Poetry Workshop Brings New Voices To The Magic Of Harry Potter

By Tanjua Damon

Something fluid and silvery gray

Fell out of the package

Strange to the touch

Water woven into material

Rare

Really valuable

An invisibility cloak…

These phrases and words may be recognizable to many, but are the new creation of students who took part in the Harry Potter Poetry Workshop at the C.H. Booth Library on Friday, bringing a new dimension to Harry Potter.

Liz Arneth facilitated the program about poetry on Friday for students in grades four through six. Students used the four Harry Potter books to create poetry of their own by imagining what the author wrote about using descriptive words.

“I want you to look at poetry as a game,” Ms Arneth said. “Pick up any written thing and utilize what is there. She [J.K. Rowling] makes words that make you see pictures.”

Students learned about found poetry, which allows students to use a written work and use words and phrases from it to create something new, according to Ms Arneth. The group also made memory maps for which they took a scene they remembered from any Harry Potter book and drew what they imagined it to be. Then they wrote down words that were associated with the picture. The students used their words and phrases to make a poem of their own.

“People ask you about magic in your life,” Ms Arneth said. “Kids who read books are magic to me. Kids who like words are magical to me.”

Children have been  fascinated by Harry Potter since J.K. Rowling began writing about the magical boy in 1998. The series by the British author will have seven books in all. Four have already been written and a movie is to be released in November.

“It’s not exactly like another book and it’s easy to understand,” Kelsey Hopper said. “It doesn’t have facts… well it does, but they are facts about a magical world, and that’s cool. It makes it sound like it could be real.”

The way J.K. Rowling writes inspires many children to read the Harry Potter series.

“I just like the writing and the plot of it,” Stephen Berg said. “J.K. Rowling uses good expression and good word usage. I just think Harry Potter is a really good book even if you read it for the 12th time through.”

Lauren Morrissey stood in line to have J.K. Rowling sign one of her Harry Potter books.

“It just catches my interest the way she writes it. It makes me almost have to read it,” Lauren said. “If I could I would stay up all night to finish it. I just wish the books would go on and on and on.”

Ms Arneth has provided students with several opportunities at the C.H. Booth Library to learn more about Harry Potter through a trivia game and through poetry workshops which have the students use Harry Poetry in different ways to take advantage of their own imaginations.