by Travis Crowder

One of the beautiful things about poetry is that is touches all other genres. Poetry dwells within prose, both fiction and nonfiction, sometimes subtle and other times striking, but always trying to nudge us past the ostensible. Authors use poetic language to move their writing and to help us see the world through their eyes. Words, the molecules of ideas, envelope us, nudging us to think deeply about their function. Sometimes they seem to rest in the palm of an open hand, inviting us to use and to lean on them, to pull them into our own way of writing and speaking. This part of author’s craft is majestic, and I love introducing students to how authors use words to convey meaning.

Just a few days ago, conversations about author’s craft centered around the use of short sentences in prose. I mentioned to students how powerful short sentences could be, but like many things in reading and writing, showing works better than telling. During independent reading, I asked them to collect short sentences (usually 1-4 words) form their books on sticky notes. I came to class with my own collection of short sentences from my book, The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, pictured here:





Under the document camera, I began arranging the sentences into the form of a poem, paying attention to the meanings of lines, of how fractured sentences could be fused into new ones, of how meaning changes when lines are extracted from context and blended with something else. As I arranged the sentences, I thought aloud, telling students that adding or removing words from the original sentences was acceptable.

After a few minutes of crafting in front of them, I invited them to do the same. Students worked for about ten minutes with the sentences from their independent reading. During this time, I asked them to mold them into the shape and feel of a poem, read it aloud to themselves, then revise their original poem by swapping lines, interspersing their own lines of original thought, isolating words on a single line to draw attention to them, and so on.

After collecting short sentences from Girl in Pieces by Kathleen Glasgow, Levi wrote:


The arrangement of sentences—filled with haunting lyricism—mesmerized me and his other readers.

Brittany, while reading Flawed by Cecilia Ahern, found this poem of sentences:


The blend of dialogue gives her poem a different edge. Characters’ names were in the original version, but I encouraged her to remove them so the reader could create the voices and names. 

In the world of spoken word poetry, it is hard to beat the work of Rudy Fancisco. His work is powerful, brilliant, and highly entertaining. While his videos are incredible -- and I suggest you use as many as you can -- his recently published anthology, Helium, presents a number of written texts that fit well as a warm-up in any class.

One text that I have used recently is a poem he first published via social media and later used in his book.

Find this poem in Rudy Fransisco's book, Helium, or in the original tweet.

This poem is simple and presents an abundance of opportunities to talk about language and narrative.

Before introducing this poem, I talk to students about some fears that I have, things like flying and heights. I ask students if they have any fears and discuss whether they are rational or not. I end the brief discussion with what seems to be a surprising statement for some students: that I am terrified of spiders. I then show them this poem on my screen. I read the poem aloud and ask for a student reading.

The discussion can go a number of ways. Focus on the first half: "How does the poet react when asked to kill a spider, a task we all have probably done without giving it much thought?” Or focus on the second half of the poem: “What profound statement is made about the refusal of a simple task, killing a spider”.

I start with these questions but also allow student to just talk about the poem and what they got out of it. I close the discussion with the fact that since reading this poem a year ago, I haven’t killed a spider. Because of the way Fancisco addresses the idea of being “caught in the wrong place/at the wrong time, just being alive” I have tried to treat all things with a greater sense of kindness and mercy. Poetry can change us.

A suggested pairing: Read this text alongside William Blake's "The Fly"  and allow students to analyze “How does poetry allow us to see large concepts in the smallest of creatures?”

Further Reading:




Zachary Sibel is a hip-hop fan and an eighth-grade English teacher at Tohickon Middle School in Bucks County, PA. 

by Brett Vogelsinger

Everybody has their favorite comfort food. An omelette with bacon, macaroni and cheese, wonton soup, chocolate cake with vanilla icing, and a full box of Triscuits -- these are a few of my personal favorites.  

In the poem "Everybody Made Soups," poet Lisa Coffman takes an artistic eye to a favorite winter comfort food, and since winter does  not seem to want to let go of us here in Pennsylvania this year, it seems strangely apropos right now.  After a first read of the poem, I ask students to answer a single question.  What words or phrases do you find here that are most surprising to find in a poem about soup?


Everybody Made Soups
by Lisa Coffman

After it all, the events of the holidays,
the dinner tables passing like great ships,
everybody made soups for a while.
Cooked and cooked until the broth kept
the story of the onion, the weeping meat.
It was over, the year was spent, the new one
had yet to make its demands on us,
each day lay in the dark like a folded letter.
Then out of it all we made one final thing
out of the bounty that had not always filled us,
out of the ruined cathedral carcass of the turkey,
the limp celery chopped back into plenty,
the fish head, the spine. Out of the rejected,
the passed over, never the object of love.
It was as if all the pageantry had been for this:
the quiet after, the simmered light,
the soothing shapes our mouths made as we tasted.

by Rose Birkhead

Hanging Fire by Audre Lorde is a perfect fit for a fourteen-year-old adolescent student!

On the day I shared this poem with my students, I rearranged the desks to form a circle. The students knew from the beginning of class that today was going to be different, and it brought a new energy to the classroom. I highly recommend rearranging the furniture to promote conversation!

I used the text rendering experience to work through this poem, and also had students write a short comment to connect with the poem, an idea in their head, or an emotion on their heart, the Book-Head-Heart from Kylene Beers & Robert Probst.

First, I read the poem aloud to the students and had the students close their eyes, or put their heads down so they could take in the poem. On second read, I passed around copies of the poem for each student, and displayed it on the board. During the second read, I asked students to underline a sentence that stuck out to them. I read the poem aloud again, and asked them to box a phrase. Finally, I had the students read the poem to themselves, and asked them to circle one word that stood out to them. We shared our sentences, phrases, and words in the traditional text rendering protocol; then I had the students have a full class discussion about the poem for five minutes. After the discussion, students wrote down a new learning from the whole class discussion.

This activity probably takes 15 minutes. The poem has so many layers of meaning, and I was impressed with how the text rendering helped students naturally make connections with the poem. During our whole-group conversation, I held back my thoughts and let the students run the conversation. Their discussion was rich and powerful. The short write after the conversation allowed students to go back and see how/if their thinking changed, and their writing was expressive and personal. Enjoy this age-appropriate poem about being an adolescent.

Further Reading:

by Amy Ludwig VanDerwater

I collect words.  And I keep lists of these collections in my notebooks. When I listen to people speak, read books, or think, I pause to consider the sounds and meanings of lovable and interesting words.  Just this week I've been enchanted by Albuquerque and resonant.  Last week I fell in love with seagull and periwinkle.  

We are changed when we pay attention to words, and while collecting words focuses our attention on language-music, word collections also offer writing ideas. 

Begin a list of favorite words in your own notebook.  Think about words you loved as a little child, words that call up fabric names and kitchen words.  Consider nature words or magical words.  Write these down. 

A sample favorite word list with connections.

Once you have a list, consider connecting pairs of words in surprising ways by drawing random lines between them.  If you desire, share your list with friends or colleagues, each of you saving each other's favorite words as you wish. Or simply choose one word, place it atop a page, and write from it.  You may find that the lines you have drawn will invite a curious connection that brings you somewhere new, as I did in the poem "Word Collection." 

"Word Collection" by Amy Ludwig VanDerwater

Allow yourself to be surprised.

Collect words always.  Words are the bricks of writing. 

I am grateful to Rebecca Kai Dotlich for teaching me to make and share my favorite word lists as she learned from Myra Cohn Livingston.  Pass it on.  Pass it on. 




Amy Ludwig VanDerwater is author of books including FOREST HAS A SONG, EVERY DAY BIRDS, READ! READ! READ!, DREAMING OF YOU, WITH MY HANDS, and POEMS ARE TEACHERS.  Amy lives in Holland, NY with her family, blogs for young writers at The Poem Farm and Sharing Our Notebooks and posts on Twitter and Instagram as @amylvpoemfarm. 

Enter our giveaway to win a free copy of Amy's book Read! Read! Read! by leaving a comment on any 2018 Go Poems post by 8:30AM on Saturday, April 6.  Many thanks to Boyds Mills Press for sponsoring this giveaway.  

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 student writers struggle to access their full vocabulary while in the frenzy of a first draft or the more attentive work of revision.  Since poems are filled with strong diction and fresh uses for familiar words, a poem can actually be sourced as a bank full of powerful language.

by Brett Vogelsinger

Naomi Shihab Nye's poem "Burning the Old Year" showed up in my inbox on January 2, 2017, thanks to the amazing poetry teaching resources from The Academy of American Poets, available here and searchable via #poetryclassroom.  The email included some classroom activities, which are excellent for starting a new calendar year, but as all teachers are wont to do, I began thinking about how to modify or adapt the listing idea so that this poem could have relevance any time of the year.

Ultimately, the poem is about what things perish quickly -- "lists of vegetables, partial poems" -- and what lasts -- "so little is a stone."

In their notebooks, I have my students sketch a fire for one minute while thinking about what aspects of life survive the "orange swirling flames of days" and what aspects do not.  Then we make two lists.  What things do we quickly relinquish in life, and what do we manage to cling to, sometimes despite wishing to let go.  What is "paper" in our life and what is "stone?"

These two lists can provide rich ideas for later writing topics, so students can nurture this seed into their own creative writing if they wish.

Also, don't miss Naomi Shihab Nye's excellent speech about teaching poetry:




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 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

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 Brett Vogelsinger



I use this image, created on Wordle, to project a wordcloud of the language from the poem "Turtle" by Kay Ryan onto the screen. Students predict what today's poem will be about. Sometimes I even tell them that the title is hidden in the word cloud. 

Naturally, as in most poems, some of these words have figurative meaning.  After reading the poem twice, we discuss which nouns are used literally and which are used figuratively.  What does the use of these figurative nouns add to the poem?  Why use figurative language as a writer?  What does it add to the experience of readers?

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 Brett Vogelsinger

One of my favorite (and perhaps the truest) quotes about poetry is from Marianne Moore and serves as the title of today's post.  "Poetry is all nouns and verbs."  Pick your favorite poem and look at it closely.  Your favorite words, the pieces that really make it tick, will be the nouns and verbs.

I wrap the lesson up by asking about the end message -- the final two lines of the poem -- what does Jason Reynolds want us to walk away with?  This poem speaks to many of my kids, not all, but I think it offers a way to show them that poetry might be more raw than they assume.

Pernille Ripp is a seventh-grade language arts teacher from Madison, WI. Follow her work on Twitter: @pernilleripp