As part of a cross-curricular day, Year 9 have ben involved in discovering war poetry. I thought that it would be a great opportunity for them to discover Apollinaire poetry and to create their own poems.
In preparation for the day, we watched "Joyeux Noël" and did the research as stated in my post last year First World War)-
On the War Poetry Day, I told them that Poetry had developed at the end of the 19th century as more people were able to read and therefore poems did not need to be read aloud so much. Poets started experimenting with shapes as inspired by Chinese and Arabic literature. Guillaume Appolinaire invented the word Calligrammes, he used to write them from the trenches- Here are some of the examples, I showed the students.
The students only had an hour to come up with a poem. First, they were told to think about emotions, smells, colours that a soldier would have experimented in the trenches, then they drafted their poems-
Once the poems were produced, they thought about the shapes. We looked at pictures from this website which I think are very thought provoking.
They really raised to the challenge and I have been very impressed with the work produced and in awe of the creativity shown by all of them. Here are some examples of the work produced.
