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Joe Romano is poet. He currently teaches writing at Sacramento City College.
Students long to express themselves, yet often have an estranged relationship with writing. SpicyNodes is a tool you can use to engage students, and one that encourages them to hone their writing skills and anticipate how their finished work will be perceived by their audiences. In the process, they’ll gain a deeper understanding of poetry, pinpoint their own thoughts and feelings, and discover a vehicle for self-expression that will serve them throughout their lives.
Joe Romano has developed a suite of lessons that you can adapt to fit your needs, or that you can use as an adjunct to your curriculum or as stand-alone workshops for middle school, high school, college, or adult education students.
The paper preparations help students understand how readers can interact with language in poetry and urge them to think about developing multiple similes and metaphors for a single object – both of which are critical to writing SpicyNodes poems.
Next, a variety of pre-writing and writing exercises provides students with all the material they will need to think “nodefully” and begin to develop their own SpicyNodes poetry. Other assignments teach students how to critique and edit their own work, as well as how to invite feedback from others. Finally, students can create and publish their own node poems using the SpicyNodes interface.
Four published poets have experimented with the innovative form that SpicyNodes offers. The SpicyNodes Poetry Project challenges students to experiment with the form and further refine their writing.
