2021 Post #4 -- I Don't Like Poetry

 by Matthew Johnson

This morning I was reading introductory letters from my new group of students, and I was struck by how several students, as they always do, went out of their way to tell me the same four words that I’ve heard from scores of students over the course of my career: I don’t like poetry.

In my early years I struggled with how to respond to the inevitable and often vocal poetry critics that come into my classes each year, but a few years ago, I recalled a lesson from my youth that has since helped me to proactively win over a surprising number of these skeptics and detractors.

What I do now is that I, before we dive into our first poems of the year, lean forward and in hushed tones that denote a secret, I tell them my—to borrow a concept from comics—my origin story with poetry. I start by letting them know the truth, which was that when I sat in their position, I was anti-poetry myself. To me, poetry was something akin to a doily. It was nice enough for people who were into that kind of thing, but to me, it seemed frilly, fussy, and essentially useless.

I then jump to my junior year of college, when my professor, likely anticipating some resistant poets in the audience, dropped the Billy Collins’ poem "Introduction to Poetry" on our desks and asked for our thoughts on it. As I say this, I also drop this poem onto their desks and tell them that for some reason this poem grabbed me in that moment like none before. The language was so distinctly not fussy, the images felt crisp and clear, and the subversive tone very much appealed to the 20 year old me.

Lastly, I tell them that in that moment I understood both that I could like poetry and why I’d always disliked it before. Poetry is human existence condensed into, as Langston Hughes calls them, “atomic words.” Like any condensed flavor, if one dislikes the original flavor, the condensed version will be even less appealing, but when one comes across the condensed flavor of something one already loves, the taste can be like Nirvana.

To conclude the lesson, I tell students to go and find that flavor that works for them. Their Nirvana. It can be a slam poet, a pop song, another Billy Collins poem, or even Shel Silverstein. And the result, beyond students bringing a lot of great poems the next class, is that while plenty of beginning of the year letters mention not liking poetry, the ones at the end of the year never do!

Further Reading:

Matthew Johnson is an English teacher from Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is also a husband and father, and over the last decade he has read, thought, and written about how teachers can balance teaching with all of the other important roles they play in their lives. His work has been published by Principal Leadership, Edutopia, ASCD, The National Writing Project, and the National Council of Teachers of English, and his weekly thoughts on how to be a better teacher of writing in less time can be found on his website www.matthewmjohnson.com. When not teaching, reading, or writing, he can often be found in the kitchen, his garden, or out on a run through the gently rolling hills of Southeast Michigan.

2020 Post #4 -- Beautiful Words and A Call to Write

by Molly Rickert

This activity is used to discuss word choice and tone. It can also be used as a warm-up to get students to write…anything…to begin class.

I read the poem "Drum Dream Girl" by Margarita Engle aloud to students and ask students to make a list of the beautiful words and phrases they hear. When we finish reading, we discuss the main idea of the poem: Who is Drum Dream Girl? How would you describe her and why?

Then, we compile a class list of our beautiful words. We notice the use of verbs and discuss how the use of verbs carries the main idea of the poem and the tone of the poem.

Students then respond to the poem. They are encouraged to respond in any way they would like (stream of consciousness, poem, narrative, etc.) I give them a few writing ideas/options:

• Choose a line and write about it in any way. 
• Create a poem about something you are passionate about, using the collected words and phrases where possible.
• Write about a time you were told you were told you couldn’t do something but persevered.
• Write about a dream you have and what you would do to accomplish this dream.

Further Reading:

Molly Rickert is a seventh grade English teacher in Bucks County. Follow her on Twitter @mrickertCB

2018 Poem #25 -- Reclaiming Identity

by Kelsey Hughes

Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem, “We Real Cool” is a perfect choice for the classroom for many reasons—its brevity (which is, of course, appealing to students at first glance) allows for deep-digging into a small space; the speaker’s voice is palpable and relevant to many teens; and the possibilities for connecting the poem’s themes and tone to a class novel are endless.

This year, I used “We Real Cool” when teaching S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders. I presented the poem to students at the beginning of class and let Brooks read the poem herself (Listen here). Her introduction provides a good backstory before reading the poem, and by listening to Brooks read aloud, the students are able to benefit from hearing her rhythm and her voice as she reads the poem beautifully. The students then re-read the poem multiple times on their own, marking up the text each time through a new layer--be it through line-by-line extractions of meaning, notes about repetition and figurative language, or even insights into the poem’s progression. After ample time with the text, we “tear apart” and discuss the poem together on the SmartBoard.

After making sense of the poem in isolation, I then ask the students to make a connection between this poem and The Outsiders. I intentionally leave the question, “How does this poem connect to The Outsiders?” open-ended, as the connections range from connections of theme to tone and form. Students surprise me with the amount of meaningful connections they can make with this poem.

After discussing their connections, I then had them look at the definition of “reclaim”* and ask how the speaker here is reclaiming his identity. I then take them to the moment in The Outsiders where the Greasers are almost pronouncing their own “manifesto” before the big rumble; here, we closely read this excerpt and discuss how Greasers are “reclaiming” their identities and why they might need to do this.

A creative writing option would be to have students write a poem in which they reclaim their own identities. This could be a pastiche poem, where students utilize the form and the repetition of “We” or “I” to create their own manifesto. An added challenge would be to require the students to incorporate gradual shift in tone that Brooks creates in “We Real Cool.”

Further Reading:

Kelsey R. Hughes is a writer and English Teacher at Lenape and Holicong Middle Schools in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Her published and unpublished works can be found at www.kelseyrhughes.weebly.com.


*reclaim: retrieve or recover (something previously lost, given, or paid); obtain the return of.

2018 Poem #21 -- Comfort Food

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.

Words and phrases like "great ships," "the story of the onion," "weeping," "cathedral," and "pageantry" consistently surprise my students.  We often end up discussing the fun choice of ending the poem with the image of "the soothing shapes our mouths made as we tasted."  I even ask them to pantomime what it looks like to eat a spoonful of soup. 

A follow-up question can help us go deeper and inspire writing: Why does the writer use words that seem almost too profound or intense for the topic?  How does this help strengthen the poem? 

For five minutes, students can write in their notebooks about a favorite comfort food, perhaps even using language that is a bit over-the-top to intensify the effect on readers.  Writing with them in my notebook under the document camera, I might zoom in on the "lava flows" when I slice open my omelette or capture the feeling of "base jumping" off the "cliff" of a three-layered chocolate cake slice.  These subtle hyperboles can make the mundane become extraordinary, and often that is the ambition of a poem in the first place. 

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 ten years. He is the creator of the Go Poems blog and the author of Poetry Pauses: Teaching With Poems to Elevate Writing in All Genres.   Find him on Twitter @theVogelman.

2018 Poem #12 -- Letter to the Future

by Tyler Kline

In this exercise, students write a letter to a person living fifty years in the future.  First, read Matthew Olzmann's poem “Letter to Someone Living Fifty Years From Now” as a mentor text.

Students may write the letter to a specific person or to an anonymous "someone" like Olzmann does.  Encourage students to consider what they want to tell this person living in the future with some of the following prompts:  Do you want to share information about what is going on in the world right now?   Current events?  Celebrity gossip?  Do you want to share a fear, dream, wish or thought that you currently have?  Remind students that their letter do not have to be about anything monumental (example: Olzmann writes about animals becoming extinct) but what students write about should be significant to THEM.

As they write, encourage students to include a question to the future reader, something they would like to know from this person.  For example: "Do you still have the McDonald's Dollar Menu?" or "Who is on the one-hundred-dollar bill?" or "Are robots friendly?"

Olzmann ends his poem with the powerful line, "And then all the bees were dead."  Students can choose to end on any type of note they want -- inspiring, hopeful, forlorn, confused, etc.  Whatever their choice, encourage students to craft a last line that is as impactful as possible and to write this line in a separate stanza.

If time permits for discussion, students can share their poems with a partner.  The conference partner can pretend to be the reader fifty years from now and predict how this future reader would respond to the poem. 

Further Reading:

Tyler Kline is a teacher and writer from Pennsylvania.  In 2015, he was named the Poet Laureate of Bucks County, PA. 

Go Poem #23 -- Sense the Sarcasm

by Hilary Czaplicki

One of my favorite poems to use near the start of National Poetry Month is “Did I Miss Anything?” by Tom Wayman.  As literature, the poem is a great study in voice, tone, and hyperbole. The visual structure of the poem makes it easier for students to understand the pendulum-like sarcasm of the teacher as he informs a student of what was missed during an absence. I often ask students to tell me what they notice and annotate the poem. Also, I insist that noticing everything is essential. In other words, they can’t assume that something is not important. This type of close reading builds great reading skills. Eventually, we find the tone, speaker, sarcasm, and message implied.

I usually ask students to consider the following three big questions as they read and annotate (I read once aloud, then they read to themselves and analyze):

1.       What do you think the poem means?  (or what’s at the heart of the poem?)

2.       What makes you think that? (cite some specific ideas or reasons)

3.       How does the author point you to your conclusions about the poem? (I ask students to use the language of literature and point out specific terms, elements, and devices)

As a way of connecting with students through humor, the lesson of the poem works as the concluding lines imply that something was missed (because of the absence), and that something can never be “made-up.” This is not my way of shaming students into better attendance. It is a way to send a clever and subtle message about the importance of being present, not only physically, but mentally and emotionally as well, a message that becomes an important intangible rule in the learning process. The poem then goes on to serve as a running joke for the rest of the year, whenever someone asks “Did I miss anything?"

Hilary Czaplicki is an English teacher and supervisor in Bucks County, PA. Follow him on Twitter @CzapHil.

Further Reading: