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Call for Manuscript Submissions: 2023 MRA Primer

How do you encourage and excite your students to be successful and enthusiastic readers and writers? Please consider submitting a manuscript for the 2023 MRA Primer that illustrates how teacher educators, researchers, and K-12 school colleagues liberate students through the joys of literacy teaching and learning.

The theme for the 2023 MRA Primer is “Our Stories That Sing: Literacy Lessons for the K-12 Classroom and Beyond” and is directly connected to the 2024 MRA Conference Theme: “Liberating Literacies: Stories That Sing.”

Please note that the submission deadline for the 2023 MRA Primer is July 31, 2023.

We are seeking three types of submissions:

1. Featured Articles

These articles are full-length papers, discussing research studies and presenting theoretical arguments. Word count: 5,000 - 6,000

2. Classroom Connections

These are practitioner-focused articles with evidence-based pedagogies that are readily applicable to the PK-12 classroom. Word count: 1,500 - 2,500

3. Book Reviews

MRA Board members are invited to submit reviews of children’s/YA literature or professional books related to the theme. Word count: 800 - 1,000

Each edition of the MRA Primer will also include an invited children’s book column aligned to the theme.

Please note that your manuscript should be carefully edited before submission and follow the American Psychological Association (APA) (7th ed.) publication guidelines. Any direct quotes within the manuscript must include a page or paragraph number in the citation. If citations are used within the text, a reference list needs to be included at the end of the manuscript. We ask that you include a two-three sentence author biography with your manuscript.

If you have any questions, please reach out to co-editors Elaine Bukowiecki at ebukowiecki@bridgew.edu and Valerie Harlow Shinas at vshinas@lesley.edu.

Poetry as a Practice of Noticing IOANNA OPIDEE

Whenever I begin talking about poetry with my high school classes, I take a quick show-ofhands poll: “Who likes poetry?” “Who does not like poetry?” “Who falls somewhere in between?” Those who admit to definitively liking or not liking poetry tend to do so sheepishly, with a boldlyraised hand occasionally sprinkled into the mix.

Next, I invite students—either on their own, as a full class, or in small groups—to brainstorm a list of words they associate with poetry. The usual, eclectic, and often contradictory suspects emerge: boring, inspiring, emotional, old-fashioned, confusing, Shakespeare, rhyming, haiku. We consider: “Can poetry be all of these things at once?” “What does it depend on?” “Where do these associations come from?”

After this exercise, I share a list of quotations about poetry and ask students to select one that stands out. One I call attention to is from Emily Dickinson: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that it is poetry” (as cited in Beebe, 2022, p. 256). “Can this mean,” I like to ask, “that poetry does not necessarily mean a poem?” “What else can be poetry?”

I then ask students to take a picture in the next 24-hours of something they encounter that fits Dickinson’s definition—that makes them “feel physically as if the top of [their] head were taken off” (as cited in Beebe, 2022, p. 256). “Like the exploding brain emoji,” I say. The next day, we scroll through their photos of smiling dogs, heart-shaped leaves, and purple-sky sunsets, letting the images mostly speak for themselves.

These opening activities are intended to set a context in which the parameters of poetry are opened as widely as possible; to clear a space for poetry in the classroom that is as permissive, welcoming, and encompassing as possible and to interrupt and disrupt their most automatic conceptions of what poetry is, or should be, in order to pave a path for new awareness to emerge. Next, I give the class a large packet of poetry featuring a wide range of styles and voices and ask them to notice which stands out to them most, either because it confuses, frustrates, intrigues, or entertains them, or simply brings them joy. “Read the first few lines of each,” I say, “and see which pulls you in.”

All of this is done before we read and discuss a full poem together. The intention behind this approach is to base the authority of their reading experience on what they notice, and on what they feel; to help them see that they can use their observations and emotions as a starting place for a deeper inquiry into and experience with poetry and also appreciate their observations and emotions as valuable ends in and of themselves. “Teaching poetry focuses not only on the feeling for process—how poems are made—but on the process of feeling—how readers respond,” write Baron Wormser and David Cappella in Teaching the Art of Poetry: The Moves (1999, pp. 339340). Too often, we fly through the process on our way toward extracting a theme or finding the “hidden meaning;” in the words of Billy Collins (1996), we “tie the poem to a chair with rope/and torture a confession out of it” (lines 13-14).

But poems are more than just meanings. Surely, the ideas in a poem matter; they can open our minds, in addition to our hearts. Yet, as Audre Lorde writes in her essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” “there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt—of examining what those ideas feel like being lived” (p. 39). How, then, do we guide students through such a lived experience?

Before moving into a full-class reading of a poem, I posit to students some possible steps for reading poetry that may seem rudimentary or reductive but can lead to an important slowing of the process. The steps are:

• Notice: “Do you recognize the author’s name?” “When was the poem written?” “What does it look like on the page?” “How long?” “What shape?”

• Read: Preferably aloud.

• Observe (or notice again): “Which words or phrases stand out?” “Which punctuation choices or line breaks?”

• Close-Read: Identify elements such as enjambment, alliteration, and simile.

• Analyze: Study the effect of each element.

• Interpret: Determine a possible meaning or thematic significance.

• Evaluate: Comment on the poem’s overall value or quality.

• Apply: Consider how it might illuminate an outside context or topic.

While it’s not necessary–or even helpful–to go through each step with every poem you encounter, honoring the order–without skipping around–can be a helpful way to experience, in the words of Lorde (2007), “what [the poem’s] ideas feel like being lived” (p.39). Without this deliberate slowing of the process, people tend to skip from reading to evaluating (“This poem is bad.” “This poem is boring.” “This poem is beautiful.”) or to interpreting (“This poem is about death.” “This poem is about love.” “This poem is a metaphor for how human beings struggle with change.”). While these thoughts and sensations may naturally emerge—a phenomenon that is, itself, worth noticing—quick evaluations and rushed interpretations are sometimes more compelled by the feeling of pressure to deliver what is expected; to accomplish the task and to be done with it. Noticing, in contrast, is an act of mindfulness in the spirit of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s definition: “awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the moment, non-judgmentally” (Mindful, 2017).

A deeper noticing can occur in close reading when readers identify and name elements such as imagery and caesura and observe their effects. “The caesura and the line breaks, it’s breath,” says poet Ada Limón (Tippett, 2023) in a recent On Being podcast interview.

And then that’s also the space for us to sort of walk in as a reader being like, “What’s happening here? Why are all these blank spaces?” . . . You get to have an experience with language that feels somewhat disjointed …. it’s giving room to have those failures [of language] be a breaking open and for someone else to stand in it and bring whatever they want to it. (Tippett, 2023, Ada Limón interview)

Limón, here–with her authority as U.S. Poet Laureate no less–models the inviting and nurturing of uncertainty, the unknowingness that can panic students and teachers away from reading poetry. Such a process of slow noticing and experiencing may, indeed, lead toward thesis statements of interpreted “meaning,” but the resultant claims will more likely come from a place of awareness, rather than reaction; may come from a reader having lived (in the spirit of Lorde’s commentary) the feeling of an idea, rather than fashioning a plausible conclusion. The reading experience may more likely be, in Limón’s words, “a breaking open” (Tippett, 2023) toward insight, through noticing.

References

Beebe, A. (2022). Emily Dickinson: A companion. McFarland

Collins, B. (1996). Introduction to poetry. The apple that astonished Paris. University of Arkansas Press.

Lorde, A. (2007). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. Crossing Press. McLaughlin, N. (2018, December 21). Doris and Warren Buffett’s charity; fiction debut on aftermath of rape. Boston Globe. http://www0.bostonglobe.com/arts/ books/2018/12/20/doris-and-warren-buffet-charity-fiction-debut-aftermath-rape/ k1FpCvEsAVrksRh0Tt2IuJ/story.html https://mindful.org/jon-kabat-zinn-defining-mindfulness

Mindful. (2017, January 11). Me me me [Video]. Mindful.org.

Tippett, K. (2023, February 16). Ada Limón: To be made whole [Audio podcast episode]. In On Being. The On Being Project. https://onbeing.org/programs/ada-limon-to-be-madewhole/

Wormser, B., & Cappella, D. (1999). T eaching the art of poetry: The moves. Taylor and Francis.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ioanna Opidee is a high-school English teacher in Connecticut with an MFA in Creative Writing from Fairfield University. She is author of the novel Waking Slow, called “an arresting, timely” take on sexual assault by The Boston Globe, and a PhD student in Educational Studies at Lesley University.