Post #20 -- Learning Beside Oregon's Poet Laureate, Anis Mojgani

by Penny Kittle

I am from the green of Oregon in mid-June when the sun is up early and the trout are biting in every pond. I was born and raised in the beauty of my favorite state, and it still sings inside of me. So I was thrilled, as you can imagine, when I learned that a favorite poet of mine, Anis Mojgani, had been chosen as the 10th annual Oregon Poet Laureate. He follows the two-year-term of Kim Stafford, son of legendary William Stafford, who served in the role for 15 years. Oregonians know poetry: it is in the sky in September, at Cannon Beach just after a wild windstorm, and in the view from the summit of Mt. Tabor where I walk each morning on my annual trip home.

Mojgani is a two-time National Slam Poetry Champion, and you simply must watch his 2010 performance of “Shake the Dust” on YouTube. Click now and find it. I’ll wait. Anis brings such a gentle compassion to this poem. Students respond to his call for imagining the lives and struggles of others. They want to write next to this poem.

I have used Mojgani’s poem in middle and high school classrooms for the last 11 years. I give each student a copy of the words to the poem, and then I show Anis’s performance of it. I want students to have the words when they are ready to write. Following his performance, I open my notebook and tell students I’m going to imitate his poem with my own lines:


For the new student who doesn’t know where to sit at lunch, shake the dust.

For the grandmother lonely in her room in a nursing home, shake the dust.


With each line, I tell students, I imagine someone I know who is hurting and write for them.

We all write together. The room fills with words spinning from hearts to paper. We imagine, we write, we fiddle with language and lines, and we create something beautiful in our notebooks. There is no grade, no rubric, just an opportunity to write our thinking. This essential daily practice in first draft writing builds confidence. Imitation allows all students to feel successful as they begin to trust their words and ideas on the page.

After several minutes, I ask students to underline a few lines they feel capture something important. We end this practice with a whip share—where each student has the chance to read a line or two out to the class (or pass, of course.) I love to gather these notebooks and create a class poem from their lines, which I share the next day. Community poems bind us together.

You can learn more about Anis Mojgani and his poetic genius at thepianofarm.com. Or follow him on Twitter @mojgani, Instagram @thepianofarm, or Facebook Anis Mojgani.

Further Reading:

Penny Kittle teaches freshman composition at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire. She was a teacher and literacy coach in public schools for 34 years, 21 of those spent at Kennett High School in North Conway. She is the co-author of 180 Days with Kelly Gallagher, and is the author of Book Love, and Write Beside Them, which won the James Britton award.