It’s a Wednesday afternoon in September at R.S. Payne Elementary School in Lynchburg and Dr. Chidsey Dickson, an English professor at the University of Lynchburg, has just arrived at Georgianna Cary’s fourth grade class.
Wearing a tweed newsboy cap, blue twill pants, and a white button-up shirt rolled up at the elbows, Dickson stands in front of the class — all students in R.S. Payne’s Gifted Opportunities or GO Center — and announces, “We’re going to write a poem today!”
His words are greeted with a resounding, “Yay!”
Dickson visits Cary’s class every Wednesday and spends an hour with the students doing writing and creativity exercises and working on their writing skills.
“I’m very pleased Chidsey is willing to come to our classroom once a week and work with my kids,” Cary said. “I’m sure this is a highlight of their week. He always has a creative lesson that gets the kids excited about putting pencil to paper.
“It’s fun to see some [students] get lost in the project. I’m excited to see what kind of writers they become by the end of the year with him.”
Dickson takes off his hat and pushes his dark-framed glasses onto his forehead. He tells the students that today they’ll “experiment with fancy, fun, fabulous words” to write a poem. “Along the way,” he says, “you might be thinking ‘This is never going to be a poem!’ but trust me, at the end, you’ll have a poem.”
He explains that the words they’ll use are “fantabulous words,” “low-frequency words,” words that people don’t use very often. “A poem isn’t everyday talking,” he says. “These fancy, fun, fabulous words will give a burst of energy to something you’re saying.”
Dickson hands out strips of paper and tells the students to work in groups of two or three. Each strip contains a “fancy, fun, fabulous” word, along with its pronunciation and definition.
“I want you to take turns saying the words,” he says. “Get used to the sounds of those coming out of your mouth.”
He writes two of the words, “ossify” and “pontificate,” on the board. Ossify, he explains, means to turn something to stone. Pontificate means to “go on and on and on when you have a point to make.”
He suggests that the students put the two words together to make a third word and then invent a definition for it. The result: pontify, which one student defines as “to stay at a still state” while someone talks on and on.
Dickson writes another made-up word on the board. “Pontossify, to lecture to a brick wall,” he says, adding, “Poets like to play with words.”
He tells the students they’ll use a poem by Langston Hughes as a model for their poems. He asks them if they’ve ever heard of Hughes — silence — and then explains that the “great poet,” who lived from 1901–1967, used to visit his friend, the poet Anne Spencer, in Lynchburg.
He writes Hughes’s poem on the board:
I loved my friend
He went away
This poem ends
Soft as it began
I loved my friend
“It’s a good example of how you want to keep your lines short,” Dickson says. “The reason you do that is you want to slow the reader down in the reading of your words, so they can understand all of the wonderful words.”
Prompting the students, Dickson tells them to think of a good memory from a winter day.
“Everyone, close your eyes, because I want you to focus on your gray matter, your brain stuff,” he says. “Imagine a really good winter holiday, a really good day you had last winter. Are you inside, outside, what did you see? And let that little film play in your head.”
Except for the hum of the air-conditioning unit, it’s silent.
Cary said her students talk about Dickson’s prompts even after class is over.
“One time, he had them write about things they might find in their pockets,” Cary said. “This led to several conversations during the week about what one could hold in their pocket that might be out of the ordinary — planets for example.
“Students also find his prompts quite funny, which I think is a big part of their enjoyment — getting to have fun with writing instead of just writing ‘this essay’ or ‘that essay.’”
Dickson tells the students to open their eyes and write one line that — like in Hughes’s poem — will serve as the beginning and end of their poems. “Write some sentences about what was going on in your head. Focus, focus, focus,” he says.
Dickson pushes his glasses back to his forehead and walks around the room. Then he writes on the board, “I remember smelling leaves burning when I was outside, walking around in the cold.”
He says that when he closed his eyes and thought about a good winter memory, the image of smelling burning leaves stuck with him. So, he included that in the first and last lines of his poem. “Poems work by images,” he says.
A few minutes later, Dickson asks how many people have finished their first and last lines and most hands raise. He waves around some strips of paper. “Guess what I have here?” he says. “Money? No! A different type of currency. Words!”
They’re “sense words,” he says, referring to the five senses. He tells the students to add sense words to their poems as well. He says he used the sense word spicy to describe the smoke in his poem.
“Does spicy smoke make sense?” he asks. “Kinda, but in poetry, all you need is kinda.”
Using a different meaning of the word, he adds, “Poems don’t have to make complete literal sense. They can make poetic sense.”
Someone asks Dickson if there can be more than three lines between the first and last lines of their poem and he says that’s fine. In Dickson’s workshops, there aren’t a lot of rules, which Cary considers a good thing.
“My kids have loved having Chidsey come and lend a whimsical, fun aspect to their writing,” she said. “There is so much emphasis on writing according to a rubric in our Language Arts curriculum that it is wonderful to have someone encourage creativity along with the process.
“Chidsey doesn’t forsake all writing conventions, but he allows them to bend at the parameters. The kids love that. They know he will accept what they have written and give them positive feedback. He laughs when they laugh and it encourages them.”
The students continue writing their poems. A few minutes later, Dickson interrupts the silence. “Listen up, y’all,” he says. “Here’s where things get a little wacky! Do you trust me here?”
He tells the students to include “an active verb” in each of the three interior lines of their poems. He hands out pieces of paper printed with action verbs. “Pick one, even if you don’t know how it would fit with the other words,” he says.
“Here’s the fun part of writing poems. There’s kind of a randomness to it.”
Then he reads his poem to the class:
Smelling burning leaves
Spicy smoke enters nose
Clean snow slides off the roof
Stars sing in the night sky
Smelling burning leaves
“Does that sound like a poem? Does it make you see something?” he says.
Dickson talks briefly about how poems can include metaphors and similes and says all poems need images. He said the first attempt at a poem doesn’t have to be the final attempt either —that you can work on a poem until you’re happy with it.
He walks around the room, asking students if they’d used a fancy, fun, fabulous, or invented word, or a metaphor or simile in their poems. “It’s up to you,” he says. “One of the great things about poetry is you can’t get it wrong.”
Five minutes later, Dickson asks if anybody wants to share their poems. There are some takers. Some students read their poems aloud; others pass them to Dickson to read for them. He says, “One of the things I tell my college students is it is really important to share your work. Why?”
Someone says it’s so that you get “other opinions” to see how you can change it to make it better. “Yes!” Dickson says.
Another student says, “It gives you new energy to go back” and work on the poem some more. Dickson agrees.
After each poem is read, the students — and Dickson — give a round of applause.
“They ask every week, ‘When is Mr. Chidsey coming?’” Cary said, adding, “I think it’s very important for students to know that they can have fun, be creative, and not be critiqued for a grade every time they produce work.
“I think it’s so important for their development to reach down into their own minds and find something, rather than seeing it on a screen. I love to listen to the ideas that come out during class.
“It’s often [that] my students who do not prefer traditional school tasks … produce the most creative stories. This has given them a time to shine.”
