Mentor Text: Potato by Rebekah Rempel
Techniques:
- Exploring a symbol
Background –
The last two months of school are challenging, eh?
If I’m not in teacher mode planning the end of my courses, laying the groundwork for next year or marking, I’m in parent mode, shuttling everyone everywhere.
As I’ve shared before, I always grab my satchel on the way out the door, which always has something to read in it – some poetry, a novel and a graphic novel.
I recently finished the 2023 edition of Best Canadian Poetry at swim practice, and flipped through to find a poem I’d flagged to share with you.
How we might use this text:
Exploring a Symbol – Currently, one of my classes is about to start writing an essay that incorporates some personal poetry elements, sharing their learning and thinking about a topic they’ve chosen to explore over the semester. I kind of wish I’d dropped ‘Potato’ into their poetry writing experiments a couple of weeks a go when we did some initial drafts.
I really love the way that Rempel explores the role of the potato in the famine that bears its name. By addressing the potato itself, it seems as if she highlights the juxtaposition of the size of a potato and the scale of the famine. A single potato, the one she’s addressing, seems insufficient to have caused such strife.
And this unlocks, in my mind, how symbolism works for our writers. It is the act of putting very big ideas into small packages. I can see my student focusing his project on basketball addressing the ball itself, and what it means to him, to others.
There is an extra element to Rempel’s poem revealed when you dig into the notes on the poem at the end of the anthology. “The poem was initially much longer. I read an article about different varieties of potatoes and was inspired by their surprising colours and beautiful names…” I love this idea of taking inspiration from research, and expressing that appreciation in a poem. I also love that she explains how the poem started.
In the notes, she also shares how discussion with other writers helped her edit the poem, how their advice impacted her final poem. The longer poem was trimmed, leaving the last stanza to form the core of the poem that resulted. As she focused on the potato’s role in the famine, she had to put aside some of the other elements that contributed to the famine. “I knew that the poem had to remain focused on the potato itself, and I had to let the images do the work.”
This week, we were discussing some of our school’s bigger picture thinking related to literacy. English courses wind up doing a lot of the heavy lifting – teaching research and academic writing. I found my self advocating for a renewed focus on literacy in other content areas, developing those skills there. I want to use research to guide students to writing things like ‘Potato.’
What poems do you use to have students play with symbolism? Are there instances where an author’s note has influenced how you’ll approach a piece with your writers?
Leave a comment below or find me on Twitter @doodlinmunkyboy!
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