Ekphrastic

In the Spring of 2020, five Leadership students at the University of Delaware Associate in Arts Program began planning an illustrated anthology of creative writing composed by the middle- and high-school students of First State Squash as part of the Just Write! Wilmington initiative. The UD students were Tavon Gage, Naya Ugorji, Olivia Scalora, Emily Myers, and Josiah Jones. They were mentored by the Academic Director of First State Squash, Ami Patel, who is herself a graduate of the UD Associate in Arts Program and of UD, and Owen Butler, Executive Director of First State Squash.

The advent of the COVID-19 epidemic put the Just Write! project in jeopardy, but it also presented an opportunity to reconsider, reorganize, and take a new direction.

Analyzing resources at hand, the UD/FSS team identified the online collections of the Delaware Art Museum as a virtually-available asset. Assisted by Eliza Jarvis and Saralyn Rosenfeld of the museum, the UD/FSS team selected three works of art to use as subjects for an ekphrastic poetry project.

By choosing the technique of ekphrastia, which is taken here to mean writing a poem about a work of art, the collaborative team solved the problem of coordinating with an illustrator during quarantine: the illustrations would already be done.

The particular genre of poems the team opted to use are known as Cinquain and Diamante. Both are short, clearly-defined structures that ask writers to master syllabification, parts of speech, and strategic word-choice in addition to traditional poetic concepts such as rhythm, diction, imagery, and figurative language.

Over weeks of preparation, the Ekphrastia team constructed lesson plans to be delivered online to FSS students in their homes. FSS proved to be a spectacular partner. The relationships between FSS staff and their students are strong and their organizational proficiency is high. Thus the team could assume that, once they had created viable online learning tools, they would be able to use these tools to deliver content to students.

Additionally, it bears noting that Ami Patel provided invaluable mentoring in the art of creating lesson plans.

The team built up to the actual session for composing poetry over the course of three lessons. Using Zoom, Google Classroom, and Nearpod, they prepared FSS students by focusing on their relationships with visual art, by helping them develop the vocabulary to talk about it, and by exploring how language captures such abstract concepts as personal relationships and emotion.

Working in Zoom breakout rooms accompanied by UD and FSS instructors and staff, UD students led lessons designed to scaffold the skills necessary to successfully write poems about art. FSS students discussed their favorite words and created their own “word clouds,” which became the basis for the diction they employed in their actual poems. Breakout groups discussed the works of art in question, “Crying Giant” by Tom Otterness, “Marooned,” by Howard Pyle, and “Cherry Island” by Hank Willis Thomas, and created possible narratives and historical contexts to surround them.

On the third meeting day, FSS students and their UD mentors began composing poetry. Employing a different approach in each breakout group, some composed on a Zoom whiteboard, some composed on a separate Googledoc, and some wrote on paper at home and read their pieces aloud.

On Tuesday, May 12, FSS students presented their poems:

Giant

Blue, Tall

Crying, Sitting, Wondering

Backyard, Trashcan, Grass, Cloud

Thinking, Seeing, Picturing

Huge, Big

Museum

--Kendrick

Sadness

Blue, Alone

Depressing, Unwilling, Saddening

Hate, Feelings, Iron, Steel

Rusting, Standing, Decaying

Massive, Gargantuan

Metal

--Vincent

Giant

Isolated, Rejected

Nodding, Sitting, Crying

He is very unhappy

Colossus

--Riley

Giant

sad, lonely

depressing, tiring, hurting

heartbroken, down, joyful, cheerful

pleasing, thrilling, laughing

glad, playful

happy

--Jah’mere