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).