https://teachersandwritersmagazine.org/make-it-new-using-surprise-to-make-poetry-come-alive-999.htm

 

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“How do we teach students of poetry to avoid cliché, to use language that allows us (and them) to see things anew? In these four lessons, the poet Michelle Chan Brown offers an array of strategies for using surprise to subvert expectations and create a sense of wonder. Using the work of poets (and one songwriter), Brown walks us through the ways poets use surprise in both form and content, and presents writing exercises to help students incorporate surprise into their own work.

 

Michelle Chan Brown 

The work of poetry is to render things new.  When we use language in ways that surprise we do just that. But what, exactly, is surprise and how do we teach it? Any attempt to define it is a suspect endeavor because spontaneity and unpredictability are an intrinsic part of what makes something “surprising.”

Take a birthday party planned in stealth, or a physical gesture intended to rattle: the tickle-attack, for example. Once the recipient of the planned surprise has any indication of what is about to happen, they begin to strategize how they will receive the (now non-) surprise. They may still experience pleasure or distress, but of a different variety.

Although many claim to hate surprises, I would argue that in life, and especially in art, we crave surprise. Let me clarify that I don’t mean shock, which is surprise’s sweaty, bombastic cousin. The elegant relative of surprise is wonder. And why make art but to enlarge our capacity for wonder?

When we demand that language surprise us we move towards more clarity and fewer clichés, away from what George Orwell, in his famous essay “Politics and the English Language,” calls “the slovenliness of our language [that] makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

Although many claim to hate surprises, I would argue that in life, and especially in art, we crave surprise. Let me clarify that I don’t mean shock, which is surprise’s sweaty, bombastic cousin. The elegant relative of surprise is wonder. And why make art but to enlarge our capacity for wonder?

Here are four lessons on surprise that I have taught to high school students. The lessons introduce categories of surprise, look at sample poems that take different routes to surprise, and suggest approaches for writing poems that aim to surprise not only the reader but the poet as well.

Following the lessons, I offer several writing assignments that challenge students to explore these strategies for creating surprise.”

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