by Brett Vogelsinger

I first used the song "A Long and Happy Life" by the band Delta Rae with my class to spark a Writer's Notebook piece about my students' roots.  "I was born to..." or "I was raised by... " make excellent starters for students to explore their heritage in words, perhaps even using quick images and figurative language as the songwriters do in the song.

Some of my students this year wrote lines like "I was raised by a strict Jewish mother and a free-spirited Catholic father" and "We were born to improve the world" and "I raised with brothers who tackled each other for fun" and "I was born to be everything my dad could not be." These lines are windows into my students' lives and afforded me views I might otherwise overlook.

This song is my Poem of the Day about a week prior to starting our personal narrative writing project, and it is the perfect way to start thinking about the stories that make my students the people they are today and the adults they are becoming. Try sharing this song or maybe one of your personal favorite. Find lines in the lyrics that empower new writing ideas for your students and help them to explore their roots.  In my classroom, we even begin to write as the song is playing.

I should also add here that Delta Rae often offers a free ticket giveaway for teachers on their summer tour, a drawing I won (thanks to some generous student nominations) for their Philly 2018 concert.  This band puts on one of the most phenomenal live music shows I've seen, and they have a genuine appreciation for the work of teachers.  I can't wait to see them in concert again in May! Much love to Delta Rae :)



Further Listening:



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 Amy Ludwig VanDerwater

Click to Enlarge Image

Sometimes I find my way into a poem through the window of meter. I adore playing with meter, but when I find myself relying too heavily on the same syllable counts again and again, I turn to songs.

If you wish to write with meter but do not know where to begin, choose a song, any song: "Twinkle Twinkle" or "Happy Birthday" or "Three Blind Mice." Or don’t choose a song but instead, choose a poem with a meter you like and want to try. Write it out. Then, count out the syllables and mark the stresses.

Next or first, select a topic, maybe something new or perhaps something you have already written about but wish to try in a new form. Now, on a fresh page of your notebook, write the syllable counts down the left column of your page. Experiment with writing within this syllable and stress constraint. You may choose to vary a bit, or you may not, but either way, you will have tried something new. And to test if the meter works, sing your words to the tune of the song. Listen carefully and revise based what you hear.

In April 2015, I wrote from a different song meter each day. One of these poems ended up in my book With My Hands (Clarion, 2018). I always tell students that books have secrets, and one secret of With My Hands is that "Painting" (found in the image above) can be sung to the tune of "I’ve Been Working on the Railroad!"

Part of the work of a writer is stretching oneself. Experimenting with meter and song is one way to do this.

Further Reading:

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 Zachary Sibel

by Penny Kittle

Some students resist writing poetry because they struggle to find words to contain their ideas. Poetry feels Important, Serious, and Literary. It is. But it is also simple, playful, and found in the everyday. In fact, that is its Superpower.

To help my students learn to play, I spend days on found poetry.  We use words we find in an editorial, news article, school hallway, book, or in this case, songs to compose our own poems. The rules are simple: you can't add your own words; you use what you find.  This takes pressure off and opens possibility.

My writer's notebook was open and under the document camera at the start of class one day.  I had strips of lyrics to three songs from the Lumineers piled on two empty pages.  I placed one line, then another, searched for phrases to repeat, and then added those between emerging stanzas. The beauty was in the clean, efficient revising: I lifted lines from my emerging draft and returned them to the word pile or cut a phrase into smaller parts and played with the power of line breaks to slow down my reading.  I searched for consonants to repeat and unlikely combinations that led my poem to new ideas.

“Can we get started?” students asked.

Yes, please.



Penny Kittle is a high school English teacher and writer from North Conway, New Hampshire.  You can follow her work on Twitter @pennykittle.

by Brett Vogelsinger

The repetition of grammatical structures, known as parallelism, works especially well for poets because it establishes rhythm and momentum in a piece of writing.  Any writer is concerned with the "flow" of a piece, how it moves, and parallelism is a key skill to acquire for our students as writers.

Joy Harjo's poem "Remember" employs parallelism on two levels.  The repetition of the word "remember" to introduce new ideas couples with the similar structure in the clauses that follow give this poem its remarkable sense of music.

After our first reading of the poem, I ask students to hypothesize the cultural background of the poet from the imagery in the poem.  Most classes are able to conclude the poet is writing from a Native American background using the personification of earth, moon, and stars and the reference to dance in the closing lines as their primary clues.  We briefly discuss how Native American cultures view man's relationship with the earth and how this differs from other cultures.

Just before the second read, I introduce the concept of parallelism, relating it to the simpler term repetition. How does repetition/parallel structure enhance this poem? After a second read, kids are quick to pick out that the structure adds to the rhythm, giving the poem a songlike quality.

As an extension, it can also be rewarding to write together as a class based on this poem.  I have kids write their own "Remember . . . " lines on sentence strips.  On my magnetized board, we attach them and work them into our own collaborative "Remember" poem reorganizing for greater music and momentum as we go. In writing this poem, we have used, listened to, and revised parallel structure.  

Two other poems that work well as alternates for a similar mini-lesson:  "The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee" by N. Scott Momaday or "Famous" by Naomi Shihab Nye.

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 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!