by Brett Vogelsinger

Gabriel Fried's poem, "Twilight Field" establishes a delightfully creepy mood with simple langauge and one short stanza:


Twilight Field

The spirits play a children's game;
they pose as trees in clover.
I look. They stay. I look. They stay.
I look again. They're closer.


The second read of this poem demands a choral reading from the class, which adds to the sinister overtones.  And if a student just happens to be open the door and come in late as you read the last word of the poem together as a class . . . well that's just perfect!  For me, this poem catpures that feeling we can sometimes experience when alone with nature, that something is watching us or drawing near, for in nature, we are never entirely in solitude. (Note: The Dr. Who fans in your class will impulsively want to point out a connection to The Weeping Angels at this point as well!)

I use this poem on days when I want to maintain my Poem of the Day routine, but I have limited time.  I write this statement on the board: "This poem has an excellent example of 'near rhyme.'"

After two readings, I ask students to defend this statement, even if they have never heard of "near rhyme" before.  In each class, someone is able to infer what that term must mean, and the student points out that "clover" and "closer" seem to rhyme, but do not excatly rhyme, and the repeated "a" sound (assonance) in "game" and "stay" create a similar effect.

While I do not make it a formal homework assignment, I invite students to pay attention to the lyrics the next time they listen to their favorite music.  Where in the lyrics can they spot an example of near rhyme?  Songwriters often employ near rhyme in order to fit the needed ideas within the rhythm of the music without compromising the overall rhyme scheme.  Put to music, near rhymes sound even more like real rhymes.

While literary terms can be dry when learned in isolation, taught in the context of a quick, enjoyable poem and favorite music they seem far less daunting.

For another Gabriel Fried poem to share, see this post from last year's 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 Michelle Ambrosini

When I have paired a poem with another poem or with an image, my seventh grade students have shared prolific responses. Pairing “Always” and “Hope is the thing with feathers” allows students to enter the discussion of a big idea using both modern and classic text. By inviting students to sketch Dickinson’s “thing with feathers,” I ask students to make meaning through drawing as well as discussion.

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

Some poems are so simple and beautiful that overthinking them, as English teachers are prone to do, can risk losing the potent, raw effect of the words.

I first discovered Nikki Giovanni's poem "Quilts" in her illustrated children's book I Am Loved.  I was next to my sons, reading them the book at bedtime, when the poem suddenly seized me, choked me up, sent chills down my spine.

To allow students to have this experience with poetry, it is sometimes necessary to minimize our intervention and discussion of the poems.  We must also unabashedly share our own unexpected emotional responses to a poem.  For me, it was the closing lines that move me the most:

        When I am frayed and strained and drizzled at the end
         Please someone cut a square and put me in a quilt
         That I might keep some child warm

        And some old person with no one else to talk to
        Will hear my whispers

        And cuddle
        near.

So when I share this poem with students, I tell them it is new to me, and the first time I read it, it almost made me cry in front of my sons.  I do not try to explain why this happened, just share that it happened, and that I hope they find a poem like this in their lives at some point, maybe even in the course of our class.

After hearing the poem twice, read aloud the first time by me and the second time by one of my students, I asked the class only one question: "What's this poem about?"

This simple but excellent question about poetry invites divergent thinking early in the class period.  In this case, students brought up that the poem is about aging, usefulness, love, timelessness, change, and comfort.  The question avoids killing the poem with over-analysis, and the student observations are varied.

Try this with "Quilts," or with a poem of your own choosing that speaks to your heart.

And welcome to our second year of Go Poems.  I hope you find some intriguing ideas for reading daily poetry in your classroom.

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. Follow him on Twitter @theVogelman. 

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 Lisa Levin

Musician Jeff Tweedy recently turned Carl Sandburg’s poem “Theme In Yellow” into “an airy, idyllic folk song” that appears on Brooklyn musician David Nagler's tribute album, Carl Sandburg's Chicago Poems.

The poem describes a midwestern October and is filled with images of "prairie cornfields / Orange and tawny gold clusters" and children "singing ghost songs / And love to the harvest moon" while gathered around a pumpkin (or someone pretending to be a pumpkin), who serves as the poem's speaker.

I project the text of this poem on the screen while my students listen to the song. I tell the students very little beforehand, except that they should try and ascertain whether the poem develops a story from the images the poet creates. After the song, I ask a student to volunteer to read the poem to the class. Next we discuss the literary element of mood. Students define the mood of the poem and then provide lines from the poem as supporting evidence. It was interesting that half of the students found the mood to be peaceful and half found the mood to be sinister!

by Brett Vogelsinger

Today's post offers two poems for the price of one.  Both are in video format, for the poems have been adopted by companies in hopes of making their brand appeal to the hearts and minds of customers.

First, we have Charles Bukowski poem "The Laughing Heart" found in a Levi's commercial.




Second, we have Maya Angelou's "The Human Family" found in an iPhone commercial.


Using one or both of these poems, discuss these questions as a class:

What does the company seek to communicate about their brand using this poem?  What associations do they want you, the audience, to make with Levis or Apple?  What connotations are they developing for their brand? 

What are your thoughts on using poetry for the purpose of advertising? Does it devalue the poem that someone besides the author is using it to make money?  Or does it bring poetry, framed professionally with images and music, to a vast audience, making poetry more approachable?

It may be worth noting that both of these commercials were produced after the death of the poets who wrote the poems, so someone other than the original poet had to give permission to use the poem in this manner.  If you were responsible for the copyright of a famous poet's work, what questions would you ask before granting permission to use the poet's work in a television commercial?

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.