When Context Is Absent, Imagination Abounds by Brett Vogelsinger

Writing poetry from a picture is certainly not a new idea, but sometimes a picture with zero context can take us to fresh and surprising places as writers.

I find that The New York Times Learning Network’s collection of Picture Prompts has helped my students to craft poems about situations and topics that pull from our personal experiences, but go beyond as well.  The images are carefully curated so that they will be high-interest for teens, but since they come from current events, they expand our focus and pull in images that may be foreign to my students’ experiences in suburban Pennsylvania.

Alternately, when our library is discarding old non-fiction books and magazines, or I am purging piles of outdated copies of The New Yorker, abundant paper prompts that can be taped into our writer’s notebooks become available.

This year, I used a Picture Prompt post from September to encourage my student writers to slip into someone else’s skin and see the world through different eyes.  Here is the picture:

Image from The New York Times 

First, I invited students to sketch for three minutes, then asked what they noticed.  Here is my sketch:

It is intriguing to talk about what we did not notice until we sketch the picture, and those details may make the best material for writing.

I wrote with my classes, and of course the best part about teaching a writing workshop is having the opportunity to try the activity five different times across the course of my five classes for the day.

First period, I imagined the feet standing apart belonged to a new student.

Later in the day, I imagined that the apparent ostracism was the result of a long-held grudge.

After we all had a chance to draft, I invite the class to collectively be my conference partner, offering some praise and some push to make my work better.  Then they apply that technique to each other’s work in peer-to-peer conferences.

For this activity, it is important to withhold the original context, but if you end up using The New York Times Learning Network’s resources, they do link out to the original article context. This can be informative or sometimes hilariously surprising to consult after interpreting the image in a poetry writing workshop.



Brett Vogelsinger is an English teacher at Holicong Middle School in Bucks County, PA.  He is accessible on Twitter @theVogelman and blogs (with others) annually about ideas for Poem of the Day at http://30gopoems.blogspot.com/ . Students from his school publish their work at http://sevenateninemagazine.blogspot.com/ .