The Poetry Quilt: To respond well to a tough subject

When we returned to school from Spring Break, my seventh-grade students began reading and reacting to stories of slavery in the United States.  Without question, this is a difficult topic.  As you may remember, I make sure to prepare my students for the emotions involved in these stories by burying negative, hateful words.  See “Burying Negative Words,” April 15, 2022.  This preparation helps, but it cannot take away the strong emotions we all feel as we read the capture stories, the middle passage stories, and the desperate attempts to escape to freedom.

In order to allow for strong reactions, I asked my students to respond to these stories of slavery in poetry.  I did the same. Poetry lends itself to emotive language and feeling.

We read stories by Julius Lester, Margot Theis Raven, Kim L. Siegelson, Deborah Hopkinson, and Henry Cole.  Then we responded in borrowed poems, repeat-a-line poems, poems of address, narrative rhyming poems, and poems inspired by the templates in For the Love of Poetry by Nancy Lee Cecil.  I also had my students try a reverse poem, also known as a palindrome poem. 

To say that my students’ poems were powerful and filled with emotion would be an understatement.  Some gave me chills.  Others made me hold my breath.  Still others brought me to tears. 

Because so many stories of slavery include quilts—freedom quilts, quilts as messages, quilts as maps—I decided to have my students create their own quilt.  They each made a near-perfect copy of the best poem they had written.  They decorated these poems.  Then, we held an in-class quilting bee, punching holes in the margins of the decorated poems and tying them together with yarn.  My students chose red yarn, because the color red shows up in a couple of the stories we read.  It holds powerful meaning.  It was a good choice.

The poetry quilt hung in our classroom for about two weeks.  I invited teachers and other staff members to come into our classroom to see it.  The reaction was strong.  As these visitors read the poems in our quilt, they responded in much the same way as I did.  There were audible gasps, breath-holding silence, and tears.  The words, the decorations, and the symbolism of the quilt all worked well to help us deal with a tough subject and to give it dignity and respect.