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Poetry - Visual poems

Range of Poetry

Poetry is a very wide-ranging type of text and has many purposes and forms. Often written or spoken for an intended reader, it may also be composed for a personal outcome because the concise and powerful nature of poetry conveys emotion particularly well. Like oral storytelling, poetry has strong social and historical links with cultures and communities.

The fact that poetry often plays with words makes it an attractive text type for children and one that they experiment with in their early language experiences. Features of other text types are frequently used as the basis for a poem, e.g. lists, dialogue, questions and answers. As children become familiar with a wider range of poetic forms and language techniques they can make increasingly effective use of wordplay to explore and develop ideas through poetry.


Structures:

Visual poems are based (often exclusively) on visual appearance and/or sound. The words are presented to create a particular shape, to create an image or to convey a visual message. Letter shapes may be exaggerated in the design. Meaning may be literal or rely on metaphor.

Link to:

Progression paper on poetry texts

Generic structureLanguage featuresKnowledge for the writer
calligrams and shape poems
view example

A calligram can be a poem, a phrase or even a single word. Calligrams use the shape of the letters, words or whole poem to show the subject of the calligram in a visual way.

 

Examples

A one-word calligram could use a wobbly font or handwriting style for the word TERRIFIED. A shape poem about eating fruit to stay healthy could be presented to look like the shape of an apple on the page or screen by adapting line length.

  • Think about words in different ways. Listen to the way they sound and look carefully at their letters and shapes on the page or screen.
  • Find out more about word meanings by using a thesaurus to get ideas.
  • Stick to simple shapes that you can recreate by typing or writing.
  • Get more ideas by exploring font options and text effects. The way they make words look will help you plan visual poems.
  • Remember that some visual poems only work by looking at them, not by reading them aloud. Others only make sense when you read them and hear the sound of the words.
concrete poetry
view example

The simplest concrete poems are shape poems but others blur the boundaries between poetry and art. They can include sounds and images and can also be 3-D. New technologies have brought about innovative forms that include multilayered texts with hyperlinks to ‘poems within poems’, visual stories, audio files and images that form part of the poem itself.

Example poems

calligramconcrete poem

P
YR
AMIDS
are wonders
that show what
numbers and people
can do if they get together.

Example 1

In art and design, children in Year 2 have been investigating different kinds of art. They make a clay sculpture and carve carefully chosen words into the surface to reflect their own feelings about a particular topic or issue, creating a 3-D poem that relies on the words and the sculpture working together. For example, they create a sculpture of a hand with two or three words in the palm to convey their own feelings.

Example 2

Children use a graphics program to create an illustration. They add a hyperlink to a sound file that plays when the cursor rolls over a hotspot or when the link is clicked. For example, working in pairs, children draw two characters and add two sound files, one for each ‘voice’ in a dialogue poem they have written. The poem is only complete when the reader can not only HEAR the dialogue but also SEE who the two speakers are.

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