Teachers & Writers Collaborative
Invite the class to invent a poet. Let them know that the purpose of this project – which may be a course of a week or intermittently taken up over a school year – is to, as a class, write the life’s work of this poet.
Get creative, but keep it loose. Brainstorm with the full group or in pairs with the question: Who is our poet? Collectively invent a biography that includes the poet’s name, his place and date of birth, his publication history, if any. The details should be agreed upon by the class, since the class is all moving under the same pseudonym of the invented poet. However, there shouldn’t be too many details (i.e., what kind of poetry the invented poet writes) so as to not preclude the wildly variant poems the class will create or make the poet less real.
[It may be useful to use the setup created in Hershon’s class: “[Our invented poet] was young, which is why he wasn’t terribly well known. He hadn’t yet published a book, which was why one couldn’t be found in a store, but a manuscript had recently been accepted by a Very Big Publisher, which was why he deserved everyone’s attention.”]
Any writing exercise may be used with this personae: group poems, individual poems, list poems, game poems, poems that contain certain words, lyric poems, experimental poems, poems that lift sections from other poems. The possibilities are endless, but make sure the students are writing from the perspective of the Invented Poet, so as to free their creative selves and lessen the need/impulse for control of the material.
The anthology collected of these works may be either anonmymous (i.e., every poem is supposedly “by” the Invented Poet), or credit the original, live authors.
Instead of an anthology, one student may be designated a reader for a poetry reading, adopting the personae of the Invented Poet. This can be especially fun if hoaxing a larger audience.
Please read Robert Hershon’s article “Lawrence Stazer: The Use and Pleasure of the Hoax” for the full text and for examples of student writing generated by this exercise.
Please refer to other writing exercises in the “Lessons” section of the T&W website that may work well with your group when adopting the Invented Poet.
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