Poem Renovation: A Game-Changing Approach to Teaching Poetry

Dan Clark: Turning now to education in New York. Poem Renovation is a free website where you can take words from a poem, mix them up and rearrange them to make a new poem. The artist who created the site says it's designed for self-expression, and now she's brought that concept into the classroom.

In this story, from producer Catherine Rafferty, we see a different side of poetry at a local school district. 

Kelly de la Rocha: But gods are born of ichor and nectar. Their excellence is already bursting from their fingertips. So they find their fame by proving what they can mar, destroying cities, starting wars, breeding plagues and monsters, all that smoke and savor rising so delicately.

The way I got the idea for Poem Renovation is that I’ve been writing poetry since I was 17 years old. It was when my parents were getting divorced, it was a time in my life that was really confusing for me. I was hurting. I didn't understand what was going on and I turned to poetry and I started writing poetry to help me figure out my life, and it worked. 

Back then, I wrote a lot of self-portrait poems and I kept those all these years and I started looking back during the pandemic at those poems and saying, well, these don't really define me as I am now, and I started wondering about what could I do with those poems to rearrange them and make them describe me now. 

So, I took some magnetic paper and I printed those poem out on magnetic paper, cut them all up, stuck them on my refrigerator and I started moving the words around. And that made me start thinking about how could I share this idea of kind of recycling old written things to make something new and share it with the public.

Basically, every day on this site, users are presented with between 30 and 40 words from a song, a poem, a snippet of literature, and when you open up the site, you'll be presented with a word bank where all of the words are scrambled up together, and you can click on the words, whatever ones resonate with you, close the word bank and then you have a digital canvass where those words will appear and you can move them around and do what you'd like with them. You can also share your creations and see what the original excerpt is.

I started to hear from people who were saying this would be great in a classroom. I think this would be great with my students, I teach creative writing, I teach English, I think the students could really benefit from this. It was something that I hadn't even thought of before, and my sister-in-law, Dena Marie, teaches at Shenendehowa Gowana middle school, and she's a sixth-grade teacher, and she was one of the early ones this said, I want this in my classroom.

Dena Marie de la Rocha: The students love that poem renovation provides them with a different passage every day. They also love that they can use it on their screen. They love to be on paper, but they also love that they have this. I think they kind of look at it as a game which is really fun for them and they're not intimidated by it. They literally don't feel that they're pressured to do anything a certain way, so I think they get excited to jump on.

Student 1: Poetry wasn't the thing I liked because, like, it was all about, like, our teacher didn't like, mention like you didn't have to rhyme all the time, and then she also like didn't-- there was like nothing like Poem Renovation. I couldn't really understand poems back then, but now I really understand because of Poem Renovation. 

Monsters starting plagues, fingertips destroying nectar. Smoke bursting from cities. Gods rising. Reading their fame. Savor what they already find. All excellences are born.

DMR: The skills that my students learn using poem renovation is that poetry has-- it's limitless. It has no rules. It doesn't have to be a certain way. It doesn't have to show a certain emotion. It doesn't have to be written exactly the same way from day to day as well. Poetry is an expression of how they feel. They also learn elements of poetry like using similes and metaphors and different sound devices and visually what poetry is like on the screen or on the page. So it's an easy way for them to self-express.

We actually had some really great successes at the beginning with students that were much more shy and intimidated. Didn't really want to talk or share within their small group setting or the large group setting and are excited to share what they come up with on the screen with the poem reno.

Student 2: Hi. I'm Kyla and this is my poem.

Smoke rising. Starting fame. Gods rise. Monsters destroying cities. Wars delicately bursting.

Student 3: Hi, my name is Dylan White. I'm here to share my poem.

Smoke that's rising. Breeding monsters and excellences. Already bursting, savor nectar.

Student 4: Hello. My name is Alex and this is my poem. 

Smoke rising, bursting, destroying, but there are plagues starting already from fame and excellences.

KR: there are social-emotional benefits as well. It's an opportunity to receive positive feedback from your peers after you create something and share it with the class. It's an opportunity to talk about perspective, you know, we all start with the same words but we all come up with something different. We all have our own voice and our own perspective. It's an activity that helps kids to focus. It's a doorway to new possibilities. 

A lot of times what I think of when I think about the words that are in the excerpts every day, I think of them like pretty stones that you can look at, and they can be whatever you want them to be, and that's been really cool for me is coming up with a way that I can help kids to appreciate language, to love words and to also understand the power of them, how you he no, you switch a couple of those words around and they mean something completely different.

If you want to give Poem Renovation a try yourself, click this link.