Cracking Poetry Wide Open — Part 1 Introducing Poetry

A couple of months ago, I wrote about a community project I named Cracking Poetry Wide Open, wherein the mission is to introduce poetry in a new way to make reading, writing, and understanding poetry accessible to people.

The Project

People generally have a stiff, disinterested response to poetry. They think it’s boring or highbrow, hard to understand and even harder to write. With this project, the goal is not only to break people’s expectations about poetry but to demonstrate the endless possibilities with poetry, help participants find their voice, and provide a new tool with which to express and share emotions and experiences.

This project is not limited to the elderly, but retirement homes are where we are starting. While I’ve read of people implementing poetry readings at retirement homes, the scope of our project involves getting the residents to write poetry too. Since I couldn’t find any other groups or projects discussing a poetry workshop at retirement homes, I’ve decided to write about what we’re doing in case anyone else would like to do something similar.

First Workshop

For the first day, I overplanned (as I tend to do) for the workshop. My intent going into these was always to have an adaptable plan going in that would be tweaked based on the participants and the facility. Different retirement homes have different accommodations, and I wanted this project to fit in anywhere regardless of the setup. In the end, not nearly so much planning was required for the first day.

I’m going to put some information in bullet points, so if anyone comes across this post wanting to do something similar, the information will be easy to find and read.

• Time: An hour minimum. At first, I was worried we’d be able to fill half an hour, but that fear was unfounded. You have to be on task to stay within that timeframe, but it’s not a bad starting point. A lot of these workshops have run closer to an hour and forty-five minutes.
• Space: It’s the tendency of people to spread out when joining an activity, but it runs better if they are joined in a circle or a horseshoe, that way everyone can hear and participate. Even better is an activities room with tables (or the dining room) the group can sit around.
• Poems: We found that the residents enjoyed poems about faith/religion, patriotism, ranch life, children, and pets. They liked poems that they remembered from their childhood, but they also enjoyed spoken word poems, poems by local authors, and in particular, they liked poems we’d written because it created a connection between the poem and the poet. I also did a little research beforehand and found some humorous or interesting anecdotes about the poets whose poems we read. It was another way to create a connection between the participants and the poems they were hearing.
• Conversation: The poems brought about memories for some of the residents, so there was a conversation between the readings about memories that surfaced from hearing the poem. We went around and talked about where each person grew up, their former occupations, poets who they liked or types of poems they preferred. It led these people who had lived with and thought they knew each other to learn new things about their friends. I remember hearing a few times, “I didn’t know that about you.” And the purpose of the conversation was two-fold, one to be comfortable with poetry and talking about it and the connections we have with poems, and two, to pull memories and realize how easily they could fit into a poem. The other cool thing about having these discussions between the poems was that there was a man at one of these workshops who had a poem memorized. That was an unexpected treat. And since part of the purpose of doing these workshops at retirement homes had to do with helping the participants find their voice and providing tools to express themselves, these conversations were perhaps more valuable than the readings.

We didn’t want this project to be something where we read to the residents, and they nodded off (not that the elderly won’t rest their eyes anyway or that the act of reading poetry to them isn’t valuable), but we wanted it to be more interactive. We wanted each workshop to build on the last and show the participants that writing poetry isn’t too hard or scary.

This is an exciting and rewarding venture. It doesn’t pay anything, and I find myself buying things here and there to run these workshops, but it is so amazing watching people connect with poetry, perhaps for the first time. And having this mystical, unattainable form of writing suddenly become reachable to the participants and watching the pride as they share their creations is incredible. As I mentioned earlier, each class builds on the previous, so I’ll have a future post with what we did in the second class of the poetry workshop. I’m looking forward to sharing some of the residents’ creations from these classes as well.

Have you thought about providing a poetry workshop (or writing workshop) in your community or bringing poetry (or literature) to the elderly? If you’ve done a workshop in your community, what types of activities have you done?