One thing I know about teenagers is that music is a universal love language for them.

As writing workshop teachers, one of the ways that we can speak this language is by inviting our students to write lyric mashup poetry. As the name suggests, this kind of poetry invites students into practicing several skills that elevate our students’ writing craft. Among them:

• Immersion in beautiful words. As students dive into well-known lyrics, they’re empowered to love words and reflect on their meanings.
• Listening and speaking: Students are invited to listen to the words of favorite songs, and talk with other writers about why the songs are meaningful, and how they plan to “mash them up” with other songs. 
• Synthesis: Perhaps the most powerful invitation for our students in writing lyric mashups is synthesizing–looking at the lyrics of three songs, and intentionally selecting lines from each to “mashup” and create a new song.
• Thanks to Kelly Gallagher and Penny Kittle for introducing me to lyric mashups during their daily videos for teachers during the COVID-19 lockdown!

Billy Joel’s music was the soundtrack of my adolescence, and I still love his haunting melodies and the way that so many of his songs are narrative poems that invite listeners into redemptive tales, breakup stories, or litanies of historic events. Following is a description of how I implement lyric mashup poetry with eighth grade poets, with my job sheets and student examples linked.

Step One: I share my favorite artist, Billy Joel with students, by playing one of the three songs that I use for my mashup with them, “The Downeaster Alexa,” a piece that tells the story of New England fishermen struggling for survival. 

Step Two: After listening to the song together, I give students my mashup and we use different colored highlighters to take a look at how lyrics from “The Downeaster Alexa” are mashed up with words from the other two songs I selected, and lines I wrote myself to preserve the flow of the mashup poem. My job sheet for students is linked here.

The mashup poem that I wrote is called “Cathedral,” and I use it to illustrate how powerful it can be to mashup songs that are dissimilar at first glance, but on closer examination have common threads thematically. To write “Cathedral,” I used “The Downeaster Alexa,” and a song that Joel wrote about Victor, a dear friend he met while on tour in what at the time was still the USSR, called “Leningrad.” My third and final song is his famous breakup song and the tenth track on his 1989 album Storm Front, “And So it Goes.” All three of these songs are about loss in different ways: Loss of innocence, loss of a lifestyle, a parent, and the death of a relationship. When joined together, the lyrics from these three songs can create a compelling new poem.

 My students’ lyric mashups were a joy to read and showed the depth of their dive into music, and the breadth of their appreciation for different musical genres. I asked them to include a brief rationale for why they chose the artist that they did at the beginning of their mashup poems. 

     Karis and Carly mashed up four different Beatles’ songs, and wrote about the lasting impact that the Beatles have had on the world. Shaun and Isaiah collaborated on a mashup using the music of NF. Another beautiful aspect of writing mashups is that it invites students to collaborate around their similar musical tastes to create something meaningful.

     Lyric mashups were one way to invite my students back into composing poetry before we spend time writing beside living poets this December during our Ten Days of Spoken Word Poetry. What are your favorite ways to invite students into poetic exploration? Share your ideas in the comments below.

Elizabeth Oosterheert is a middle school language arts teacher and theatre troupe director in central Iowa. She loves writing, and sharing the stage with seventh and eighth graders. Her favorite stories are Peter Pan, The Outsiders, & Our Town. She recently finished writing an adaptation of Arabian Nights for performance in November 2021.

Tagged: Mentor Texts, Readers Writers Workshop, writing