Writing poetry is a great exercise for English language learners. It gives them a chance to experiment with language and vocabulary, and to freely share their ideas without the confinement of perfect grammar or firm structures.
Several years ago my native town (Birobidzhan, JAR, Russia) celebrated its 75th birthday and I, together with my students, decided to present a birthday card for it. A lot of guests came to congratulate Birobidzhan and there were foreign guests from different places that’s why we wrote our card in English. Through this birthday card we tried to express our thoughts and feelings about our town and to find ways to honor the past and celebrate the present.
But it is a well - known fact that birthday cards are written in a verse form that’s why we began to look for information about poem writing and found a lot of interesting facts.
Poems are words used in a special way. There are many different kinds of poems. Poems can be happy or sad, funny or serious. They tell about many different things. Not all poems rhyme! Poems are fun to read. Poems are fun to write, too! But coming up with poetry that rhymes isn't always an easy task. We needed the following things while writing our poems: time, patience, imagination, an open mind, a peaceful place and inspiration. When writing our poems we tried to use clear and creative language.
Don’t judge us strictly. We did our best.
The first poem is about our rivers – The Bira and the Bidzhan. Here is what we got:
The Bidzhan is a Jewish river
That runs parallel the Bira,
They had a special aim
To give our town its name!
The next poem is about our Railway Square. This place is visited by many people every day thus we called it “The town’s face”
Railway Square is the place
Which is considered to be town’s face,
Here Birobidzhan history begins
For Jewish settlers it was land of dreams,
There is a fountain and Minora
Welcome gentleman and senora!
We tried our luck in writing different poetic styles.
One of them is a name poem, a clerihew.
A clerihew is a four-lined poem about a person, real or fictitious. It was originated by Edmund Clerihew Bently, a British writer. The poem follows a pattern:
Line 1 ends with a person’s name
Line 2 rhymes with the first line
Line 3 and 4 rhyme with each other.
This style we used to write about our famous writer Sholom – Aleichem who played a great role in the Jewish literature.
Sholom-Aleichem,
All Birobidzhan citizens know him
Our main street has his name,
As a writer he won a world fame.
But not all poems rhyme. For example, acrostic poems.
Acrostic poems are simple poems in which each the first letter of each line forms a word or phrase vertically. It is usually an unrhymed poem. This type of poem is easy to write because it gives you a concrete format in which to write. We’ve tried to write such poem about our town. To do this we had to find important information about Birobidzhan and then used the facts writing this poem.Born in 1937
Immigrants arrived here from all over the world
Resourceful, it’ll go far
Official center of JAR
Beautiful, green and clean
Ideal for happy life
Different from other cities
Zone time is Vladivostok
Has a great Jewish culture
Admired by many foreigners
Nice, developing and industrial.
Another unrhymed poem that we used was a cinquain.
A cinquain is a poem made of five lines. It has one topic and each line of the poem has specific rules.
Line 1 - one word that names a subject
Line 2 - 2 words that describe your subject
Line 3 - 3 verbs that describe the actions related to the subject
Line 4 - 4 words that express the feelings about your subject
Line 5 - one word that is another name for your topic
Our cinquain is about our green hill that is one of our town’s symbols. Besides it is shown in Birobidzhan’s coat of arms.
Hill
Green mount
Shining, flaunting, broadcasting
Our beautiful national treasure
Symbol
So these are our first attempts at writing. This activity is very funny and exciting but at the same time it’s very difficult to find rhymes, use correct grammar and spelling. We spent hours looking through a dictionary and surfing the Internet in search of rhymes and suitable words. More than that, we had to learn a lot of information about the history of Birobidzhan, its sightseeings and other interesting facts. I hope you will like our card (Приложение)
And I would like to finish my article with one more poem.
Birobidzhan is 75
This town is still full of life
It is in the Russian Federation
With its unique culture and nation.
There are many interesting places
And a great deal of ample green spaces.
It has beautiful broad embankments,
Several museums, squares and monuments
Where we experience our happiest moments.
Never-dying and forever young
Happy Birthday Birobidzhan!!!