Last week, I walked in and saw students embroidering faces, hobbies, and traits onto a blank white piece of fabric. The alignment was cosmic. As students finished up their self-portraits for art class, we read and discussed Chen Chen’s “Self Portrait as So Much Potential” and discussed the various ways the voice in the poem describes themself. Students then had time to brainstorm how they want to talk about themselves in written form before diving into the writing process and writing their own portrait poems. Read a poem by one of our student poets below:
Here she is, as tall as a tree.
As free as a bird. Here she is as bright
as day and as dark as night. She is
as sweet as a pear and as sour
as a lemon. She is as quiet as a mouse
but as loud as a bear. She is as strong
as she wants to be. She is me.
