Mentor Text: Emile Nelligan by Carmine Starnino
Techniques:
- Poetry Analysis
Background –
Whenever I’m near a magazine rack that carries it, I grab a copy of The Feathertale Review. Though I grabbed my first issue because the cover illustration featuring a monkey was silly, I’ve come to love the offbeat approach to being a literary magazine that it takes.
Lit mags often sit near my TBR piles, and I grab them as I transition between reads, so it can take me a while to get through one. Issue 27 of The Feathertale Review is a really unique one, as all the pieces are smaller, and each page is actually a postcard. Loved it, and initially, my thought was that the lesson idea lay in that format, but as I read through the pieces, I found myself, as I often do, flagging pieces for their mentor text potential.
One such piece is this prose poem by Carmine Starnino that serves as a nice mentor text for writing about poetry.
How we might use this text:
Poetry Analysis – Starnino’s piece hones in on a single line of poetry from French Canadian poet Emile Nelligan. As one of my first questions when we deal with a poem in class is always, “What pops out in this poem for you?” this poem resonated.
Because what Starnino does is identify that line that resonates, and does an exemplary job of discussing why.
See, she does what I’d love to see my students doing – she explores the technique and craft of Nelligan’s line and she explores the emotional resonance of the line. I was engaged by this piece before she got around to making those personal connections to snow, and her remembrance of a childhood in a cold climate. Like we often do with mentor texts, we’re able to show writers the “high bar” version of a writing task. If they’re striving for this, then we’re going to get some great stuff from them.
I also quite appreciate the extra level that’s added through her consideration of what a translation may do to the meaning of a line. I know many of us have different languages spoken in our classrooms, and I think that might possibly add to our look at some works.
January is kind of the worst time of the school year for me, wrapping up the courses of the first semester and prepping for the new courses to come as the new semester starts. As I was going through another teacher’s list of favourite poems today, considering what my approach to poetry in an upcoming course might be, I paused to share this piece with you. And in doing so, I know I have at least one lesson crafted for early next semester as we look at this piece. (I also kind of like that since this is presented as a prose poem, it may not follow the conventions for a piece of analytical writing, which allows us to review those conventions early in the course!)
Do you have favourite literary journals? What makes them your faves? Do you have other good mentor texts to encourage a deep dive like this from your writers?
Leave a comment below or find me on Twitter @doodlinmunkyboy!
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