Remix Poetry

What insights and connections do students make when engaging with literacy texts through poetry?

By: Ashleigh Allen

“I jump ‘em from other writers, but I arrange ‘em my own way.”

- American Blues and Folk musician, Blind Willie McTell

We depend on each other for inspiration; whether we’re expressing ourselves using language, paint, music, or creating in any way, we’re inspired and we inspire. We cannot create a thing from nothing, and this activity is a clear example of how we overtly rely on pre-existing texts and ideas to develop our own creations.

 During our novel study of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 we made remix poems. One of the powerful elements of this activity for student writers is that they use language and syntax already available to them. Instead of having to think of a topic or language to explore a topic in a poem, students use the pre-existing texts in front of them to write. Re-mix poetry is a sort of literary collage.

“It’s an exercise in intuition and intention as well as invention.”

In creating re-mix poems, it’s important to choose primary texts carefully; our poems combined four texts. The first was a paragraph-long written story that mattered to students (this could have been a story of something that they or a family member experienced, a local legend, a favourite book, or something else). Since we had read Fahrenheit 451 and had been considering the role and ethical obligations of fire fighters, the second text was the “Fire Fighters Code of Ethics” and because we were questioning the morals and implications of laws within our society, the third text was “Canada’s Arson and Other Fires” laws. The fourth text was Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Students engaged with each of these texts in a unique way, weaving them together to create a unique fifth text – their poem.

The invitation for students was to choose a few phrases (3-5) from each of the texts, order them however students wanted on the page, adjust verb tenses or words so that the flow of the poem suited the taste of the student, reorder or break up lines on the page, and finally walk away from the poem. It was stressed that a poem is done when the student decides it’s done. The experience of remixing allows students to see themselves not only as keepers of texts and preservers of stories, but also creators of texts who deliberately decide what elements of pre-existing texts they will take with them, and what they will leave behind. It’s an exercise in intuition and intention as well as invention.