Cosmopolitan Greetings” that doubled as a kind of manifesto, Ginsberg wrote, “Observe what’s vivid / Notice what you notice.” I say these two lines again to make sure the students have heard them. The kids like the repetition of “notice what you notice,” and it helps them understand when I encourage them to look, and then look again, at the details in the photographs in front of them. Try to see not only with your eyes, I tell them, but also with your mind.

Each photo I hand out is different, and there is inevitably some jostling and comparing, but once everyone settles down I tell them I want them to try to write at least three lunes about their photo before they turn it in for a new photo.

Almost as soon as they put pencil to paper I hear the question I’m expecting. “Does the poem have to be 3 words / 5 words / 3 words?” “Can’t we use an extra word or two?” I’m strict about this, at least at the start, because I like how the restrictions of the form force them to rethink what they want to say and how they might say it. Many of the best student poems I’ve seen written in response to this exercise were born out of the unusual and/or felicitous word choices the form obliges them to make. I also tell them that each line does not have to stand alone, that one can run into the next by using the technique poets call enjambment. Finally, I let them know that if they choose to, they can string together a series of lunes to make a longer poem.

In one class, we look at photos of immigrants taken at Ellis Island around the turn of the last century. The eyes in the images gaze out at us from the sepia-toned past with yearning and apprehension and a welter of other emotions. These women and men, children and infants have just arrived at Ellis Island and are balanced precariously between the Old World and the New, the past and the future. My students, fourth-graders, have been studying immigration and are familiar with the broad outlines of the stories these photos suggest, but I am asking them for something more. I am asking them to look again, to find the details—the mismatched shoes, the torn bag, the expression of boredom or hint of mischief on a young boy’s face—that will bring these individuals to life.

My students scrutinize the photos. They study the faces, the bodies, the clothes, the background, and begin to write.

Three dirty kids
sitting on couch, tired, bored.
Where are we?
          —Oliver (4th grade)

 

A muffin shape
a torn bundle. Secrets hanging
by a thread.
          —Max (4th grade)

 

Everyone is scared
Everyone is staring at something
With great surprise
          —Ashley (4th grade)
 

For a third-grade class studying explorers, I bring in some photographs of natural wonders and others that depict moments of discovery: footsteps on the surface of the moon, the Grand Canyon, the cave paintings at Lascaux, and the Titanic in its resting place at the bottom of the North Sea. I ask them to name what they are writing about in the title so that they can focus the lune entirely on their observations.

Imagine you are explorers seeing these sights for the first time, I say to them. Think about the explorers you have been studying. Perhaps, like some of them, you have simply stumbled upon something amazing. Or perhaps you have been seeking what you are seeing for a long time, have suffered mightily to achieve this goal. How would your emotions color your description of these discoveries? What details can you share that will make these things real to others? How will you describe what you see so that others might see it too? How will you say it so that they will believe you?

On an Arctic Glacier
Made of beauty
Ice cold water threatening the
warm blue sky
          —Griffin (3rd grade)

 

On the Hudson River
Trees like zigzags
The river like stained glass
Maze of nature
          —Saanika (3rd grade)

 

On Viewing a Lunar Eclipse
The jealous sun
finally controls the moon
A blue lollipop
          —Nick (3rd grade)

 

On Discovering the Wreck of the Titanic
The dead Titanic
The perfect home for fish
Its new passengers
          —Truls (3rd grade)

 

On the Cave Paintings at Lascaux
How many hands?
Little carved flecks and dots
Color of sand
Some are dissolving
like a giant hurricane passing
with perfect precision
Swirling and spiraling
A disturbance can be seen
Reaching, not grabbing
          —Rose (3rd grade)
 

A fifth-grade class I taught was preparing for a school trip and had been making comparisons between Paris, where they were headed, and New York City, where they lived. I gave them photos of both cities and asked them to write about them by zeroing in on details that previously might have escaped their attention, or that provided a clue to the larger character of either city.

Paris Lunes
Trees of Paris
give their cool shade to
the many tourists
In the sunset
friends going home all talking
with each other
          —Irène (5th grade)

 

Those pharmacies everywhere
with their big green crosses
shining in streets
          —Alexandre (5th grade)

 

New York City Lunes
Big shiny billboards
with all your ads. You
brighten the dark
          —Tim (5th grade)

 

Little cars below
Look! These taxis look just
like yellow ants!
          —Matteo (5th grade)
 

The educational theorist Maxine Greene believed that giving children the opportunity to engage with art in the classroom was essential in helping them develop the creativity, imagination, and sense of agency “to challenge expectations, to break stereotypes, to change the ways in which persons apprehend the world.” She saw art as indispensable for living a moral life, but emphasized that “the capacity to perceive, to attend, must be learned.” In the world my students will inherit, it’s clear that the need for these skills is more urgent than ever.

The goal of this lesson then, I want to emphasize, is not to have the students “write what they know.” It is, in fact, the opposite: to give them a chance to experience how art and poetry can let them see what they know in a new light.