Lifted Line Poem

What Is a Lifted Line Poem?

This activity provides a creative way for students to engage in a text after they have worked with it as a class. In a lifted line poem, students collaborate to explore more deeply the words and experiences of first-hand accounts or fictional characters. After reading a short text, students select a line that they find meaningful and, as a class, transform these lines into a poem. The class might then collaborate to rearrange their lines in a different order that reflects a shift of mood or tone or a hierarchy of emotions, for example. This activity provides students with the time and space for individual reflection about what the text means to them as they select their lines, as well as the opportunity to engage in a class discussion while debriefing the activity that focuses on the language of the text.

How to Create a Lifted Line Poem

This activity provides a creative way for students to engage in a text after they have worked with it as a class. In a lifted line poem, students collaborate to explore more deeply the words and experiences of first-hand accounts or fictional characters. After reading a short text, students select a line that they find meaningful and, as a class, transform these lines into a poem. The class might then collaborate to rearrange their lines in a different order that reflects a shift of mood or tone or a hierarchy of emotions, for example. This activity provides students with the time and space for individual reflection about what the text means to them as they select their lines, as well as the opportunity to engage in a class discussion while debriefing the activity that focuses on the language of the text.

Step 1: Select a Text

Select a short fiction or nonfiction text for this activity. Texts with a powerful sense of voice, perhaps expressing a first-person point of view, or strong imagery tend to work well as source material.

Step 2: Prepare Students for the Activity

After reading and discussing the selected text, tell students that they will be working together to create a lifted line poem in which they will each select a meaningful line from the reading and then work together to create a poem from those lines.

Step 3: Create the Lifted Line Poem

• Instruct students to review their whole reading, select one line that is most meaningful, important, or revealing to them and mark it with a star or underline it.
• If you have time, you might ask students to write an explanation in their journals for why they lifted the line they chose.
• When everyone has selected a line, ask the students to stand and form a circle. Next, pick one student to begin and a direction (clockwise or counter-clockwise). Each student should read his or her line in succession in the direction you've picked. Tell students that it doesn’t matter if more than one person shares the same line.

Step 4: Discuss as a Class

• Discuss with students any patterns they noticed in the lines they chose. Were any lines repeated by multiple students? Why did those repeated lines resonate with multiple students?
• What ideas seemed most meaningful and important to the class? What ideas were not represented in the lifted line poem?
• How does the class’ lifted line poem extend or challenging their thinking about the text?