Poetry – Idea to Image Brainstorming Exercise to Improve Marks in Poetry

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Today, I will be sharing a poetry exercise that can help students enhance their understanding of poetry in the NAPLAN, Opportunity Class and the Selective Exam here in NSW. This is through the idea to image brainstorming activity which shows a concept or idea and you have to associate it with images that first come to your mind that is associated with it.

This is an exercise that I have seen work by poets and teachers alike and I found quite a bit of success with this when introducing students to poetry for the first time or for those who are quite early to it. This means it is effective for students as young as year 2 and can get primary school students who tend to usually have a lack of understanding of poetry to get much better in a relatively short amount of time.

For this exercise, I’d like you all to shut your eyes and I’ll say a word. Open your eyes and tell me what you “saw.” For example, if I say “love,” you may cupid or two people holding hands. This is the mind’s “translation” of an idea, an abstract concept to a mental picture, an image. The mind does this naturally.

For example:

LOVE DEATH & SELF.

Love= hearts, a loved one’s face, holding hands

Death = coffin, grave, skull

Self = mirror, photo, selfie

Please write down your “images.” Be honest about what you “see.” Don’t worry if you see the sun coursing through your body when I say “love”—your mind is telling you something. It’s making a connection, which may not be readily clear to you. There is no such thing as a non sequitur, the mind always has a reason. It might not be obvious logic, but the mind has its reasons for connecting two seemingly unlike notions. This is the key for poetry with this exercise.

Regarding the “love” example, the process is the same. If I say “power” and you see the sun again going through your body, continue to interrogate that image and write down the next image that it inspires, and the next. You may find that you are “tracking” the next lines of a poem—let’s say you feel the sensation in the tips of your fingers. You recognise the hand as yours, your hand as a child so you may write a line about the feeling on your skin. You begin to enlarge the frame by pulling out from that and you see it’s you as a baby at the beach for the first time when your parents took you (showing familial love). Or the images keep coming and stay mysterious. That’s totally normal too, but keep on recording your images, write down these signals without thinking too deeply into it. Writing is an intuitive process; we must trust our intuition and let creativity flow.

Example

Create a 4 by 4 of feelings, adjectives such as rage, order, justice, common, solitude, ecstasy, evil, gratitude, mercy, pain, hunger, god, peace, war, history, geography. To see a visual representation of this - check the YouTube video above.

After you have finished completing the above, try to link up the feelings and abstractions that most appealed to you. Which ones did you like the most? They could relate a lot or be completely different. Try to then link up your images that came to mind and just like the above that I mentioned earlier, see whether you can expand from the image and find a deeper meaning from it.

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