by Brett Vogelsinger
Joy Harjo's signature poet laureate project "Living Nations, Living Words" features an interactive map of North America. The project invited Native Nation poets to choose where on a story map they would like to place a link to one of their poems. Now it invites us to click on the map and open an audio version of a poem, read by the poet, along with a bit of background.
For Poem of the Day, I project the map on the screen, and I let my students choose a location to click. We enjoy hearing a poem that was new to teacher and students together, a true discovery experience in the classroom. Since the poem is new to all of us at once, I ask a simple question: "What do you learn from this poem?" Sometimes daily poetry responses should be that simple, that natural.
One of the favorite poems we discovered was "Off Island CHamorus," by Craig Santos Perez, a memoir poem about coming from Guam, a place so small that it did not appear clearly on the school map when his new teacher in California asked him to point out where he was from to the class. The poem teaches about "what it means to be a diasporic CHamoru."
The poem is understandable as we listen to it the first time, but share the PDF version available just underneath the recording and there is so much more to talk about. The poem blends narrative, statistics, history, and reflection in ways that show my high school readers that there is so much we do not know, even about the territories of the country we inhabit.
I dare you to click on this map and fall down a rabbit hole of exploration. You will marvel, and you will learn. And so will your students.
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.
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