by Brett Vogelsinger

When it comes to concrete poetry, students are often impressed with its combination of simplicity and cleverness.  And that's the thing about concrete poems: like masterful acrobats or skateboarders or dancers, they make artful maneuvers look easy.  As some people work on movement to play with gravity, the concrete poet plays with negative space, the blank page, and the shape of words in original and sometimes humorous ways. 

One of my favorite concrete poets is Bob Raczka and his book Wet Cement contains a poem that will ring true to students and teachers everywhere.  It is called "Clock" and the picture below comes from the Kindle preview on Amazon:  




Why not challenge your students to create a smiple clock poem that sets the hour and minute hands at a different time: wake-up time,  lunch, bedtime, game time.  Or you might challenge them to change the form and still write about time: a sundial, an hourglass, a digital clock, an iPhone.  This quick introduction to a sub-genre of poetry in a shape that students of all ages and artistic abilities can handle may do more than just inspire them to create a concrete poem.  Poetry is about moments, and this exercise moves them to think of a poemworthy moment.  Maybe the following day in class, that same moment can be crafted into a poem with line breaks and stanzas.  

The writer's notebook awaits!

Further Reading:


Brett Vogelsinger is a ninth-grade English teacher at Holicong Middle School in Bucks County, PA. He has been starting class with a poem each day for the past six years and is the creator of the Go Poems blog to share poetry reading and writing ideas with teachers around the world. Find him on Twitter @theVogelman.

by Allison Marchetti

One of the greatest lessons we can give our young writers is to pay attention. Nature walks, writer’s notebooks, guided imagery--all of these are wonderful tools for sharpening the writer’s focus. Another tool is the still life in words.

Jim Daniel’s poem “Work Boots: Still Life” describes a pair of work boots drying in the sun. Like an artist painting the tiny details of a thing, each line reveals the hidden layers and larger-than-lifeness of an ordinary pair of boots. The poem builds to reveal much about its wearer, to whom the boots offer the “promise of safety | the promise of steel.”

One of my favorite poems to write with students is the pantoum. The basic structure is as follows: ABCD, BEDF, EGFH, ACHJ. We read Carolyn Kizer's poem Parent's Pantoun.

Here is one that I wrote in front of my students:
















What I like about pantoums is that they appear accessible to students. I share that you really are writing 9 lines and then repeating those lines. But repeating those lines is also what is complex, where the author must think about getting the lines in an order that makes sense. I do always begin by having students number (or letter) the lines on a lined sheet of paper. It helps the writer organize their thoughts and lines, especially when it comes to repeating them later.

I ask writers to think about a few things as they write and revise:


What line is the most important to begin on and end on?

As you brainstorm and draft, which lines are worthy of being repeated and which are not?

How can you leverage punctuation in a way that will introduce an idea in one line but have the same line conclude an idea later on?

by Brett Vogelsinger

Welcome back teachers, poets, writers, and students to our first post of the 2019 National Poetry Month season!  Subscribe now via email so you can catch every post and add new selections to your repertoire of poems to share with students.  On this site, you will also find engaging methods, questions, and media to provoke powerful thinking in your classroom.

Naomi Shihab Nye is a familiar name to many teachers who share poetry in their classrooms. Her poems are accessible and profound. They balance provocative, relevant commentary on our world with a sense of joy and possibility that children need to hear in their reading at school.

Her poem "Famous" is one of her best-known poems, but the title is slyly misleading. Instead of celebrating fame in the red-carpet sense of the word, it turns an eye on commonplace things "like a pulley . . . or a buttonhole . . . because it never forgot what it could do."

After reading the poem with students, discuss this question: "What is she doing here with the title and the concept of fame?"  Then, in their notebooks, invite students to create an imaginary"deleted scene" from this poem that fits the spirit of the original.  They might begin with her refrain "The _______ is famous to the ________" to shine a light on a different sort of fame. The opening lines of the last two stanzas also work well for this prompt: "I want to be famous to _______" or "I want to be famous in the way ________." My students wrote about the "fame" of jeeps, staples, touchscreens, pen caps, and tree trunks in their notebooks, to name a few.

When you visit the link to today's poem, be sure to watch the film adaptation of Nye's poem at the bottom fo the page.  The creative pairing of video imagery with lines from the poem could spark a discussion all of its own.  In a later post, we will look at another video from the Poetry Foundation's Poem Movie collection.

Further Reading:




Brett Vogelsinger is a ninth-grade English teacher at Holicong Middle School in Bucks County, PA.  He has been starting class with a poem each day for the past six years and is the creator of the Go Poems blog to share poetry reading and writing ideas with teachers around the world. Find him on Twitter @theVogelman.

by Oona Marie Abrams





Oona Marie Abrams (@oonziela) is one of the co-organizers of NerdCampNJ. She lives and teaches in northern New Jersey.

by Molly Rickert

Part of what make's Ada Limon's poem "The Conditional" exceptional is its use of figurative language, and I would like my students to become more comfortable with figurative language as a writing skill.

When we discuss the beauty and unique style of writing with figurative language, I have students write observation poems. The first goal is to make literal observations three times in a row: 1. Look up and write 2. Look around and write. 3. Look down and write.

Below is an example of the first stanza of a literal observation poem based on 1) the details of the ceiling tiles 2) what was nearby on a desk and 3) what was on the floor.








For as many literal observations as the students made, I have them make the same amount of figurative observations.




Molly Rickert is a seventh grade English teacher at Holicong Middle School. This idea was inspired by a class she took through the West Chester Writing Institute (PAWLP).  Follow her on Twitter (@itsklinemk).

by Brett Vogelsinger

An abecedary is an inscription of the letters of the alphabet, often in order, and often used as a practice exercise, so technically every student who has studied the English language has completed an abecedary at some point early on in their education in order to learn the alphabet.  In fact, there is even a related word to describe people learning the alphabet: abecedarians.  That sounds so much more accomplished than "kindergarteners," does it not?

Gabriel Fried's poem, "Abecedary," is somewhat more challenging.  Each word begins with a consecutive letter of the alphabet, yet it makes fantastic, whimsical sense as a series of commands or instructions for debonair elves and mighty newish otters.

Here is the poem:

Abecedary
by Gabriel Fried

Apple-
Bodied
Child,
Debonair
Elf,
Forage
Gently
Here
In
Jasmine
Keeled
Latitudes.
Mighty
Newish
Otter,
Pray
Quietly.
Retrieve
Sapphires.
Trundle
Under
Violets
Within
Xanadu,
Young
Zodiac.


The poem looks like it must have been easy to write at first, much like some abstract paintings in a museum may make some visitors feel like, "Well I can do that!"  So challenge students to create an abecedary that makes some sense, maybe even as a set of instructions like this poem.  In five minutes, they will discover the challenge.

The goal here is not for every student to complete a perfect Abecedary, but rather to grapple in their writer's notebooks with this structure and see how an excellent poet can make a challenge look deceptively simple.

Further Reading:




Brett Vogelsinger is a ninth-grade English teacher at Holicong Middle School in Bucks County, PA.  He is the faculty adviser for the school literary magazine, Sevenatenine.  Besides his annual blogging adventure on this site, he has published work on Nerdy Book Club, The New York Times Learning Network, and Edutopia and you can follow him on Twitter (@theVogelman).

1. What do I see?
2. What do I hear?
3. What do I feel?
4. What do I smell?
5. What do I think?

Image taken from Allan Wolf's website, linked above.

by Brett Vogelsinger

As teachers of poetry, we have likely all spoken about the value of each word in a poem.  It is no hyperbole to say that each word in a poem carries more weight than each word in an essay, short story, or novel.  But to make this fact have a bit more impact, and in the spirit of Keri Smith's wildly successful creative journal series, it can be fun to experiment with "wrecking" a poem.

Anne Porter's Poem "Wild Geese Alighting on a Lake" is a poem that students can easily identify as tranquil in its mood.  I challenge students to wreck the poem in their Writer's Notebooks by drastically altering its mood.  They must do this by changing only five words.

Fair warning: if you try this in class, a fair amount of students will kill off those geese.  Nonetheless, the outcomes are remarkable.  A poem that is nearly the same can be so, so, incredibly different when the writer (student) alters just five of the writer's (poet's) words.  Your class is guaranteed a few laughs along the way, and we can only hope that Anne Porter would forgive and maybe even applaud the kids' irreverent ingenuity.

An interesting extension might include a discussion of the connotations of those five changed words, for it is the associations of the individual words that help to craft the mood in a poem.

Brett Vogelsinger teaches freshman English students at Holicong Middle School in Doylestown, PA where he starts class with a poem each day. Follow his work on Twitter @theVogelman.

Further Reading:

Living Things: Collected Poems by Anne Porter

by Brett Vogelsinger

National Poetry Month is a harbinger of warmer weather in many parts of the United States, and most people who experience the bitter extremes of a frigid winter are ready to bid that weather farewell.  Reading the poem "Night Below Zero" by Kenneth Rexroth might seem counterintuitive.

The poem beautifully captures the way "the cold lies, crystalline and silent" in the dead of winter, which can introduce an intriguing challenge for your students.  Can they craft a short, sharp poem like this one that captures the awakening of new life with the first warmth of spring?

When the first beautiful weather strikes in Pennsylvania, I share with my students the line from Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem, "Spring": "when weeds in wheels spring long and lovely and lush."  How amazing is the rhythm and alliteration in that line!  But I digress.

Why not take the poem's title in today's poem, "Night Below Zero" and change it to something in the same concise structure that captures a key element of spring in your community:  "Sunrise Before Alarm Clock" or "Buds Upon Trees" or "Sunshine On Shoulders" (not quite the John Denver song title, but close).  This copy-change technique can be used to help coach students with mentor texts in all sorts of genres.

The same way Kenneth Rexroth uses the action of skiing in the darkness to take the pulse of a season, challenge your students to quick write for five minutes in their notebooks to their title, perhaps just focusing on one key moment or activity that characterizes springtime.  Pencils moving for five minutes will result in a draft; there is always time to go back and revise later, and perhaps you will even choose to grow this seed writing into a lesson on revision.

Brett Vogelsinger teaches freshman English students at Holicong Middle School in Doylestown, PA where he starts class with a poem each day. Follow his work on Twitter @theVogelman.

by Drew Sterner 

My class reads the poem "My Father's Tie Rack" by Joan Larkin twice -- once aloud and the second time silently -- to enhance understanding. I share the poem on the screen up front without the title. Students write down a guess for what the title may be in their writer's notebook. They identify one or two lines from the poem that they have used as clues for the title they have written down.




Students typically enjoy the use of powerful fragments found in the poem that personify the ties as possible memories in the father’s life.

Drew Sterner is a Middle School ELA teacher in Central Bucks School District.