Our workshops are meant to be generative, educational, and fun spaces where students can try their hand at creating poetry similar to what they just saw on stage. It’s always immensely helpful when students have some familiarity with poetry before the workshop (particularly live performance poetry or “spoken word” poetry) but it is not a requirement! If you are looking to align the curriculum with the visit, what we’d recommend most is to have some time spent in class watching some performances of either Phil and Sarah or other contemporary poets (there are lots of videos on youtube), and having the students spend some time discussing and writing their own work. This can be done alongside the normal poetry curriculum. To give a sense of what to expect from the Project VOICE workshops themselves, our workshops for middle and upper school students try and tackle three essential questions:
We see these questions as essential for young writers and consider them a “roadmap” for creating their own poems. While the exercises and language we use are adjusted to be age-appropriate for each group, the main concept remains consistent. For the first question (“What Do I Write About”) we focus on low-stakes list creation and identifying things that are uniquely and authentically important to each individual writer. The second question (“How Do I Write About It”), can be taken in a number of different ways, but most often we’ll focus on the power and usefulness of sensory details in poetry, and how to use them ourselves. For the last question (“How Do I Perform It”) we do some creative performance-based exercises to help students connect with their bodies and break some of the stigma of stage fright. The workshop includes opportunities for students to ideate, to write, and ultimately perform their own work. Although the exercises and language vary depending on the age group, this structure is what we most commonly used with middle and high school students due to its balanced coverage of topics and its adaptability to different comfort levels with poetry in a class.