Using K. A. Holt as a Poet Mentor for Student Writers by Dr. Melanie Hundley

Using K. A. Holt as a Poet Mentor for Student Writers by Dr. Melanie Hundley

Dr. Melanie  Hundley returns to the blog this week to tell us about students' work with K.A. Holt.  Aside from being a Monday Motivator curator for YA Wednesday, Dr. Melanie Hundley is a Professor in the Practice of English Education at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College. Her research examines how digital and multimodal composition informs the development of pre-service teachers’ writing pedagogy.  Additionally, she explores the use of digital and social media in young adult literature.  She teaches writing methods courses that focus on digital and multimodal composition and young adult literature courses that explore race, class, gender, and sexual identity in young adult texts.  She has taught both middle and high school English Language Arts. She is currently the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Department of Teaching and Learning.

​The middle school students in the reading group have been focusing on novels in verse for several weeks.  This week’s focus is K.A. Holt’s Ben Y and the Ghost in the Machine.  We have been focusing on the poem called School.  Matt says, “I wasn’t really interested in reading poetry so I didn’t expect to like this book.  But it was not what I expected at all.  I liked Ben a lot.”  Karlie nods and adds, “The poem about beige is my favorite.”  Six other students nod and one says, “I never thought about a color being heavy but by the time we got to the end of the poem, I felt the weight of beige.”  The students talk excitedly about what it is like to feel the weight of something that doesn’t really have weight to it. ​

They talk about how the poem creates the sense that beige is overwhelming, that it surrounds you, and that it could consume you or destroy you.  Erica says, “Beige seemed kinda harmless before this poem.” ​

School
Beige is a color, sure.
It blandly blends,
and it blends blandly.
It isn’t happy.
It isn’t sad.
It’s just…beige.
There has always been beige.
There will always be beige.
It is what it is.
Because it’s beige.
But beige isn’t just a color.
Beige is also 
a state of mind.
Embrace the beige 
so you can blend blandly,
and blandly blend;
so you can join 
the one big Everyone
that fills the halls
like a soggy glob
stuck in the throat,
that can’t be coughed out
no matter how hard
you try.

There has always been beige.
There will always be beige.
It is what it is.
Because it’s beige.

And if you don’t embrace it?
If don’t easily blend?
Beige tries to swallow YOU whole--
or worse, you’ve already been devoured
and you don’t even know.
. . . .
The beige has this way 
of seeping into your brain, 
of making you wonder--
if there’s so many of them,
and not very many of you,
maybe
just maybe
you are wrong or bad
for not fitting 
into the blob,
and maybe
just maybe
the safety
of being the same
is better than 
the danger 
of being you.
K. A. Holt (2021, p. 117-119)

“See,” Erica says after we read the poem aloud, “beige is really scary now.” The students talk about what it means to feel weighted down by something they see everyday as they talk about the lines in the poem.  They focus on the craft of the poem—the use of alliteration, rhythm, imagery, repetition, and sentence structure—and how these components are used to create the feeling of beige.  Karlie says, “I knew all the words in this poem so at first I thought it was simple.  Then we did the three readings and three discussions (once as a reader--what do you notice?, once as a scholar--what can you say and support?, and once as a  writer--what do you want to try out?) and I realized how careful and specific the word choice is. It looks so simple but it says so very much.”  As a group, we share what we noticed in the poem, we discuss the patterns that we see and how we think those helped with the meaning, and then we make a list of the things we want to try.

Our list includes: repeating words and phrases, alliteration, short sentences for emphasis, long sentences to create rhythm and contrast, capitalization for emphasis, ellipses for strategic pauses, and semicolons to make longer sentences. The students choose three of these things to try in their writing.

The students reread School one more time before they write.  We talk about colors and the importance they play in our daily lives.  Then the students choose a color and brainstorm three lists: What I think about my color, where I see my color, and what people think about my color.

After the brainstorm, the students write a series of sample first lines for their poem about the color they’ve chosen.  First, they write a sentence similar to the one K.A. Holt uses to open school—short, provocative, declarative.  It is layered with opinion.  

Green is the color of spring, kind of.
Pink is a girl color, they say.
Blue is the color of the sky, bright and smiling.

The students then try out asking a question about their color to see if that is the way they want to open their poem.

How many things are green?
Why do people think that yellow is a happy color when it is the color of a fading bruise?
How can one shade of pink be so very…bright?

The students then write a definition of their color—based on their personal definition not the one in the dictionary.

Yellow is sunshine, daisies, and my sister’s hair.
Blue is magic—it is light and bright on a summer day and dark and scary before a storm.
Green is the color of grass, dark and deep but it is also the color of snot, bright and slimy.

After the prewriting, the students write the first draft of their poem.  They underline the places in their poems where they used a technique that they saw in the mentor poem School.  Matt says, “I didn’t think I would like writing a poem.  I was wrong. This poem wasn’t scary and it was about something I know so it made me think I could write something.” When the students shared their poems, they talked about the techniques they used and what those techniques added to their writing. As a mentor text, this poem provided a great deal for the students to talk about as readers; it also provided multiple skills they could try out as writers.  

K. A. Holt is a powerful writing mentor for students.  Her poems are approachable and packed with writing skills that students can try out.  She tells engaging stories that connect with students.  Each of her books is packed with poems that make strong writing mentors for students.

Work Cited
Holt, K. A. (2021). Ben Y and the ghost in the machine. Chronicle Books: San Francisco.