2021 Post #17 -- A Poem a Day (The Same Poem a Day)

by Janet Wong and Sylvia Vardell

A year ago, at the start of the pandemic in the U.S., we wrote a guest post entitled “In This Together,” celebrating the teachers and administrators who have risen to do heroic things on a daily basis to help families in their learning communities. We praised families, too, for stepping up to comfort and educate children and lamented over the jumbled mix of emotions that we all were feeling over the COVID-19 situation. We urged readers to seek relief in poetry for several reasons, such as the way poems often point to the good things in life, especially the small good things, bringing us slivers of hope and joy when we are lost.

Fully a year later, we feel the same way about the ability of poetry to provide relief, but we’ll admit that the message of optimism might be wearing thin—especially for students. How many times can they hear “things will be better” before they tune us out?

More than we might think. A few years ago the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research released a study that shared the following: people often replay a favorite song hundreds of times. The study’s authors called this “extreme re-listening” and suggested that people do not tire of listening to songs that they choose voluntarily. We think it’s time to apply this concept to the sharing of poetry, especially with poems that incorporate movement and can provide a quick “brain break.” One exemplary poem for this purpose is “Everyday Use” by Zetta Elliot from HOP TO IT: Poems to Get You Moving, our latest anthology (featuring 100 poems by 90 poets). You can read the text of the poem here, but we hope you’ll also play the video of Zetta Elliott reading her poem. It takes less than a minute, so you can even play it daily for a week, or several times in a day—and then give the link to it to your students for them to play (when they feel like it) at home.

You might even want to give students a homework assignment simply to listen to a favorite poem—any poem—three times in a day. You can provide them with a list of audio or video links gathered from Poets.org, PoetryFoundation.org, PoetryMinute.org, or in the Poetry Video Library at No Water River; you can also find many poetry readings at our Pomelo Books Vimeo site. To give you a start, here are links to several additional poems from HOP TO IT, read by the poets themselves, that will lend themselves well to some extreme re-listening (and brain breaks) at home.


“Any Weather” by Rebecca Balcárcel https://vimeo.com/477187936

“At the Eye” by Padma Venkatraman: https://vimeo.com/477200215

“Chair Dancing” by Xelena González: https://vimeo.com/476495197

“Clear, Cool Blue” by Jacqueline Jules: https://vimeo.com/477197161

“I Smile with My Eyes” by David McMullin: https://vimeo.com/476499247

“The Artist” by Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie: https://vimeo.com/504939468

As we said last year, if any of these poems resonates especially strongly with your students, please spread the word. We are still #inthistogether.



Further Reading:



Sylvia Vardell is Professor in the School of Library and Information Studies at Texas Woman’s University; her current work focuses on poetry for children, including the nationally recognized blog, Poetry for Children. Janet Wong is the author of more than thirty books for children and teens on a wide variety of subjects, including identity (A Suitcase of Seaweed & MORE). Together, Vardell and Wong are the forces behind the Poetry Friday books published by Pomelo Books.

2021 Post #9 -- What We Leave Behind

 by Rama Janamanchi

In my classroom, we watch Chimamanda Adiche’s The Danger of a Single Story early in the year. I use it as a touchstone throughout the year to remind students to look beyond the obvious and the stereotypical in all the literature we read.

Ross Gay’s poem, A Small Needful Fact, is central to understanding how we all have stories that reveal another dimension of ourselves. When I first taught this poem, Eric Garner’s name was still familiar for most of my students. Last year, I had students ask who Eric Garner was. So the lesson below was born inspired by a Folger workshop at NCTE last year led by the inimitable Missy Springsteen-Haupt.

We begin by reading the poem chorally. Then I call on 2 volunteers to read part of this article as if they were newscasters. They are asked to take turns reading the first 4 paragraphs in the article. Then the class reads the poem again silently. Then the 2 students stand and read the paragraphs aloud again. This time, as the article is being read, the rest of the class reads aloud “A Small Needful Fact” until the newscasters are done reading the 5 paragraphs.

As voices of the ‘newscasters’ are slowly drowned by the poem, we return to discuss the impact of having both narratives run concurrently. This is especially true when the poem’s ending lines up with the fourth paragraph recounting Garner’s final words.

Further Reading: 

Rama Janamanchi teaches at a private high school for students with language-based learning differences. Twitter: @MsJanamanchi410 

2019 Post #24 -- Reading and Writing Outdoors

by Sarah Mulhern Gross

Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day” is one of my favorite poems to share with students. It’s one of Oliver’s best-known and most-quoted poems and has been included in a few of her anthologies. It strikes a chord with many high school students as they are beginning to think about their lives beyond high school. It’s also a great way to get students to slow down and observe nature for a few minutes.

Begin by giving students a copy of the poem and let them read along as they listen to Mary Oliver read it. I like to take my students outside for this activity, so I use my cell phone to share the audio. Ask your students to mark the phrases or lines that strike them in any way while they read the poem. After students have read the poem and listened to Oliver read it, have a brief discussion. I always point out to students that “The Summer Day” sounds like a prayer to me, and this makes sense because Oliver frequently talked about how the forest was her church. Ask students what their “church” might be. Where do they feel spiritual? Where do they feel safe and at peace?

After a brief discussion, give students a few minutes to write. Ask them to let the sights and sounds of the outdoors guide their writing as they try to answer the question “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” I don’t give my students too many guidelines here as I just want them to write. Their response can be in prose or poetry form, and if they really get stuck I encourage them to sketch.

You could easily extend this activity into a full lesson by having students choose something outside (a tree, a blade of grass, a bird, a bug, etc) and center their response around it like Oliver centers her poem around the grasshopper. They could spend 10-15 minutes making observations about what they see, hear, smell, feel and (maybe?) taste while observing their species of choice. Oliver’s poem can serve as a mentor for their response to the question in her final line.

For more on Mary Oliver, check out this excellent New Yorker piece: Mary Oliver Helped Us Stay Amazed

For a brief Go Poems idea for Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese" click here.

Further reading:

Sarah Gross is one of the co-organizers of NerdCampNJ. She teaches in central New Jersey and loves spending time outdoors.