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Listen to Poem-a-Day on Spotify. Poem-a-Day is the original, daily poetry series featuring new poems by today's poets. Produced by the Academy of American Poets, this free digital series is made possible by you, our readers and listeners. Theme music by Kat Rejsek. Audio engineering by Thea Matthews.

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We know poetry to be a critical pillar of public life. It rises up when official language fails us. And it gives voice to what is human and what is true, how...

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Your new ritual, in podcast form: Immerse yourself in a single poem, guided by Pádraig Ó Tuama.

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Well over ten thousand poets and writers maintain listings in this essential resource for writers interested in connecting with their peers, as well as editors, agents, and reading series coordinators looking for authors. Apply today to join the growing community of writers who stay in touch and informed using the Poets & Writers Directory.

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Archive - For Dear Life with Maggie Smith

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Full archive of all the posts from For Dear Life with Maggie Smith.

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List of All 180 Poems | Poetry 180 | Poet Laureate Projects | Poet Laureate | Poetry & Literature | Programs | Library of Congress

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The Library of Congress promotes poetry and literature year-round through our online and in-person programs, our honors and prizes, and our ambassadors.

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- Charles "Chaz" Bojórquez
And this block would shout, "Nos diste un chingaso, cabrón. Mira esta cara rota, these baton-cracked ribs, this black and blue street dizzy con gente: blades, kiki, larry, snow, enrique, connie, elton, king, david, kelly, jeff, ratón, chaz, los de aquí, los de abajo. This roll call won't be silenced, not by glock, not by chokehold. This is our temple of runes, our tomb - its glyphic curve and flow, calligraphic code writ acrylic. This, our relic, our scroll unrolled in catacombs, our flecks of subtext still buzzing después de que vayamos con La Pelona. ¡qué lucha, loco! Ven, baile con nosotros to the aerosol's maraca y hiss, al punk en español's furious sweat. Hang your head out the window y dale un grito tan lleno de duende that it cracks the pavement, summons our dead to dinner. Turn the tonal kaleidoscope. Then pause, catch your breath, so you don't miss the illegible moment where all the mystery lives. There, de-cypher that!"

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Charles "Chaz" Bojórquez And this block would shout, "Nos diste un chingaso, cabrón. Mira esta cara rota, these baton-cracked ribs, this black and blue street dizzy con gente: blades, kiki, larry, snow, enrique, connie, elton, king, david, kelly, jeff, ratón, chaz, los de aquí, los de abajo.

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The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

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Bear In Mind

A bear is chasing me through a meadow
and I'm running as fast as I can but
he's gaining on me-it seems
he's always gaining on me.
I'm running and running but also
thinking I should just
turn around and say,
"Stop it! Stop chasing me. We both
know you aren't going to catch me.
All you can ever do is chase me. So,
think about it-why bother?"

The bear does stop,
and he sits on his haunches and thinks,
or seems to think. And then
the bear says to me,
"I have to chase you, you know
that. Or you should. And, sure,
we both know I'll never catch you.
So, why not give us both a break and
just stop thinking about me?"

But, with that said, he gets back on four feet,
sticks his long pink tongue out, licks down
both sides of his snout. Then he sighs, looks
behind himself, then at me and says, "Okay,
ready when you are."

"Bear In Mind" by John Martin from Hold This. © Concrete Wolf Press, 2017. Reprinted with permission. ( buy now)

Today is the birthday of Amos Bronson Alcott (1799) ( books by this author), born in Wolcott, Connecticut, and also the birthday of his daughter, Louisa May Alcott (1832) ( books by this author), born in Germantown, Pennsylvania. The father was a transcendentalist philosopher, abolitionist, and teacher; the daughter was the author of many books, most notably Little Women (1868). Bronson Alcott was full of dreams and schemes, an idealist who founded a commune called Fruitlands and became a vegan before the term even existed. Fruitlands failed miserably, and Alcott got by on loans from others, including his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, but the Alcotts were often without money. At 15, Louisa vowed: "I will do something by and by. Don't care what, teach, sew, act, write, anything to help the family; and I'll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won't! [...] I'll make a battering-ram of my head and make my way through this rough-and-tumble world."

Louisa May Alcott started writing poems and submitting them to periodicals. She also published Hospital Sketches (1863), which was based on her experiences as an Army nurse in Washington, D.C., during the Civil War. Her first literary success came with the semi-autobiographical Little Women, and the money she made provided her father with his first taste of financial security. She never favored the domestic, value-laden type of writing that made her famous. What she really loved was writing lurid Gothic romances, a fondness that traced back to her childhood acting out stories with her sisters; she wrote three of the thrillers under the pen name "A.M. Barnard." Two were published in her lifetime; the third - A Long Fatal Love Chase - was written in 1866, but was rejected as being too sensational. It was finally published in 1995.

Bronson Alcott died on March 4, 1888; a few days earlier, bedridden, he had told his visiting daughter Louisa, "I am going up. Come with me." She replied, "I wish I could." As it turned out, she followed him just two days later, dying of a stroke at age 55.

It's the birthday of novelist and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis ( books by this author), born Clive Staples Lewis in Belfast, Ireland (1898). He grew up in a big house out in the country. He said: "I am the product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books." He was particularly fascinated by Norse myths and old Scandinavian epics.

Lewis became an atheist after his mother died, and his atheism deepened after he fought on the front lines in France during WWI. He studied at Oxford University, and then became a professor there. After he had been teaching for about a year, he went to an Oxford faculty meeting and met a young professor of Anglo-Saxon named J.R.R. Tolkien. Lewis described Tolkien in his diary: "He is a smooth, pale, fluent little chap [...] thinks all literature is written for the amusement of men between 30 and 40 [...] No harm in him: only needs a smack or two." Despite his initial misgivings, Lewis and Tolkien became good friends when Lewis joined Tolkien's newly formed Icelandic Society. Lewis wrote to his best friend from childhood: " You will be able to imagine what a delight this is to me, and how, even in turning over the pages of my Icelandic Dictionary, the mere name of a god or giant catching my eye will sometimes throw me back 15 years into a wild dream of northern skies and Valkyrie music."

In 1929, Lewis converted from atheism to theism (but still not to Christianity). He described how for months he felt God's presence in his room each night, and finally, he gave in. He described himself as "perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England." Two years later, he invited Tolkien and another friend to dinner, and afterward they spent hours walking along the river on the Oxford campus and discussing Christianity and myth. A few days later, Lewis officially converted to Christianity, riding on a motorcycle on the way to the Whipsnade zoo with his brother. He said, "When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did."

It was around that time that Lewis and Tolkien began meeting regularly with a group of friends who became known as "The Inklings." The Inklings met for 16 years. Each week they gathered midday in a back room at the Eagle and Child pub (which they called the Bird and Baby) for food, cider, and informal conversation. The serious literary events occurred each Thursday evening in Lewis's apartment, which was not particularly clean. Lewis flicked his cigarette ashes directly on the carpet, and as one member pointed out, it was impossible to tell whether his gray chairs and sofa were gray originally or were just dirty. The Inklings would arrive slowly between 9 and 10:30 p.m., someone would make a pot of strong black tea, and they would take turns reading aloud from whatever they were writing. Over the years, Tolkien read The Lord of the Rings, and Lewis The Screwtape Letters (1942), his book of fictional advice letters from a senior demon, Screwtape, to his nephew Wormwood.

One day Lewis sat down to write a story for his goddaughter, Lucy. He said it "began with a picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. The picture had been in my mind since I was about 16. Then one day when I was about 40, I said to myself: 'Let's try to make a story about it.'" That was The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), which Lewis followed with six sequels, known collectively as The Chronicles of Narnia.

Lewis's other books include Mere Christianity (1952) and Surprised by Joy (1955).

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®

Production Credits

Host: Garrison Keillor
Technical Director: Thomas Scheuzger
Engineer: Noah Smith
Producer: Joy Biles
Permissions: Theresa Burgess
Web Producer: Ben Miller

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The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

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Bear In Mind A bear is chasing me through a meadow and I'm running as fast as I can but he's gaining on me-it seems he's always gaining on me. I'm running and running but also thinking I should just turn around and say, "Stop it! Stop chasing me.

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Gwarlingo's Sunday Poem series features the poetry of today's best contemporary poets.

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Commentary on why poetry matters. "The Word Sonnet: A Distillation" (2021) Read a conversation between author, Seymour Mayne, and editor and translator, María Laura Spoturno in Tusaaji: A Translation Review. "No One Gets Sylvia Plath" by Emily Van Duyne (2020) Read in Literary Hub.

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Poets reflect on the poems they return to in difficult times....

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Poetry and lessons for children of all ages by Amy Ludwig VanDerwater for classrooms or homeschools to teach literacy and writing workshop instruction

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Share your videos with friends, family, and the world

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Grief. Homesickness. A first kiss. Experiences like these transcend our rational understanding of the world. In such moments, we need poetry. This series pai…

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Mixtapes provide a playlist of poems for when you want to dive into a subject, idea, or theme. Don’t forget to check out the liner notes, where you’ll find the thought process behind each Mixtape as well as recommended readings if you want to go even deeper.

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Over the years, this list of poetic forms for poets has grown from 50 to 86 to 100 and now 168. And I doubt we're anywhere near adding to the list (still have plenty of forms to discuss for future Poetic Form Fridays). This list is a combination of well-established traditional forms, newer types of poems, and even a few fun super new nonce forms.

( Common Poetry Terms.)

Each form listed below has a very brief description to give the vaguest ideas of how it differs from the others in the list, but I advise clicking the link for the name of the form to gain a true understanding of the guidelines for each poetic form. Also, most of those pages include at least one (if not several) example poems to show how to write them.

And with that simple introduction, please enjoy this updated list of poetic forms from abstract to zejel and 160+ more in between. Be sure to check out each form. It might even make a good year-long challenge to write three forms each week of the year.

Here's my list of 168 poetic forms:

(Note: Click on the name of each form to read the full description in the original posts.)

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Play with poetic forms!
Poetic forms are fun poetic games, and this digital guide collects more than 100 poetic forms, including more established poetic forms (like sestinas and sonnets) and newer invented forms (like golden shovels and fibs).

Click to continue.

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Build an Audience for Your Poetry!
While your focus as a poet will always be on refining your craft, why not cultivate a following along the way? With the multitude of social networking opportunities available today, it's never been easier to connect with other poetry enthusiasts.

Click to continue.

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Poem your days away with Robert Lee Brewer's Smash Poetry Journal. This fun poetic guide is loaded with 125 poetry prompts, space to place your poems, and plenty of fun poetic asides.

(Writer's Digest uses affiliate links)

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From abstract poems to villanelles, find a range of poetic forms for poets in this list, including French, Spanish, Vietnamese, Irish, Japanese, Korean, Welsh, and contemporary forms! Each listing links to a more comprehensive description of the form along with an example poem using the form.

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Making poetry personal, in the hands of people who love it. New episodes every Tuesday and Friday. Produced in collaboration with The Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/

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poetry "slam poetry" slam "spoken word" neil hilborn "freestyle poetry" "poetry slam" "poetry videos" "spoken poetry" "rudy francisco" "sabrina benaim" "sara...

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Help us expand what we do (closed captioning, multilingual subtitles, nationwide tour & more!): http://bit.ly/buttonpatreon Subscribe to Button! New video daily: http://bit.ly/buttonpoetry Click here to see some of of our upcoming classes, products and more: https://buttonpoetry.com/instalinks/ Button Poetry is a Minnesota-based organization dedicated to developing a coherent and effective system of production, distribution, promotion and fundraising for performance poetry.

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Poets reflect on the poems they return to in difficult times....

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Welcome to The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database!

The Quarry is a searchable collection of over 600 poems by a diverse array of contemporary socially engaged poets, published by Split This Rock since 2009. Like all of Split This Rock's programs, The Quarry is designed to bring poetry fully to the center of public life.

Searchable by social justice theme, author's identity, state, and geographic region, The Quarry is a unique, rich resource.

Whether you are organizing for social justice, work as a teacher or social worker, or are planning a worship service or other public event, The Quarry offers poems that will inform and inspire you, your peers, and all with whom you work and collaborate.

Split This Rock celebrates the power of the imagination to transform the individual and society. Poems in The Quarry help us name injustices and grieve losses both personal and communal. They speak our rage and our resistance. And they imagine another world, one built on justice and with the power of love. We are so grateful to the brave, visionary poets for their words.

We invite you to explore The Quarry: use the tags at the bottom to let one poem lead you to another, get to know poets in your state or region, watch videos, luxuriate in these gorgeous, hurting, challenging, and comforting words. Split some rocks!

Share the Poems Widely But Please Give Credit

We encourage you to use and share these poems widely, and ask only that you credit the author and name Split This Rock's The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database as the source. Please also include a direct link to the database for any reproduction of poems.

We'd love to hear how you use The Quarry. Please send your stories, questions, suggestions to info@splitthisrock.org. Thank you!

About the Poems

Poems featured in The Quarry were originally published in Split This Rock's Poem of the Week series or were winners of Split This Rock's annual poetry contest or the Abortion Rights Poetry Contest, co-sponsored by the Abortion Care Network. Some of the poets have featured at Split This Rock's biennial poetry festival and/or Sunday Kind of Love reading and open mic series. Others are members of the national Split This Rock community, Split This Rock teaching artists, members of the DC Youth Slam Team, and more. Sign up for the newsletter to receive the Poem of the Week in your inbox each Friday when the series returns in 2022.

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The Quarry is a searchable collection of over 600 poems by a diverse array of contemporary socially engaged poets, published by Split This Rock since 2009. Like all of Split This Rock's programs, The Quarry is designed to bring poetry fully to the center of public life.

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David Barber is poetry editor of The Atlantic, where he has been a staff editor since 1994. Barber has taught writing and literature at Middlebury College, the Harvard Writing Program, MIT's Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, and the Emerson College graduate writing program. He also writes on natural history, music, and art.

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Poetry Out Loud encourages the study of great poetry. The program helps students master public speaking skills, build self-confidence, and learn about literary history and contemporary life.

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Introduction to Spoken Word and Slam Poetry

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Here are 30 ideas for helping your students appreciate poetry - and experiment with it themselves.

Video

"Thank goodness for poetry," wrote Sindha Agha, the video artist who made the piece at the top of this post. "A poem is a timeless place, an immaterial plot of land where we can gather across generations to breathe and feel, deeply and safely."

We agree, and, as The New York Times keeps publishing news and features about poetry and poets, it is both our job and our joy to help people teach and learn with poems - during April, which is National Poetry Month, or anytime.

Below, you'll find an updated and improved version of a list we've been keeping for years. We hope it will help even the most verse averse find something to enjoy.

Here Are Some Ideas For...

_________ Find a Favorite Poem

Image

This Book Review piece asks well-known people like John Green, Shonda Rhimes, Alan Cumming and Stephen King, "What's Your Favorite Poem?" and links to answers including Yeats and Gwendolyn Brooks.

Ask your students to find a favorite poem and write or talk about what it means to them. For more inspiration, they might visit The Favorite Poem Project and watch videos like this one.
_________ #TeachLivingPoets

The #TeachLivingPoets movement is about "complicating the canon and empowering students through poetry." You can follow along or contribute on Twitter, and, as you'll see throughout this post, you can also find all kinds of work by living poets in The Times.

One great place to start is the weekly Poem column in The New York Times Magazine. There you'll find accessible work by contemporary poets, all of it chosen and briefly introduced by a poet-editor like Reginald Dwayne Betts or Naomi Shihab Nye who gives the piece a bit of context. In this lesson plan, Reading Poetry With the Poem Column, we suggest nine pieces to begin with, and many ways to work with them.
_________ Start a Meeting or a Class With a Poem

Did you know that the journalists who work for The Times's National desk often started their meetings with a poem? Here's why, according to a 2020 piece written by their former editor:

When the National desk gets together to discuss stories, it can be a grim half-hour. We dissect natural disasters. We reconstruct mass shootings. We delve into political scandals and all manner of domestic tumult. Recently, though, we added a new feature to our morning meetings aimed at inspiring us and boosting our creativity before we embark on another long day of editing the news.

We read a poem.

I got the idea from an unlikely source: my son's high school English teacher, Anne Baney. During parent-teacher night, she explained how she reads a poem at the beginning of every class from "Poetry 180," an anthology of contemporary poems compiled by Billy Collins, the former poet laureate of the United States. The room turns quiet when she reads, she told us. If she ever forgets to start off the day with a poem, her students remind her. They like it.

And, it turns out, so do we.

We borrowed the story above as an excuse to ask students back in 2020, " What Role Does Poetry Play in Your Life? " Nearly 200 answered, telling us about why and when they turn to poetry, how it inspires or helps them, and what verse they love best. Your students might add their own thoughts since the post is still open to comments.

What poem could start your next class or meeting? Brett Vogelsinger has some ideas. Mr. Vogelsinger is a teacher in Pennsylvania who begins every class all year long with a poem, usually having his students focus on one small aspect of it before moving on. For example, here is how he has taught Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." This idea and the ideas of teacher-contributors from all over can be found on his Go Poems blog, which, for six years now, has published brief strategies for sharing a #poemaday in classrooms during National Poetry Month.
_________ Navigate Difficult Times

Video

Back

transcript

'Democracy' by Langston Hughes

Democracy will not come today, this year, nor ever through compromise and fear. I have as much right as the other fellow has to stand on my two feet, and own the land. I tire so of hearing people say let things take their course, tomorrow is another day. I do not need my freedom when I'm dead. I cannot live on tomorrows bread. Freedom is a strong seed, planted in a great need. I live here too. I want freedom just as you.

The Muriel Rukeyser poem at the top of this post comes from a 2021 feature in which Ms. Agha, the video artist, and several contemporary American poets created videos of verses that helped them "puzzle through their feelings" about the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. Though the Rukeyser poem was written in 1968, and the Langston Hughes poem above was first published in 1949, they both "reach across time and circumstance" to speak to us today.

Watch any or all of the three videos - the two embedded in this post, plus "Barracks Home" by Toyo Suyemoto - and ask your students to think about how they connect with our struggles today.

Then, skim the comments from readers. The piece asked, "What's a line from a poem that has helped you navigate a difficult time, or encapsulates your outlook on life?" Over 200 people shared their thoughts. What new poetry can your students discover this way? And, what lines from poetry have helped them navigate difficult times? If they are stuck for an answer, another Times feature from 2020 asked 16 poets what poem they turn to in times of strife. In it you'll find links to verse by Dante, Robert Hayden, Audre Lorde and more.
To go deeper into this theme, please see the section below about "Connecting Poetry and the News." _________ Read Closely

Do you teach "Musée des Beaux Arts," the W.H. Auden poem based on the Bruegel painting shown above? The Times has created a rich interactive, part of its Close Read series, in which the poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert helps readers literally and figuratively "zoom in" on specific details of both the poem and the painting to learn more.

To go along with it, we've published a lesson plan that prepares students for the experience via their own close readings, then suggests taking the learning further by using Ms. Gabbert's work as a mentor text for analyses of the poem or painting of their choice - or for writing their own ekphrastic poem s.

And if they would like to do a similar close read of another often-taught poem, invite them to follow this interactive from the Close Read series that explores Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art."

Here's an idea from the writer Elliott Holt, as described in her piece "My Secret Weapon Against the Attention Economy ":

On the first day of every month, I pick a poem, and then I read that poem every day that month.

I can't take credit for this idea; my friend Jenny suggested it to me years ago, after someone proposed it to her. That first year, I joined Jenny in reading Wallace Stevens's "The Snow Man" in January. Repetition led to revelation: Every day, I noticed new things in the text. By the end of the month, I knew the poem by heart.

She wrote, "Revisiting the same poem every day is the antithesis of the attention economy; instead of scrolling along the surface, I'm diving deep beneath it."

What would your students choose as their "poems of the month"? Could you make time during every class period this month for them to revisit their poems and dive deeper? Do you think they would find it meditative - a relief from our noisy world - the way this writer did?
_________ Recite, Memory

Since ancient times, humans have memorized and recited poetry, writes Molly Worthen in this Opinion essay:

Before the invention of writing, the only way to possess a poem was to memorize it. Long after scrolls and folios supplemented our brains, court poets, priests and wandering bards recited poetry in order to entertain and connect with the divine. For individuals, a poem learned by heart could be a lifeline - to grapple with overwhelming emotion or preserve sanity amid the brutalities of prison and warfare.

She suggests that, though the practice is currently out of fashion in schools, everyone should memorize a bit of poetry as "a lifeline - to grapple with overwhelming emotion or preserve sanity," as well as to "find your kindred spirits across the centuries."

If your students tried the exercise above, in which they read the same poem daily for a month, they may have already accidentally memorized a poem that is meaningful to them. But if not, what verse would they choose that would provide a "lifeline" or connect them to a "kindred spirit"?
_________ Dismantle the Barriers Between Rap and Poetry

If your students love rap, there is no better article for them to read than this 2021 Magazine piece about what rap and poetry have in common. Here is how the writer, Adam Bradley, introduces the idea:

Today, a new generation of artists, both rappers and poets, are consciously forging closer kinship between the genres. They draw from a common toolbox of language, use the same social media platforms to reach their audiences and respond to the same economic and political provocations to create public art. In doing so, rappers and the poets who claim affinity with them are resuscitating a body of literary practices mostly neglected in poetry during the 20th century. These ghost appendages of form - repetition, patterned rhythm and, above all, rhyme - thrive in song, especially in rap.

Invite your students to annotate as they read this rich analysis. Then, to go even deeper, you might have them check out " American Poets on the Hip-Hop Songs That Most Inspire Them," a companion piece in which The Times asked some of the poets mentioned in the article about the hip-hop songs they return to again and again. (Please preview, however, to make sure the songs are appropriate for your students.)

Finally, you might try having your students analyze some of their own favorite raps for their poetic elements, using either the short appreciations by the poets or paragraphs from the longer analysis by Mr. Bradley as mentor texts.
_________ Ask, "What's Going On in This Poem?"

You may already be familiar with our popular, weekly "What's Going On in This Picture" photojournalism exercise. Well, in 2016 we experimented with a live, moderated "What's Going On in This Poem?" discussion, using the same three questions we apply weekly to photos. This time, though, we asked participants about " Taking It Home to Jerome," a poem from the Magazine's weekly column:

What more can you find?

Because the discussion took place on our old site, you can no longer see the comments, but trust us when we say that those three simple questions opened up a world of possibility for students as they built on one another's responses.

Try it yourself. We've suggested the same exercise in a lesson plan focused on W.H. Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts," but, of course, you could use it with any poem.
_________ Give a Poem to a Friend

Video

"Poetry prevents everybody from feeling lonely," says Nikki Giovanni. Her latest book, "Chasing Utopia," is a collection of poetry, recipes and short stories.

"Poetry prevents everybody from feeling lonely," Nikki Giovanni says in this video.

"If I had a friend in the hospital, I would read a poem," she said. "But then, friends who get married, they read a poem. And then friends who die say, 'Read this poem at my funeral.'" She added: "Poetry is there with us, a part of us. Poetry is something we carry in our hearts."

Challenge students to think about someone they know who might need the gift of a poem. What poem would they give this person, and why?

A 2022 article, " 'Why Was I Born a Girl?' An Afghan Poem Inspires U.S. Students," tells the story of Fariba Mohebi, an 11th grader who learned that most Afghan girls would not join boys returning to school under Taliban rule. In her despair, she wrote a poem called "Why Was I Born a Girl?"

Here is what happened next:

Fariba's poem found its way to Timothy Stiven's A.P. history class at Canyon Crest Academy, a public high school 8,000 miles away in San Diego. It was relayed via Zoom calls between Canyon Crest and Mawoud, a tutoring center Fariba now attends in Kabul, where girls sit in class with boys and men teach girls - testing the limits of Taliban forbearance.

Periodic Zoom sessions between the Afghan and American students have opened a window to the world for girls at Mawoud, hardening their resolve to pursue their educations against daunting odds. The calls have also revealed the harsh contours of Taliban rule for the California students, opening their eyes to the repression of fellow high schoolers halfway around the world.

Our related lesson plan invites your students to learn more and respond. They might pair it with the 2012 piece " Why Afghan Women Risk Death to Write Poetry, " to understand the power of verse in a place where poetry has "long been a form of rebellion for Afghan women, belying the notion that they are submissive or defeated."
_________ Celebrate the Work of Amanda Gorman

When Amanda Gorman, the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history, read "The Hill We Climb," and " wove history and the future into a stirring melody," for many it was the highlight of President Biden's inauguration, and educators everywhere dropped what they were doing to teach the poem.

But, as Ms. Gorman later revealed, it almost didn't happen:

The truth is I almost declined to be the inaugural poet. Why?

I was terrified.

Read the poem - perhaps with the help of our companion lesson plan that draws from a range of related pieces to introduce the poet and put "The Hill We Climb" in context - then read " Why I Almost Didn't Read My Poem at the Inauguration " to learn why Ms. Gorman thinks of fear "not as cowardice but as a call forward, a summons to fight for what we hold dear."

What messages does she have for all of us? Which feel most resonant for you and your students in this moment?

In October 2020, The Times spotlighted 10 young artists whose work was responding to "this moment in America." In " Listen Up: These Young Black Poets Have a Message," you can read, and hear, powerful verse about fire season, protests, the coronavirus, God, sexuality, hope and more. And you can find ideas for teaching with the collection in our related lesson plan.
_________ Discover #poetsofinstagram

Do your students know Rupi Kaur? In December 2021, The Times reported that her debut poetry collection, "Milk and Honey," had been on the best-seller list for 190 weeks. Three years earlier, Carl Wilson, a Times critic, wrote about the "Instapoet" phenomenon in " Why Rupi Kaur and Her Peers Are the Most Popular Poets in the World ":

Kaur established herself not in poetry journals but on platforms like Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram (where she has 1.8 million followers, and posts glamorous shots of herself). And she's only the biggest of several popular "Instapoets" who have graduated from being retweeted by Kardashians to publishing books, including Tyler Knott Gregson, Lang Leav, Amanda Lovelace and the pseudonymous Atticus.

Collectively, to differing degrees, they lean to aphoristic, confessional and inspirational verse, often brief enough to fit into a tweet, or to be overlaid on a photo or an illustration like Kaur's own eye-catching line drawings - an outline of a pregnant woman's belly, say, with the legend, "we are all born / so beautiful / the greatest tragedy is / being convinced we are not - rupi kaur." There's a parody meme on Twitter to break any banal statement or quote into short lowercase lines and sign it "- rupi kaur."

What do your students think of Rupi Kaur's work? It might be a good jumping-off point for asking questions like: Is this "greeting-card verse" or "real" poetry? What is "real poetry" anyway? Why? Do they follow other #poetsofinstagram? Are Instagram and other social media "saving" poetry? Would they ever publish their own verse there?
_________ Learn How Poetry Can Act as "a Way of Being in the World That Wasn't Made for Us"
The Opinion section's Disability column explores the lives of people living with disabilities. In 2018 the column published a collection of new work from 10 poets with disabilities, each illustrated with a drawing like the one you see above.

Here is how the poet Jennifer Bartlett introduces the collection:

In my view, poetry is the most organic art form; it does not require money or physical labor. A poem doesn't need to follow any particular grammar rules; it is the record of one's own experience of the singular mind and/or body, a singular voice. For many of us, it is also a way of "being in the world," a world that in many ways was not made for us and actively resists our participation. Through poetry, we are able to remake and reinvent that world.

Do these poems resonate with your students? How well do they think the art matches each piece? And what other art in any genre, past or present, can they think of that might fit Ms. Bartlett's description - expression that is a way of "remaking" a world that might have been uncomfortable for, or even hostile to, the artist?

Though poetry may be more popular than ever, there are still voices missing, especially in the mainstream world of published verse.

In a Saturday Profile, Vivian Wang writes about Chen Nianxi, one new artist who has risen to fame as a "migrant worker poet," adding the voice of China's often-invisible laborers to the cultural conversation.

For more than 15 years, he labored in gold, iron and zinc mines across China, detonating explosives by day and scrawling poems on the backs of newspapers at night. Now, though, he has published two critically acclaimed books of poetry, and sometimes feels like an outsider in the glamorous world he has entered.

Whose voices are missing from the poetry you teach or your students read? How can you invite a greater range of work into your classroom?
_________ Help Us Create an April 2022 Collaborative Poem on "Small Kindnesses"

What minor, gracious things do others do for you that make you happy?

Invite your students to answer this question via our Student Opinion forum. With help from the poet Danusha Laméris, we may choose lines from their responses to be part of a collaborative poem we'll publish sometime in late April or early May.

The inspiration for this collaborative piece comes from Ms. Laméris's poem " Small Kindnesses," which appeared in The Times Magazine in 2019. As our student forum suggests, your students might read the poem first, then think about how they might contribute their own lines to a work on the same theme.

Collaborative poetry is, of course, an old tradition with which many teachers are familiar. You might introduce the idea to your students by sharing with them the game " Exquisite Corpse," which the French Surrealists invented in the 1930s, or the epic collective poem " La Familia" that Juan Felipe Herrera, the U.S. poet laureate from 2015 to 2017, created with lines submitted by people all over the country. Or you might invite them to listen to or read some collective poetry produced by National Public Radio, where Kwame Alexander, N.P.R.'s "poet in residence," has created crowdsourced poems responding to the coronavirus pandemic, the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, anti-Asian hate and more.
_________ Make Poetry From the Print Paper

4 Poems You Can Create From Your Newspaper

Natalie Proulx �� Making newspaper poetry

April is National Poetry Month. Celebrate by making verse from your print newspaper.

Here are four ideas from the poets Leah Umansky and E. Kristin Anderson →

Check out the suggestions above for ways to get playful with the print New York Times or any other newspaper. For more detail on two of the ideas - blackout poetry and found poetry - see the next two ideas below.
_________ Create a Blackout Poem

From 2010 to 2018, we ran a Found Poem Contest every April, in which we challenged teenagers to use any article they liked from any edition of The Times, past or present, to create verse simply by rearranging the words.

Every year, teachers across the curriculum participated. We've had science-themed winners on the cosmos and fruit flies; current-event-focused finalists on topics like the Syrian refugee crisis and the Boston Marathon bombing; and history-steeped verse that used archival reporting on events like the sinking of the Titanic and World War II.

To inspire your students to create their own, have them look through the work of some past winners. For instance, here is "Amy," by Epiphany Jones, which was created with some words "found" in a 2011 obituary, " Amy Winehouse, British Soul Singer With a Troubled Life, Dies at 27," and a 2007 article on the singer, " Disillusioned Diva With Glimmers of Soul."
_________ Match a Picture and a Poem

The Times has often posed this challenge to poets and photographers. For instance, the image above is part of a series by Zora J. Murff, who took the photos in the Near North Side neighborhood of Omaha. They illustrate a poem by Adrian Matejka called "If You're Tired Then Go Take a Nap" and can be found in this collection of five more poems and the photos they inspired.

T Magazine did something similar for many years, pairing a never-before-published poem with a newly commissioned work of contemporary art - bringing aesthetic life to the written word.

Invite your students to look at these examples and then make their own, perhaps working in pairs or even across English and art classrooms. They can write their own new poems and let them inspire artwork, or they can choose published poems and do the same.
_________ Write Poetry About a Place - or Bring Poetry Somewhere Unexpected

Many teachers will already know the George Ella Lyon list-form poem "Where I'm From." As Mr. Lyon writes, "People have used it at their family reunions, teachers have used it with kids all over the United States, in Ecuador and China; they have taken it to girls in juvenile detention, to men in prison for life, and to refugees in a camp in the Sudan."

To take the notion of writing poems about place further, you might show students how your local area has inspired work from various artists, the way Hartford, Conn., inspired Wallace Stevens. Then, invite them to write poems about a place they remember from their own lives, or give them a common place to consider, like the school or the town park. Finally, plan a site-specific celebration, like a reading or poetry walk in the area, or poems projected on structures, written in chalk on sidewalks or otherwise displayed. You might also collaborate with dancers, musicians and visual artists to perform or present their related work at the event.

Or post poems in unexpected places the way David Ellis does with his " driftwood haiku ":

A German shepherd tied to a rusted gate, blackfish simmered with tomatoes on a grill, a scuba diver emerging from the waters of the Bronx: These are the scenes that inspire the poetry of Mr. Ellis, the self-proclaimed Bard of City Island. He composes haiku on seashells and driftwood about the daily serendipity of the mile-and-a-half-long island, leaving them around the neighborhood for people, like the woman who reads his poems every morning when she walks her dog. His works, locals say, add unexpected reflection to their day. Last January, Mr. Ellis self-published a book of haiku called " Beach in City Island," and he is now working on a children's edition, which his [6-year-old] son is illustrating.

For example, students might leave poems around your school - perhaps inspired by these subway poets. Ask students to choose poems they have studied in school or elsewhere (or their own original works), then print and tape them to cafeteria tables, bathroom mirrors or hallway walls, or even write them in chalk on the sidewalks. How do people respond? What can you learn from that?

You might show students the Everyday Poems for City Sidewalk project in St. Paul or the Poetry in Motion program in the New York City subway for an idea of what kinds of poems work well as public pieces.
_________ Write Verse to Understand Portrayals of the Undead

Read about some anthologies of poetry that explore a coming zombie apocalypse and have students create their own undead-inspired verse, whether via limerick, haiku or sonnets.

Are zombies metaphors for things like capitalism or racism? See what some in the article contend, then find evidence in popular culture for or against that interpretation.
_________ Revise to Envision Other Possibilities

To persuade your students to write, rewrite, edit and polish their work to make it ready for the world to see, share with them " Poetry in Action." In this feature, six contemporary writers, including Billy Collins and Jenny Zhang, share images of their own poems in progress and discuss the revisions they made. Above, you can see "Ceremonial," by Eduardo C. Corral. Here is what he says about his process:

This is a draft of my poem "Ceremonial," which I wrote in 2012. Revision is my favorite part of writing. Revision helps me envision other possibilities for the language on the page. I know a poem is done when I can identify three distinct pleasures: linguistic, emotional and intellectual. I wanted to privilege emotional pleasure in this poem, though. The annotations reflect that desire.

_________ Match Poetry With Nonfiction

From 2010 to 2016, we ran a regular feature called Poetry Pairings. In each, we matched a poem selected by the Poetry Foundation with an article from The Times that in some way echoed, extended or challenged the poem's words and themes.

You can find the full collection here and use our related Teaching and Learning Ideas for Any Poetry-News Pairing with any entry.

After reading a few, challenge your students to do what we did: match a poem to a piece from The Times or any other news source. How does reading them together deepen and broaden them both?

To celebrate the opening of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture in 2016, The Times ran Langston Hughes's poem "I, Too" by itself on a full page of the print paper.

Two people who worked on the design explain why in this piece. As the art director says, "Langston Hughes's words are so powerful, there was no need for design adornment. In this case, less proves to be more."

If The Times were to give over another whole page to a poem right now, what should it be and why?
_________ Consider the Role of "Verses vs. Virus"

Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, The Times has featured pieces about how poetry can help us cope. In March 2020, for instance, the Opinion section featured a piece by Sarah Ruhl, " Broadway Is Closed. Write Poems Instead," that discussed the power of language to heal:

During the 1590s plague, when the theaters were shut, William Shakespeare apparently chose to write poems instead. From his "Venus and Adonis," penned while the playhouses were closed and writers were essentially quarantined, came this somewhat strange compliment: "The plague is banished by thy breath." Should we theater people - writers, players and audiences alike - be staying home now and writing and reading poetry as a curative for the next month? Books, unlike group events, carry no germs.

Elsewhere in The Times that month, you could find a poem by Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell, who was working in a Boston emergency room. Called " The Apocalypse," it mixed images of spring with images of "the battleground" of the virus.

In June 2020, as the pandemic continued to rage and the Black Lives Matter movement brought millions of people into the streets, the Book Review asked two prominent American poets, Claudia Rankin and Jericho Brown, to write original poems responding to "this historic moment in our country." Here, Claudia Rankin recites her poem " Weather. "

'Weather'

Claudia Rankine recites her poem.

'Say Thank You Say I'm Sorry'

Jericho Brown recites his poem.

In late November 2020, The Times asked poets laureate across the country why the people in their states would be thankful, even "in a nation battered and brought low by rampant disease and division." In this piece, you can find links to the results, which might inspire your students' own poems of gratitude.

Finally, on our own site, we have run multimedia contests during the pandemic that invited teenagers to show us, in words and images, audio and video, what it has been like to be a teenager during this time, trapped inside, going to school over video and missing coming-of-age milestones. Take a look at the winners from 2020 and 2021 to find poems like Suhaylah Sirajul-Islam's "okay," Aaron Zhang"s "Winter" and more.

The pandemic has been a fact of our lives for over two years now. What do your students want to express about that, and how?
_________ Parse Politics With Poetry

"Like virtually everything else in the Trump era, poetry has gotten sharply political these days," The Times wrote in 2017. The article continues:

Writers are responding to this turbulent moment in the country's history with a tsunami of poems that address issues like immigration, global warming, the Syrian refugee crisis, institutionalized racism, equal rights for transgender people, Islamophobia and health care.

Our "moment" has not become any less turbulent since then. How might your students use poetry to express their reactions to what is happening in the world today? What published poetry can they find that helps them make sense of it?

Some possibilities: reading the work of the former United States poet laureate Tracy K. Smith or listening to the podcast The Slowdown, which she hosted for two seasons before the poet Ada Limón took over.

In an essay on politics and poetry, Ms. Smith writes that political poetry has become a means of owning up to the complexity of our problems, and she introduces the reader to some poets, like Justin Phillip Reed and Evie Shockley, who are doing it well. She writes:

Poems willing to enter into this fraught space don't merely stand on the bank calling out instructions on how or what to believe; they take us by the arm and walk us into the lake, wetting us with the muddied and the muddled, and sometimes even the holy.

Invite your students to find or create political poems that address the issues they think are important - and that do so in a way that "take us by the arm and walk us into the lake."
_________ Read Poetry in a Time of War

As the Russia-Ukraine war began in February, " We Lived Happily During the War," by the Ukrainian American poet Ilya Kaminsky, took off on social media. In a related guest essay for the Opinion section, he writes:

Since the war began, I have received emails from journalists asking me to explain my poem "We Lived Happily During the War," which went viral on the day Vladimir Putin's troops began bombing my birth country. The poem was published on Poetry International in 2013, the same year the Maidan protests began in Ukraine. Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine's president at the time, was trying to lean closer to Putin and crush protests. Ukrainians rejected him; Putin stole Crimea; and the war in Donbas began.

Your students might read the essay to learn about the origins of his poem, then move on to the poem itself. Together, they might answer the question Mr. Kaminsky poses: Why do so many find poetry comforting in times of crisis? Then, challenge them to seek more poetry that offers wisdom, comfort or courage for times like ours, perhaps even creating a class anthology of their favorites.
_________ Does Poetry Matter? And What Is It, Anyway? Discuss:

If you have come this far, and your students have read, written, performed and celebrated a range of poetry - both their own and others' - they might be ready to debate a final question: Does poetry matter?

What evidence might your students use to make their cases?

To help, here are a few pieces from The Times that address the question:

_________
Do you teach poetry with a Times article or feature? Let us know!

4 Poems You Can Create From Your Newspaper

Natalie Proulx �� Making newspaper poetry

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Ways to Read, Write, Teach and Learn Poetry With The New York Times

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Here are 30 ideas for helping your students appreciate poetry - and experiment with it themselves. "Thank goodness for poetry," wrote Sindha Agha, the video artist who made the piece at the top of this post. "A poem is a timeless place, an immaterial plot of land where we can gather across generations to breathe and feel, deeply and safely."

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Check out the latest additions to our anthology!

We seek permissions and add new poems during the summer and fall. Is there a poem you'd like to see on our site? Let us know: poems@poetryinvoice.com

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Check out the latest additions to our anthology! We seek permissions and add new poems during the summer and fall. Is there a poem you'd like to see on our site? Let us know: poems@poetryinvoice.com

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Poets on Couches Archives - The Paris Review

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The second series of Poets on Couches continues with John Murillo and Nicole Sealey reading Anne Waldman's poem "How to Write." In these videograms, poets read and discuss the poems getting them through these strange times-broadcasting straight from their couches to yours.

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The Slowdown podcast hosted by Major Jackson delivers a different way to see the world - through poetry

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When Brian posted Three Acronyms for Literary Analysis, I knew immediately that I would follow with Quick and Easy Ways into a Poem. This was by far one of the most popular posts on APLitHelp (#RIP) and with good reason. They're quick, and they're easy.

Many students approach poetry reluctantly feeling inadequate to make sense of verse or "find the meaning" of a poem. Sometimes this is due to past experiences with poetry where students have been led on a scavenger hunt for poetic devices but never taught the function of devices. Other times teachers have been to quick to analyze a poem without helping students embrace the struggle of working through it themselves. Or perhaps this standardized-test generation are fearful they will get the "wrong" answer with their interpretation. Whatever the reason, my goal is to give students lots of exposure to poetry with low-stakes opportunities to interact and begin to build an interpretation.

These quick and easy methods not only help students feel more comfortable with poems but also provide concrete ways into a poem. I like them because they are not as rigid as TP-CASTT or SOAPStone (even though there's a place for these) and are built around what students are naturally drawn to in a poem. And the best part is they require very little prep on our end. I trade these out throughout the year so students have exposure to different questions and methods and can hopefully find a poetry trick or two to carry with them long past this class. The goal of these is not necessarily in-depth literary analysis (even though that can certainly happen with any of these methods) but breaking down barriers and getting students reading poetry with ease.
Quick and Easy Poetry Strategies Slide Deck

Head, Heart, and Gut from Scott Bayer #thebookchat

1, 2, 3 from Melissa Smith #TeachLivingPoets

3×3 from Matt Brown

Notice and Note from Jori Krulder

1, 2, 3 Approach from Julie Adams

Finally, here are some general "rules" I have for reading poetry in my class:

I would love to hear your quick and easy ways to get students thinking about a poem.

Susan Barber teaches at Midtown High School in Atlanta, Georgia. In addition to reading, writing, and investing in the next generation, she loves watching college football with her family especially when Alabama is playing.
Feature Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

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Quick and Easy Ways into a Poem - Much Ado About Teaching

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When Brian posted Three Acronyms for Literary Analysis, I knew immediately that I would follow with Quick and Easy Ways into a Poem. This was by far one of the most popular posts on APLitHelp (#RIP) and with good reason. They're quick, and they're easy.

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anapestic (anapest): a metrical foot containing three syllables-the first two are unstressed, while the last is stressed

dactylic (dactyl): a metrical foot containing three syllables-the first is stressed, while the last two are unstressed

falling meter: meter containing metrical feet that move from stressed to unstressed syllables

iambic (iamb): a metrical foot containing two syllables-the first is unstressed, while the second is stressed

iambic pentameter: a traditional form of rising meter consisting of lines containing five iambic feet (and, thus, ten syllables)

pause (caesura): a pause for a beat in the rhythm of the verse (often indicated by a line break or a mark of punctuation)

rising meter: meter containing metrical feet that move from unstressed to stressed syllables

spondee: a nontraditional metrical foot in which two consecutive syllables are stressed

stress: greater amount of force used to pronounce one syllable over another

trochaic (trochee): a metrical foot containing two syllables-the first is stressed, while the second is unstressed

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anapestic (anapest): a metrical foot containing three syllables-the first two are unstressed, while the last is stressed dactylic (dactyl): a metrical foot containing three syllables-the first is stressed, while the last two are unstressed falling meter: meter containing metrical feet that move from stressed to unstressed syllables iambic (iamb): a

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Experience Poetry | The On Being Project

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Poetry, Audre Lorde tells us, names "the nameless so it can be thought." On Being features poets across our media and public life offerings because poetry, for all its craft, is more than a craft. It is a necessary art. Poetry speaks to the way we could be.

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Poetry

Six contemporary poets share the process behind their poems.

Image

A draft of "Ceremonial," by Eduardo C. Corral.

This is a draft of my poem "Ceremonial," which I wrote in 2012. Revision is my favorite part of writing. Revision helps me envision other possibilities for the language on the page. I know a poem is done when I can identify three distinct pleasures: linguistic, emotional and intellectual. I wanted to privilege emotional pleasure in this poem, though. The annotations reflect that desire.

Eduardo C. Corral's debut collection of poems, "Slow Lightning," won the Yale Younger Poets prize in 2011.

I wrote the first draft of "Duck Blind" on the Amtrak train that runs along the Hudson River from Albany to New York City after spotting, well, a duck blind by the low water at the edge of the river. In writing it, I was nudged along by a Kay Ryan poem titled "Dogleg," but it would be hard for me to say just how.

Billy Collins served two terms as the United States poet laureate, from 2001 to 2003. His most recent collection, "The Rain in Portugal," was a New York Times best seller.

Daddy issues have been coming up a lot lately for us, as a nation. I'm surely not the only one to notice we employ metaphors to make sense of the news. I always like to take note of who hides their origins and who shows them off. How do we form a coalition of resistance without obliterating our differences? Not all lives matter and we are not all the same immigrants. Rage can be so common it turns ambient. I'm drawn to the figure of the ungrateful subaltern as a trope in literature. In real life, it is often dangerous to demand more. While writing this poem, I indulged my pettiness, and in revising, I did my best to pull back.

Jenny Zhang is the author of the chapbook "Hags" and the poetry collection "Dear Jenny, We Are All Find." Her debut story collection, "Sour Heart," has just been published.

A poem has its own body - it comes into the world and I feel most often like a midwife. And a poem has an unsayable center around which its body grows. The first draft had one or two or three things going on (too talky) but hadn't found its organic heart, its unsayable necessity. A friend suggested starting with the statement "the failure of love..." Then the map appeared and in the space between the two (the statement and the experience) the poem appeared.

Marie Howe's fourth collection of poetry, "Magdalene," was published in March.

"Exile and Lightning" is the only poem of mine published on the CNN Opinion website, headlined " An Inaugural Poem of Protest." PEN and Writers Resist had asked Rita Dove and me to compose poems for the January 15 "Protest Inauguration" on the steps of the New York Public Library. This is "draft 8" of 25 numbered drafts. The poem became a bit shorter, more direct, I hope swifter. With this version, I got the title (it's circled). The sketch of a floor lamp reflects my habit: crude little drawings of stuff around me where I'm writing. Sometimes of the pen.

Robert Pinsky was the United States poet laureate from 1997 to 2000. His latest book of poems, "At the Foundling Hospital," was published last year.

In a photographic portrait, we sometimes forget the maker exists, but how she frames her subject determines what you, the viewer, will see. In that way, the portrait is of two people, the subject and the maker. I was thinking of a photograph of László Moholy-Nagy taken by his first wife, Lucia Moholy. In that image, we see a man playfully putting out his hand toward the lens - he might be pushing the camera away ("don't take me"), or he might be reaching out to touch the photographer ("let me take you"). That ambiguity gets written into the poem. As does the fact that the marriage eventually ended.

Mary Jo Bang won a National Book Critics Circle Award for her collection "Elegy." Her eighth book of poems, "A Doll for Throwing," will be published this month.

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Poetry Six contemporary poets share the process behind their poems. This is a draft of my poem "Ceremonial," which I wrote in 2012. Revision is my favorite part of writing. Revision helps me envision other possibilities for the language on the page.

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Subscribe to Poetry Pause for your daily delivery of Canadian poetry! Poetry Pause delivers more than a daily poem; it delivers the chance for folks to pause for poetry. Sign up for Poetry Pause and spare a few minutes each day for words that heal, inspire, and sustain. We're always accepting submissions!

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Canadian Literature is an academic quarterly that publishes peer-reviewed scholarly articles in French or English related to the field of Canadian literature, broadly defined. We also publish book reviews of critical and creative works, poems, short notes, writings of importance that have been rediscovered in the archives, interviews with writers, and articles by writers about their craft.

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Slam poetry is where poetry, politics, and power combine. Filled with tension, heartbreak, and trauma, slam poetry is where to go if you want to dig into some emotional material. These poets talk about the things we don't dare to mention at the dinner table: the things that matter most. Be it rape, racism, sexism, violence, homophobia, you name it-these poems tackle heavy subjects with eloquence and ease. Start here if you want to discover one of the richest genres existing today.

Content warning: Many of these pieces are brutal, both in their subject matter and their language.

Best line:

"I want grandmas on the front porch taking out raptors with guns they hid in walls & under mattresses. I want those little spitty, screamy dinosaurs. I want Cicely Tyson to make a speech, maybe two. I want Viola Davis to save the city in the last scene with a black fist afro pick through the last dinosaur's long, cold-blood neck."

Best line:

"They put me in a dark room white men all around me asking all the wrong questions, not sure what to do with this black assassin, so I figured I'd help them out. First, when it came to that man, the question shouldn't be why did I kill him. The question should be, 'What took me so long?'"

Pass On by Michael Lee

Best line:

"When searching for the lost remember 8 things.

1.
We are vessels. We are circuit boards
swallowing the electricity of life upon birth.
It wheels through us creating every moment,
the pulse of a story, the soft hums of labor and love.
In our last moment it will come rushing
from our chests and be given back to the wind.
When we die. We go everywhere."

B by Sarah Kay

Best line:

"Instead of 'Mom,' she's gonna call me 'Point B.' Because that way, she knows that no matter what happens, at least she can always find her way to me. And I'm going to paint the solar system on the back of her hands so that she has to learn the entire universe before she can say 'Oh, I know that like the back of my hand.'"

Best line:

Phil: "I want to be the mirror that reminds you to love yourself."

Sarah: "I want to be air in your lungs that reminds you to breathe easy."

Best line:

"You, who's voice is someone's favorite voice,
Someone's favorite face to wake up to,
Nothing would be the same if you did not exist."

Best line:

"He does not tell anyone he still has ones from his dead father. He will not delete them. He will not delete dead grandparents' contact information. He will not delete anything. He is collecting memories and ghosts."

Best line:

"Across from me at the kitchen table, my mother smiles over red wine that she drinks out of a measuring glass.
She says she doesn't deprive herself,
but I've learned to find nuance in every movement of her fork.
In every crinkle in her brow as she offers me the uneaten pieces on her plate.
I've realized she only eats dinner when I suggest it.
I wonder what she does when I'm not there to do so."

Best line:

"This is for the benches and the people sitting upon them
For the bus drivers who drive a million broken hymns
For the men who have to hold down three jobs simply to hold up their children
For the nighttime schoolers
And for the midnight bikers who are trying to fly
Shake the dust."

Best line:

"The first time I heard mariachis was in a restaurant, or at a parade, or an outdoor theater
somewhere. I remember admiring the lone woman in the group, her green polyester, the way
she made her whole body a song, the whole song a mountain, her mouth a red sun spilling
with hurt."

OCD by Neil Hilborn

Best line:

"She loved that I had to kiss her goodbye sixteen times or twenty-four times if it was Wednesday.
She loved that it took me forever to walk home because there are lots of cracks on our sidewalk.
When we moved in together, she said she felt safe, like no one would ever rob us because I definitely locked the door eighteen times."

Lost Voices by Darius Simpson and Scout Bostley

Best line:

"The first day I realized I was black, it was 2000, we had just learned about blacks for the first time in 2nd grade.
At recess, all the white kids chased me into the woods chanting slave.
My mother said I refused to come out for three hours, said she thinks I was lost in the trees, but I just needed to be closer to my roots."

Best line:

"When you put me in your books, millions of Asian girls across America rejoiced! Finally, a potential Halloween costume that wasn't a geisha or Mulan! What's not to love about me? I'm everyone's favorite character! I totally get to fight tons of Death Eaters and have a great sense of humor and am full of complex emotions!

Oh wait. That's the version of Harry Potter where I'm not f**king worthless."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFPWwx96Kew

WARNING: This poem deals with very heavy, explicit themes of sexual abuse.

Best line:

"My son was an artist: Loved drawing dinosaurs,
ghosts, monsters. It's like he was haunted or
something, like something was buried in him."

Best line:

"So he said to me: 'What kind of Asian are you?'
And I said back: Well that's a loaded question, what do you expect me to be?
Because any way slice that egg-roll I'm still pretty much what you want to see
I've played many a far east stereotype
Awkward math genius
Cold and calculated Kung-Fu expert
Assistant to 'Dr Jones, you crazy!'"

Best line:

"The world has decided that this experience is pink
That breast cancer is pink.
Like strawberry ice cream, blush wine, plush wine roses
Which is funny, because I stood in my room, caressing a threat from the outside in, and nothing was pink."

bitches by Melissa Lozada-Oliva

Best line:

"The women in my family are bitches.

Cranky bitches, stuck up bitches, Customer Service bitches, turn sour bitches.
Can I help you bitches? Next in line bitches.
I like this purse 'cause it makes me look mean bitches,
Can you take a picture of my outfit for me, get the heals in, bitches.
I always wear heals to la fiesta, and I never take them off bitches.
All men will kill you bitches, all men will leave you anyway bitches."

Best line:

"Dear Straight People,
You're the reason we stay in the closet.
You're the reason we even have a closet.
I don't like closets, but you made the living room an unshared space
and now I'm feeling like a guest in my own house."

Best line:

"Step 1: win her over. Do this by pretending you care about women. Example: replace the word tits with the word equality and resume normal conversation. 'I love equality. I wish that women didn't have to hide their equality. I really wanna snort cocaine off of some drunk girl's equality.'"
What other pieces of slam poetry do you consider essential? Find more slam poetry and other poetry recommendations here.

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Where To Find Remarkable, Must-Watch Slam Poetry

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Slam poetry is where poetry, politics, and power combine. Filled with tension, heartbreak, and trauma, slam poetry is where to go if you want to dig into some emotional material. These poets talk about the things we don't dare to mention at the dinner table: the things that matter most.

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Click here for the full playlist.
With the new school year starting up, we've added a bunch of new videos to our Classroom-Friendly poems playlist! We always love hearing from teachers who use our videos, so we compiled this resource to make it easier to find great poems for the classroom.
NOTE: Some poems in this list may not be appropriate for all grade levels. The list is primarily geared toward high schoolers, but many of the poems included would be appropriate for the middle grades as well.

If you're looking for further classroom poetry resources, check out our books, available in the Button store!
Please share this with the teachers and educators in your life! And if you've personally used Button videos in the classroom, please tell us about it in the comments below!

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Click here for the full playlist. With the new school year starting up, we've added a bunch of new videos to our Classroom-Friendly poems playlist! We always love hearing from teachers who use our videos, so we compiled this resource to make it easier to find great poems for the classroom.

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This resource was originally designed for use in a face-to-face setting. For tips on teaching with poetry in a remote or hybrid learning environment, check out our Slow Down with the Slowdown Routine.

Since poetry slams gained in popularity in the 1990s, youth from around the world have competed individually and in teams in local, national, and international spoken word tournaments. "Contain[ing] elements of rap, hip-hop, storytelling, theater, jazz, rock, blues, and folk music [and] characterized by rhyme, repetition, improvisation, and word play," spoken word poetry is meant to be performed, heard, and experienced. Since the first poetry slam in a Chicago jazz club in 1986, the genre has provided youth with a creative and impactful way to explore issues of identity, belonging, prejudice, gender, social justice, and race.

As we continue to celebrate National Poetry Month this April, the following teaching ideas can help bring spoken word poetry into your classroom to help students raise their voices to make personal, social, and political statements about the issues that impact their lives and communities.

Explore Issues of Perception and Stereotyping

To help students grapple with complex issues of identity, membership, and belonging, consider teaching one or both of the following spoken word poems.

Facing History student Jonathan Lykes' award-winning spoken word poem, "Perception" (04:08), explores how prejudice influences our decisions about helping others.

Amina Iro and Hannah Halpern confront Muslim and Jewish stereotypes in their spoken word poem (03:19) at the 2013 Brave New Voices quarter finals.

After students listen to each of these poems, have them complete a rapid-fire writing response and then share a word or short phrase from their response in a wraparound.

If you would like your students to write their own spoken word poems, you might ask them to write a journal entry that responds to a question or line in one of the poems. For example, use the following prompt to have students explore the questions that Lykes asks in the opening lines of "Perception":

"How do they see me? How do I see them?"
Write about a time when you felt like how you were perceived was different from how you perceive yourself.

Students can then use their journal entries as a starting place for their poems. You might include mini-lessons about literary devices such as imagery, figurative language, alliteration, consonance, dissonance, assonance, and repetition. After students have written, workshopped, and revised their poems, celebrate with an "author's chair," where students share their poems with the class or publish them in a class book.

Explore Bullying through Spoken Word Poetry

According to the National Prevention Bullying Center, in 2016, one in five students reported being the targets of bullies. Spoken word poetry can provide a space for individuals who have been the target of bullying, or those who have witnessed it, to tell their stories. Before sharing one or both of the following spoken word poems with your students, you might ask them to create a concept map for bullying and discuss your school's bullying policy. Also, make sure your students know where to go for help if they experience or witness bullying or cyberbullying.

To This Day
In the animated version of Shane Koyczan's poem "To This Day" (07:36), or in his TED Talk To This Day. . .for the bullied and the beautiful (11:57), Koyczan recalls childhood memories of being taunted and called names and reflects on how being outcast affected him and others like him who were considered different and made objects of ridicule and cruelty by their peers. (Note: While the TED Talk version of the poem contains one word of profanity, the animated version does not.)

My Lungs
At the 2015 SLAMbassador, the United Kingdom's biggest youth slam, winner Jay Hulme shared his experience of being stereotyped and bullied as a transgender teen in his spoken word poem "My Lungs." Watch his TEDxTeen performance of "My Lungs" (00:00-03:10). At the end of his powerful performance, Hulme makes a compelling call to action to his listeners to be upstanders in the face of bullying. (Note: This poem contains one word of profanity, so it is important that you preview it before showing it to your students. You might also facilitate a discussion about the purpose and effect of Hulme's language choice in this moment.)

After watching one of the above videos, provide students with space to reflect on the experience in their journals. If you would like your students to do a closer analysis of one of the poems, the transcript for To This Day. . .for the bullied and the beautiful can be found on the TED website. You might create a set of text-based questions and then lead students through a save the last word for me discussion. Finally, have groups brainstorm ways to offer support to a friend or peer who is being bullied, explaining that offering words of encouragement in private can help an individual who is the target of bullying feel supported and less alone. For additional Facing History resources on bullying, consult our featured collection Using Bully in the Classroom.

You can find additional resources for teaching spoken word poetry at Poetry Out Loud and The Poetry Society, which includes information about SLAMbassadors, the national youth poetry slam championships.

Bring Protest, Resistance, and Empowerment Poetry into the Classroom

You can find additional poems to bring into your classroom on the Poetry Foundation website, which offers a broad range of poems, including a selection of Poems of Protest, Resistance, and Empowerment that give voice the voiceless who are afraid to speak up or have been silenced in the face of discrimination and injustice. This selection includes poems from the Holocaust, apartheid South Africa, the civil rights movement, and Black Lives Matter and could supplement Facing History readings and units found in Holocaust and Human Behavior, Teaching Holocaust and Human Behavior, Choices in Little Rock, or our South Africa lesson.
This teaching idea was created to celebrate National Poetry Month. For more ideas on how to use poetry in the classroom, view the teaching idea Use Poetry to Teach About Identity.

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How to Bring Spoken Word Poetry into the Classroom

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This resource was originally designed for use in a face-to-face setting. For tips on teaching with poetry in a remote or hybrid learning environment, check out our Slow Down with the Slowdown Routine. Since poetry slams gained in popularity in the 1990s, youth from around the world have competed individually and in teams in local, national, and international spoken word tournaments.

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On Tuesdays, David Lehman collaborates with our readers on a poem.

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It can be hard to know which poems will spur your middle and high schoolers into deep, meaningful discussion and which will leave them yawning. So we asked experienced teachers to share their favorite poems that always get a reaction, even from teens. Here's what they had to say about the best poems for middle school and high school students.

Note: Every classroom is different, so please be sure to review these poems for middle school and high school students before sharing to ensure they align with your learning environment.

Poems for Middle School and High School

Discuss symbolism with this short poem by Frost.

Discuss the literal and figurative meanings in this poem.

3. The Rat Ode by Elizabeth Acevedo

Listen to the author herself as she performs her poetry.

This poem follows the pain and suffering Joe experienced at Shubenacadie Residential School in Nova Scotia.

This poem for President Joe Biden's inauguration had the nation talking about it for days to come.

Recount the dangers of misconception with this poem.

Frost doesn't hold back with this poem, an ideal one for discussion and debate.

Ea documented this to raise awareness about the alarming rates of deforestation and the reckless destruction of our environment.

An oldie but goodie!

The late artist created a clear connection between the rhythm and deeper meaning of poetry and rap.

For your fans of science fiction.

A reaction to the experience of being Black in America in the late 19th century.

Poe is an expert at rhyme scheme-and this poem is clear evidence of that.

14. Deer Hit by Jon Loomis

Students won't soon forget this poem, both for the story and the sensory details.

Read this poem to discuss the meaning beyond the literal words on the page.

An example of just what one line can do.

Lerman engages with popular culture and an irreverent tone.

Any student who has ever felt annoyed or had to put up with daily frustrations will relate to this poem.

A politically charged poem that still rings true today, Hughes' poetry, but particularly Mother to Son, is timeless.

20. Beethoven by Shane Koyczan

This poem is a biography in verse that connects Beethoven's story to the universal.

21. Oranges by Gary Soto

Soto's poem about trying to impress a girl shows what small moments reveal about ourselves, and how those moments embed themselves in our memories.

This poem leaves lots of space for inference, which leads to great discussion.

Teach this poem to show how O'Hara uses references or for the humor.

24. Pass On by Michael Lee

Lee's poem creates snapshots of memory, creating lines and ideas for every student to grab and hold on to.

25. Snow by David Berman

Captures a narrative in miniature with a creative structure.

An uplifting political call to action that students should read right when they're starting to define the mark they can have on the world.

Sheds light on the writing process, with a sense of humor and a tongue-in-cheek challenge.

This poem is deceptive in its simplicity and leaves a lot to talk about. Be sure to discuss that internal rhyme!

A solid work for teaching poetry elements (repetition, rhyme scheme).

30. Daddy by Sylvia Plath

Plath rarely minces words and this is no exception-this poem is stuffed full of deeper meaning.

Dickinson is so good at creating mood, this time about reflection.

32. Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe

A ghost story wrapped up in a poem. Another Poe classic.

The rest of the poem is as humorous as the title, and it's fun to dissect and analyze how Neruda writes about everyday objects, like the tuna on ice.

Use this poem to teach ways to approach points of view.

Nash's comical poem pokes fun at the use of similes and metaphors.

"There are strange things done in the midnight sun ..."

When a highwayman meets the inn owner's daughter, they fall in love immediately ... as a rival eavesdrops.

"When Americans say a man takes liberties, they mean he's gone too far."

39. Mirror by Sylvia Plath

This poem speaks from a mirror's perspective, sharing truths as a woman looks at her own reflection.

The poet clearly captures the elegance and beauty of this enchanting woman.

This short poem speaks volumes.

42. Richard Cory by Edwin Arlington Robinson

A surprise ending reminds us that not everything is always as it seems.

This poem encourages readers to make the most of each day.

44. Tattoo by Ted Kooser

What stories can an old man's tattoo tell us?

The author reminds us that regardless of our circumstances, the nature of death remains unchanged.

What are your favorite poems for middle school and high school? Share in the comments below!

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45 Must-Share Poems for Middle School and High School

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Poems for middle school and high school students can be tricky to nail. You want to inspire creativity, not yawns.

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If you have enjoyed reading Go Poems over the past six years, then this is a book you will most definitely enjoy. Not only does it include ideas for tucking poems into the lessons you already teach, it organizes these ideas, poems, and prompts so that you can engage students creatively and elevate student writing in any genre with a poetry pause as part of the plan.

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Canadian Poetry Online | University of Toronto Libraries | Contemporary Canadian Poets

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Milton Acorn Bert Almon Margaret Atwood Margaret Avison John Barton Jill Battson Julie Berry Earle Birney bill bissett Joe Blades Marianne Bluger Robert Boates Stephanie Bolster Roo Borson George Bowering Dionne Brand John Bruce Ron Charach Lesley Choyce Peter Christensen George Elliott Clarke Don Coles John Robert Colombo Afua Cooper Lynn Crosbie Lorna Crozier Michael Crummey M.

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The first negative review I ever got was for a poem I published in my college lit mag. Titled "In a Booth at the Waffle House," it was a throwback to Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro," and it was about Waffle House chocolate pie, and I was seriously proud of it. Two lines and a title. That's not easy to do! And while I have lots of love for long poems, there is a special place for the tight economy of short poems. Short poems get us where we're going quickly, and because there's no room for meandering, every word weighs a ton. And a short poem puts us in touch with poetry-a shot, a quick snack, an amuse bouche to amp up our poetic reading lives. So for your enjoyment, here's a list of great short poems.

But wait! What makes a short poem short? For my purposes here, there are super short poems (fewer than 10 lines) and short-ish poems (10-15 lines). And because poetry exists beyond the page nowadays, taking on visual or spoken word or both, I have a few examples of those for you to enjoy as well. Obviously, this is not a complete list of all the great poems-let alone all the great short poems-but it's a fine place for us to start. (And don't worry. My Waffle House poem isn't one of them.)

Super short poems (fewer than 10 lines)

you fit into me
like a hook into an eye

a fish hook
an open eye

And then the day came,

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when the risk
to remain tight
in a bud
was more painful
than the risk
it took
to blossom.

Edna St. Vincent Millay "First Fig"

My life has been the poem I would have writ
But I could not both live and utter it.

Curtains forcing their will
against the wind,
children sleep,
exchanging dreams with
seraphim. The city
drags itself awake on
subway straps; and
I, an alarm, awake as a
rumor of war
lie stretching into dawn
unasked and unheeded.

The rose is a rose,
And was always a rose.
But the theory now goes
That the apple's a rose,
And the pear is, and so's
The plum, I suppose.
The dear only knows
What will next prove a rose.
You, of course, are a rose -
But were always a rose.

Short-ish poems (10-15 lines)

this gin-heavy heaven, blessed ground to think gay & mean we. /

bless the fake id & the bouncer who knew /

this need to be needed, to belong, to know how /

a man taste full on vodka & free of sin. i know not which god to pray to. /

i look to christ, i look to every mouth on the dance floor, i order /

a whiskey coke, name it the blood of my new savior. he is just. /

he begs me to dance, to marvel men with the /

of hips i brought, he deems my mouth in some stranger's mouth necessary. /

bless that man's mouth, the song we sway sloppy to, the beat, the bridge, the length /

of his hand on my thigh & back & i know not which country i am of. /

i want to live on his tongue, build a home of gospel & gayety /

i want to raise a city behind his teeth for all boys of choirs & closets to refuge in. /

i want my new god to look at the mecca i built him & call it damn good /

or maybe i'm just tipsy & free for the first time, willing to worship anything i can taste. /

We mourn the broken things, chair legs

wrenched from their seats, chipped plates,

the threadbare clothes. We work the magic

of glue, drive the nails, mend the holes.

We save what we can, melt small pieces

of soap, gather fallen pecans, keep neck bones

for soup. Beating rugs against the house,

we watch dust, lit like stars, spreading

across the yard. Late afternoon, we draw

the blinds to cool the rooms, drive the bugs

out. My mother irons, singing, lost in reverie.

I mark the pages of a mail-order catalog,

listen for passing cars. All day we watch

for the mail, some news from a distant place.

Jacqueline Woodson "Church"

On Sundays, the preacher gives everyone a chance

to repent their sins. Miss Edna makes me go

to church. She wears a bright hat

I wear my suit. Babies dress in lace.

Girls my age, some pretty, some not so

pretty. Old ladies and men nodding.

Miss Edna every now and then throwing her hand

in the air. Saying Yes, Lord and Preach!

I sneak a pen from my back pocket,

bend down low like I dropped something.

The chorus marches up behind the preacher

clapping and humming and getting ready to sing.

I write the word HOPE on my hand.

The whiskey stink of rot has settled

in the garden, and a burst of fruit flies rises

when I touch the dying tomato plants.

Still, the claws of tiny yellow blossoms

flail in the air as I pull the vines up by the roots

and toss them in the compost.

It feels cruel. Something in me isn't ready

to let go of summer so easily. To destroy

what I've carefully cultivated all these months.

Those pale flowers might still have time to fruit.

My great-grandmother sang with the girls of her village

as they pulled the flax. Songs so old

and so tied to the season that the very sound

seemed to turn the weather.

Dreaming of one day being as fearless as a mango.

As friendly as a tomato. Merciless to chin & shirtfront.

Realizing I hate the word "sip."

But that's all I do.

I drink. So slowly.

& say I'm tasting it. When I'm just bad at taking in liquid.

I'm no mango or tomato. I'm a rusty yawn in a rumored year. I'm an arctic attic.

Come able & ampersand in the slippery polar clutter.

I am not the heterosexual neat freak my mother raised me to be.

I am a gay sipper, & my mother has placed what's left of her hope on my brothers.

She wants them to gulp up the world, spit out solid degrees, responsible grandchildren ready to gobble.

They will be better than mangoes, my brothers.

Though I have trouble imagining what that could be.

Flying mangoes, perhaps. Flying mango-tomato hybrids. Beautiful sons.

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.

Life is short, and I've shortened mine

in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,

a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways

I'll keep from my children. The world is at least

fifty percent terrible, and that's a conservative

estimate, though I keep this from my children.

For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.

For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,

sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world

is at least half terrible, and for every kind

stranger, there is one who would break you,

though I keep this from my children. I am trying

to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,

walking you through a real shithole, chirps on

about good bones: This place could be beautiful,

right? You could make this place beautiful.

Is that Eric Garner worked
for some time for the Parks and Rec.
Horticultural Department, which means,
perhaps, that with his very large hands,
perhaps, in all likelihood,
he put gently into the earth
some plants which, most likely,
some of them, in all likelihood,
continue to grow, continue
to do what such plants do, like house
and feed small and necessary creatures,
like being pleasant to touch and smell,
like converting sunlight
into food, like making it easier
for us to breathe.

There's the thing I shouldn't do
and yet, and now I have
the rest of the day to
make up for, not
undo, that can't be done
but next time,
think more calmly,
breathe, say here's a new
morning, morning,
morning,
(though why would that
work, it isn't even
hidden, hear it in there,
more, more,
more?)

If Black History Month is not

viable then wind does not

carry the seeds and drop them

You're As Good As Anybody Else

You've Got A Place Here, Too

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

instagram short poems

atticus poetry

maybe just read the poems to me? okay.
Want more short poems and poetry? Check out "58 Beautiful Love Poems" or our full poetry archives.

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43 Short Poems to Sneak More Poetry Into Your Life | Book Riot

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The first negative review I ever got was for a poem I published in my college lit mag. Titled "In a Booth at the Waffle House," it was a throwback to Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro," and it was about Waffle House chocolate pie, and I was seriously proud of it.

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"Touring the Lower Oklawaha" by Lola Haskins
Lola Haskins TOURING THE LOWER OKLAWAHA, 2015 The sergeant left the tent saying, "As you were, soldiers."
When you enlisted at seventeen to get away from the mill, you had no idea there was a war on. Your platoon was dropped into Laos to ruck back to Viet Nam, with orders to kill everyone in every village along the way. When I ask the obvious, you say yes, them too and lift your T-shirt to show me the gun you're never without, tucked into the waistband of your shorts. The river here runs crystal, but above the dam the fish swim ever more slowly until the inevitable haze coats them, turns them on their sides, and floats them upwards.

- from Rattle #67, Spring 2020

__________

Lola Haskins: "When I was a little girl, I wrote because I was lonely. Now I write because I feel a deep kinship with people I may never have met." ( web)

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"Touring the Lower Oklawaha" by Lola Haskins Lola Haskins TOURING THE LOWER OKLAWAHA, 2015 The sergeant left the tent saying, "As you were, soldiers." When you enlisted at seventeen to get away from the mill, you had no idea there was a war on.

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Ask your students to find a favorite poem and write or talk about what it means to them. For more inspiration, they might visit The Favorite Poem Project and watch videos like this one:
_________
It's easy: Just "find" some poetry in a Times article - any Times article, published at any point in our 165-year history.

Here are all the rules and guidelines, and here is a related lesson plan written by two teachers whose students post some of our favorite work year after year.

Consider it an exercise in close-reading: The task of creating a found poem demands that students examine a piece with enough attention to detail to be able to choose resonant words and phrases and use them to create something new.

That's why teachers across the curriculum have participated in the past, and we've had science-themed poems on the cosmos and fruit flies; current-events-focused work on topics like the Syrian refugee crisis and the Boston Marathon bombing; and history-steeped poems that use archival reporting on events like the sinking of the Titanic and World War II.

To inspire your students, have them read the work of some past winners, like "Amy," by Epiphany Jones. She "found" her words in a 2011 obituary, " Amy Winehouse, British Soul Singer With a Troubled Life, Dies at 27," and a 2007 article on the singer, " Disillusioned Diva With Glimmers of Soul."

What can your students make? It only takes one great Times article to participate.
________
Or, make a blackout poem:

In 2014, The Times challenged readers to create "blackout poems" by redacting words from Times articles. Here are the results, and you can use the same tool to make your own.

But since the feature only allows participants a few articles to choose from, you might use it as a warm-up for the Found Poem Challenge. After students have experimented, have them choose their own article and unearth a poem in it the same way.
_________
Ask, "What's going on in this poem?":

You may already be familiar with our weekly "What's Going On in This Picture" photojournalism exercise. Well, in 2016, we experimented with a live, moderated "What's Going On in This Poem?" discussion, using the same three questions we apply weekly to photos. This time, though, we asked participants about " Taking It Home to Jerome," a poem from the Magazine's weekly column:

* What's going on in this poem?

* What do you see, or read, that makes you say that?

* What more can you find?

Follow the whole discussion here to see how those three simple questions opened up a world of possibilities. Then, perhaps, try it yourself.
_________
Post a poem in place of the news:

Last fall, as the National Museum of African-American History and Culture first opened, The Times ran Langston Hughes's poem "I, Too" by itself on a full page of the print paper.

Two people who worked on the design explain why in this piece. As the art director says, "Langston Hughes's words are so powerful, there was no need for design adornment. In this case, less proves to be more."

If The Times were to give over another whole page to a poem right now, what should it be and why?
_________
Does poetry matter? Discuss:

Room for Debate once challenged seven experts to debate this question, and some of the answers are a kind of poetry in themselves.

Elsewhere in the Opinion section, William Logan asks, " Poetry: Who Needs It?" and, in " A Poet's Boyhood at the Burning Crossroads, " Saeed Jones writes about how, as a teenager, poetry helped him "shatter silence into language."

Have your students read all three, then debate the question in your classroom: Does poetry matter?
_________
Match poetry with nonfiction:

From 2010 to 2016 we ran a regular feature we called Poetry Pairings. In each, we matched a poem selected by the Poetry Foundation with an article from The Times that in some way echoed, extended or challenged the poem's words and themes.

You can find the full collection here, and use our related Teaching and Learning Ideas For Any Poetry-News Pairing with any of them.

After reading a few, challenge your students to do what we did: match a poem to a piece from The Times, or any other news source. How does reading them together deepen and broaden them both?
_________
Or, match a picture and a poem:

T Magazine regularly takes a never-before-published poem and pairs it with a newly commissioned work of contemporary art - bringing aesthetic life to the written word.

For instance, the photo above, by the artist Christian Marclay, is in response to a poem called "Greece" by Billy Collins. Find them both here, then invite your students to scroll through the full collection for inspiration to create their own.
_________
Show that there is more to you than what people expect:

In " Galaxies in His Head," Stephen Burt writes about the poet Terrance Hayes and how he "uses poetry to show that there is more to him, and to anyone, than what you expect."

Watch the video above and read the full article. How might your students use poetry to show others that there is more to them than what people expect?
_________
Write a poem for a friend:

"Poetry prevents everybody from feeling lonely," says Nikki Giovanni in this video. "If I had a friend in the hospital, I would read a poem. But then, friends who get married, they read a poem. And then friends who die say, 'Read this poem at my funeral' ... Poetry is there with us, a part of us. Poetry is something we carry in our hearts."

Challenge students to think about someone they know who might need the gift of a poem. What poem would they give this person, and why?

_________

Stumble over metaphors every day:

Metaphors are everywhere, points out the Opinion columnist David Brooks. We often use food metaphors to describe the world of ideas and war metaphors to talk about argument.

Have students keep a journal for one day in which they record every metaphor they come across in print or speech. Then, have them react to this column, and to thoughts like, "To be aware of metaphors is to be humbled by the complexity of the world, to realize that deep in the undercurrents of thought there are thousands of lenses popping up between us and the world, and that we're surrounded at all times by what Steven Pinker of Harvard once called 'pedestrian poetry.' "
_________
Use 140 characters to create and post #micropoetry:

Inside the darkened bathroom/we looked into the black mirror/ cracked the wintergreen candy/watched sparks fly from our teeth.
- Elizabeth Alexander (@ProfessorEA) March 27, 2012

Read about the Twitter poems created by well-known poets like Billy Collins, Claudia Rankine, Elizabeth Alexander and Robert Pinsky. Then have students visit the hashtags #poetweet or #micropoetry on Twitter to see current examples, and to post their own.

Our lesson Less Is More: Using Social Media to Inspire Concise Writing has even more poetry ideas.
_________
Slam some poetry:

"When you imagine a poetry reading, the scene that comes to mind probably doesn't involve battalions of underwear-slinging admirers," begins a 2011 article about open mike night and poetry slams around New York City.

View this related slide show, then invite students to attend a local poetry slam, or watch "Def Poetry Jam." You might even stage your own classroom, schoolwide or community event.

_________

Poetry Magazine celebrated its 100th year in print in 2012, and one thing keeping it fresh, this article reports, is poetry apps for readers' smartphones. Above, a 2014 video review of even more poetry apps.

How would your students help infuse our smartphone and social-media-obsessed world with poetry in ways guaranteed to intrigue readers their age?
_________
Cope with the undead via verse:

Read about some new anthologies of poetry that explore a coming zombie apocalypse, and have students create their own undead-inspired verse, whether via limerick, haiku, or sonnets.

Are zombies just metaphors for things like capitalism or racism? See what some in the article contend, then find evidence in popular culture for or against that interpretation.
_________
Remember a place with poetry:

* After watching and listening to "Mary Oliver's Provincetown: A Poet's Landscape," or reading "For Wallace Stevens, Hartford as Muse," or "The Bridge, My Muse," have students look through personal photographs of favorite places then write poems inspired by them. Host an event in which students read their poems accompanied by a slide show of images.

* Or, read about the visual art/poetry collaboration that commemorated life at Chicago's Cabrini-Green housing project as its last building was demolished. Have students write poems about a place they remember from their own lives, or give them a common topic (something like their current school or the town park). Plan a site-specific event, perhaps a poetry walk through the place, having the poems read, projected on structures, written in chalk on sidewalks, or otherwise displayed. You might also collaborate with dancers, musicians and visual artists to perform or present their related work at the event.
_________
Or, bring poetry to a place wh ere it's unexpected:

Post poems in strange places around your school - perhaps inspired by these subway poets. Ask students to choose poems they have studied in school or elsewhere (or their own original works), then print and tape them to cafeteria tables, bathroom mirrors, hallway walls, or even write in chalk on campus sidewalks. How do people respond? What can you learn from that?

You might show students the Everyday Poems for City Sidewalk project in St. Paul, or the Poetry in Motion program in the New York City subway, to get an idea of what kinds of poems work well as public pieces.
_________
Howl:

How can poetry both reflect and transcend the era in which it is written? How can looking at a poem from multiple perspectives illuminate its meaning?

These are the questions we pose in a lesson plan inspired by a movie about Allen Ginsberg's "Howl."
_____
Parse politics with poetry:

In January 2017 the Opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof invited readers to enter his Donald Trump poetry contest. As he wrote:

Why this contest? Frankly, Trump is the issue of the moment all over the world: there's an awful lot written but not much that is new. So maybe poetry can offer a new prism through which to examine reality.

Two thousand submissions later, he published the results, which included this one:

The Republican man of the hour Is a wellspring of bluster and glower. Trump is rich and he's white, How's he leading the fight Against entrenched Establishment power?

Whatever your take on politics right now, read Mr. Kristof's full column to find more verse - like one from Amit Majmudar, the poet laureate of Ohio, who submitted a poem about his mother becoming a U.S. citizen.

How might your students use poetry to express their reactions to what is happening in the world today? What published poetry can they find that helps them make sense of it?

_________

The author Adam Bradley is quoted in this book review as calling hip-hop "the most widely disseminated poetry in the history of the world" and noting that rap "is poetry, but its popularity relies in part on people not recognizing it as such." Do your students agree?

Host a debate in which students pit poetry against rap or other lyrics. Do lyrics need to be well-crafted for a song to be good? Can lyrics be considered poetry? Why or why not? Should both forms be held to the same artistic standards? To extend the activity, you might have musically inclined students set poems they have studied in school to music - and read lyrics aloud without musical accompaniment.

Or, use our lesson plan on Jay-Z's writing process to find many more ideas.

_________

Have students choose a poem they will learn by heart and recite. Find tips to transform this potentially daunting task into a meaningful experience (and one students may look forward to repeating) in our lesson plan, By Heart.

You might see what other students have chosen by reading responses to a 2011 Student Opinion question, What Would You Like to Have Memorized?
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Poems are the only form of education to which girls like Meena Muska have access:

Meena lost her fiancé last year, when a land mine exploded. According to Pashtun tradition, she must marry one of his brothers, which she doesn't want to do. She doesn't dare protest directly, but reciting poetry to Amail allows her to speak out against her lot. When I asked how old she was, Meena responded in a proverb: "I am like a tulip in the desert. I die before I open, and the waves of desert breeze blow my petals away." She wasn't sure of her age but thought she was 17. "Because I am a girl, no one knows my birthday," she said.

Invite students to read this piece to understand the power of verse in a place where poetry has "long been a form of rebellion for Afghan women, belying the notion that they are submissive or defeated."

What other powerful poems of rebellion and resilience can they find?

_________

Do you teach poetry with a Times article or feature? Let us know.

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22 Ways to Teach and Learn About Poetry With The New York Times

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Ask your students to find a favorite poem and write or talk about what it means to them. For more inspiration, they might visit The Favorite Poem Project and watch videos like this one: _________ It's easy: Just "find" some poetry in a Times article - any Times article, published at any point in our 165-year history.

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Update, April 14: Here is our live "What's Going On in This Poem?" discussion. Though the moderated segment is over, please continue to add comments and respond to others.

How do you approach poetry with your students? How did your own teachers introduce a new poem to you?

Did they "begin beating it with a hose/to find out what it really means," as Billy Collins puts it in " Introduction to Poetry " - or did they allow you to "walk inside the poem's room/and feel the walls for a light switch"?

Thanks to our weekly " What's Going On in This Picture? " collaboration with Visual Thinking Strategies, we already have a lot of experience with giving students what Philip Yenawine, co-creator of the organization, calls "permission to wonder."

Every Monday, we post an interesting Times photograph without a caption, then watch as students from around the world join us to discuss it, responding to three simple, open-ended questions:

What's going on in this picture?

What do you see that makes you say that?

What more can you find?

Week after week, as hundreds of students post ideas and our V.T.S. colleagues moderate live, we marvel at how beautifully those three questions work.

They invite students to look closely and find details, take guesses and explore theories. They circle back on themselves to keep the conversation going, help participants build on one another's thoughts and discover more. And, perhaps most important, they communicate powerfully that you don't need an authority to give you a "right answer" - you only need your own curiosity and a willingness to go deeper.

Mr. Yenawine writes in his book, " Visual Thinking Strategies," that using these three questions over and over in talking about art starts to make them automatic habits of mind. Soon they begin to function as a cognitive strategy for making meaning - not just for visual texts, but also for almost any kind of unfamiliar material.

In fact, he and the teachers V.T.S. works with believe the questions can be used just as profitably for classroom conversations about academic content like math formulas, scientific phenomenon, historical documents - or poetry.

Which brings us to our National Poetry Month experiment. On Thursday, April 14, we'll be conducting a live-moderated discussion of a poem, using these three questions:

What's going on in this poem?

What do you see, or read, that makes you say that?

What more can you find?

Just as with our Monday forums, live moderation will take place from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Eastern, although of course students and teachers will be welcome to continue commenting after that point.

We have had some help from the sixth graders of the Old Adobe School in Petaluma, Calif., where the teachers Tracy McClure and Carol Henderson have long used the V.T.S. method for discussing texts of all kinds.

They recently did a dry run with the poem we'll post on April 14. So practiced are their classes, in fact, that some of the students took on the role of facilitators themselves. They had, by all accounts, a wonderful time.

Join us - and, as always, if you have questions, please post them in the comments and we'll answer you there.

And don't forget that you can enter our annual Found Poem Contest until May 3, and find many, many more ideas for teaching poetry in our National Poetry Month collection.

-

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What's Going On in This Poem? Exploring Poetry Through Open-Ended Questions

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Update, April 14: Here is our live "What's Going On in This Poem?" discussion. Though the moderated segment is over, please continue to add comments and respond to others. How do you approach poetry with your students? How did your own teachers introduce a new poem to you?

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Recommended Reading from Seven Academy Chancellors
We asked our Chancellors what books they'd recommend reading. Seven Chancellors- Toi Derricotte, Marilyn Hacker, Juan Felipe Herrera, Edward Hirsch, Marilyn Nelson, Naomi Shihab Nye, Arthur Sze -each chose two books of poems, a volume often revisited for continuous inspiration and another beloved book more readers should know about.

"The book I return to is Li-Young Lee's The City in Which I Love You. The unfamiliar leaps, the dream-soaked realities of a "wanderer's heart," the revisions of memory, the illuminations on the demolished crossings of nation and self to the upper trigrams of sensual becoming and the knife-sharp divinities of being; all this, all the whispered line-work-takes me back to Lee's pages." -Juan Felipe Herrera
Recommended Reading from Other Renowned Poets Past and Present
We asked a number of poets, including previous Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets, to list a few poetry books that they would recommend to others. The selections that came in include influential volumes, books returned to over and over, must-reads, and books frequently recommended to students or new poetry readers.

Galway Kinnell
Body Rags (2002, Mariner Books Reissue)

Galway Kinnell
The Book of Nightmares (1973, Mariner Books)

The Lice (1993, Copper Canyon Press Reissue)

Cesare Pavese
Hard Labor (1979, Johns Hopkins University Press)

James Wright
Shall We Gather at the River (1968, University Press of
New England)

Sylvia Plath
Ariel (2004, HarperCollins Restored Edition)

Allen Ginsberg
Howl (1956, City Lights Books)

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Poetry for Teens - If you're a teen looking to learn more about the art of reading or writing poetry, we've gathered

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Sandra Doller: I'm Sandra Doller, and this is PoetryNow. I would say I'm recently a mother, but (LAUGHS) my kid is four now, so I don't know how recent that is. Since this piece is about lifespans, the relativity of time in relation to different lives and forms of life, that seems really recent to me, but not to a four-year-old. For my partner to get diagnosed with cancer at 40 felt so unfair. You know, we're not gonna have lots of days together. We're not gonna make cappuccinos in the morning every morning for the next 45 to 50 years. Maybe we only have a year, maybe we have a month, maybe we have 10 years, or 20. We actually were decidedly not procreating (LAUGHS) for this life. And then as soon as he got sick, one of my first thoughts was, "Oh, we should've had a kid." I don't know how anyone decides to have a kid. That's, you know, such a big decision. So that seems as reasonable a reason as any.

(READS POEM)

I Thought a Tree Dying

I thought a tree dying was a sign of pestilence or terror or you'd done something wrong in your life and so your tree died. But no, sometimes, like a pet, they just go. Lifespan different than a dog, how unfair is that, you just get your dog for only this little finger of time and then move on. Whose pets are we? If the lifespan of a tree is significantly longer than ours, does that make us its pet? Like in the concentric circle of lifespans, who wins that contest and is that how you decided to make god a thing? Who am I asking all these questions of, my mother? I am the mother now and have to come up with answers like the way one letter from the word "now" to "not" changes everything: your breakfast is now ready, your breakfast is not ready. Why don't we speak typos. At the level of the letter. It's when I saw my hand holding the baby's head I realized I wasn't the baby anymore.

* * *

I did have this physical realization of the fact of motherhood. It was the first time I was alone with my child. And I'd look at her head, and it's so tiny, and then I see my own hand, which, suddenly I realize, is an adult hand. And it really looks so feminine, and so motherly. And I had never seen my hand in that way before.

(QUOTING FROM POEM)
It's when I saw my hand holding the baby's head I realized I wasn't the baby anymore.
I am not the child. I am actually the one making the world and defining the world for a child who is asking me, "Why do the leaves look brown?" "Why is that tree dead?" "Why can't I have sugar cereal?" or (LAUGHS) any of the small and large whys that actually are juxtaposed in rapid fire in the course of any day. When a child asks you questions, do you answer the real answer? Do you have a responsibility to explain what a gun is?

(QUOTING FROM POEM)
Who am I asking all these questions of, my mother? I am the mother now and have to come up with answers like the way one letter from the word "now" to "not" changes everything: your breakfast is now ready, your breakfast is not ready.
There's kind of an acceptance of not knowing that is built into this poem. As a mother, I don't have the answers. I certainly don't have them for myself, for my own life, let alone for someone else.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Katie Klocksin: That was Sandra Doller and her poem "I Thought a Tree Dying." I'm Katie Klocksin and this is PoetryNow, a production of the Poetry Foundation. For more about this series, go to poetryfoundation.org/poetrynow.

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Sandra Doller: I'm Sandra Doller, and this is PoetryNow. I would say I'm recently a mother, but (LAUGHS) my kid is four now, so I don't know how recent that is. Since this piece is about lifespans, the relativity of time in relation to different lives and forms of life, that seems really recent to me, but not to a four-year-old.

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Pithy and powerful, poetry is a popular art form at protests and rallies. From the civil rights and women's liberation movements to Black Lives Matter, poetry is commanding enough to gather crowds in a city square and compact enough to demand attention on social media. Speaking truth to power remains a crucial role of the poet in the face of political and media rhetoric designed to obscure, manipulate, or worse. The selection of poems below call out and talk back to the inhumane forces that threaten from above. They expose grim truths, raise consciousness, and build united fronts. Some insist, as Langston Hughes writes, "That all these walls oppression builds / Will have to go!" Others seek ways to actively "make peace," as Denise Levertov implores, suggesting that "each act of living" might cultivate collective resistance. All rail against complacency and demonstrate why poetry is necessary and sought after in moments of political crisis.

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Poems of Protest, Resistance, and Empowerment | Poetry Foundation

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Why poetry is necessary and sought after during crises.

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Even though its founding documents profess an egalitarian vision of opportunity and equal treatment of its citizens, rights and liberties deemed inalienable, the United States has struggled to live up to its avowed values of fairness and equality and to extend the privileges of freedom that animated its foundational cause for self-determination and sovereignty after hard-won battles against a progressively tyrannical British monarchy.

Its unapologetic history of white supremacy; genocide of Native Americans fueled by a cultural belief in Manifest Destiny; enslavement of African people; racial segregation and its lingering effects in employment practices, education, housing, medical care, and public facilities; persistence of police murders and other acts of terrorism against ethnic communities and people; confining Japanese Americans and illegal immigrants in internment camps subject to food shortages and substandard sanitation; economic exploitation of and fearmongering among migrant workers; the racial disparity of rates of mass incarceration; palpable class divisions and financial inequality caused by an ever-widening racial wealth gap across ethnic groups; the dismantling of unions and social organizations that laudably fought to bring a sense of dignity to working class and poor people; and hegemonic cultural attitudes and vocal intolerance of new Americans are just a few of the politically documented abuses that have prevented the country from actualizing as a single "nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

An oft-celebrated aspect of its poetry, most audibly evoked in the poems of Walt Whitman, celebrates and idealizes the spirit of American democracy and its possibility, chiefly evidenced in its diversity of people and expansive landscapes. However, another important and equally principled tradition of poems written in the United States has long spoken to that space between the progressive idea of a country that promises equality, freedom, and liberty for its citizens and its long history of political injustice, systemic racism, oppression, and ethnic strife. In this regard, American poetry has served as a measure by which readers become acquainted with the difficulties and suffering of citizenship and how the United States might become a more perfect union. In this regard, because such poems, like the country itself, are born of a spirit of resistance and righteousness, tonally and thematically, they represent in literature the true spirit of what being an American means-they affirm founding values of freedom of speech and assembly in the promotion, pursuit, and expressions of a better tomorrow. In advancing a collective vision of what and who Americans are, these poems bear witness, challenge assumptions, and give substance to the country's most elemental ideals of justice.

The poems gathered here document important historical struggles for dignity and justice; they praise political heroes; they express pride, frustration, and rage. They call for collective action and individual accountability, sometimes loudly yet always compellingly. They promote positive identities and self-esteem and make a claim for the sanctity of all humans. If you have any recommendations for poems to include in this collection, please contact us.

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Poetry and Racial Justice and Equality | Poetry Foundation

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Even though its founding documents profess an egalitarian vision of opportunity and equal treatment of its citizens, rights and liberties deemed inalienable, the United States has struggled to live up to its avowed values of fairness and equality and to extend the privileges of freedom that animated its foundational cause for self-determination and sovereignty after hard-won battles against a progressively tyrannical British monarchy.

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The following poems explore the themes of social justice, identity, and human rights and are appropriate for young people.
more poems for kids
" from Citizen, VI [On the train the woman standing]" by Claudia Rankine
On the train the woman standing makes you understand...

" Carrying Our Words" by Ofelia Zepeda
We travel carrying our words...

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The following poems explore the themes of social justice, identity, and human rights and are appropriate for young people. more poems for kids "Praise Song for the Day" by Elizabeth AlexanderEach day we go about our business... "Still I Rise" by Maya AngelouYou may write me down in history...

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Teach Living Poets opens up the flourishing world of contemporary poetry to secondary teachers, giving advice on discovering new poets and reading contemporary poetry, as well as sharing sample lessons, writing prompts, and ways to become an engaged member of a professional learning community.

Continue reading

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Complicating the canon and empowering students through poetry

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Carol Rumens's poem of the week | Books | The Guardian

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Each week Carol Rumens picks a poem to discuss

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Dear Poets, This year, I have seen so much death. Losing the people I love used to be my biggest fear, but now I have lost so many so quickly that I find myself with a new one. I jump into problem-solving zombie mode every time it happens. There's so much to do and so many people to take care of. Last week, a poet I knew killed himself. I spent the night comforting every friend he had and, in the middle of comforting, I realized how used to this I had become. I know just the right thing to say or not say, just how long to hold the silence before it had to break. I am an expert at helping others deal with the grief death brings. Now, my biggest fear is that I will get too accustomed to tragedy, to suicides, to death. I am scared of getting used to losing. I am scared of losing all this pain. I don't ever want to stop feeling. I don't ever want to get used to it. Is there a poem for it, any words that will stop this from happening?
Too Used to Death Read More

In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets-Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz-take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Kaveh Akbar is on the line. Dear Poets, I am the daughter of two wonderful, loving Chinese parents, and I have a supportive boyfriend and caring friends. But still, I somehow find myself dealing with daily feelings of anxiety and inadequacy. I am a humanities major with an uncertain future and less-than-average academics, and I am faced with continual feelings of shame and embarrassment about the lack of effort I put into my studies. My parents are intellectual giants who came from nothing and worked their way up into high-earning jobs so that they could give me the best possible education and life, and I feel as if I have squandered the opportunities they have worked so hard for me to have. To make things worse, they are extremely supportive of my choices, and are constantly caring and understanding. How do I deal with my fears that I will never be able to honor my parents by becoming more successful than them?
Sincerely,
Dutiful Daughter

Dear DD,

"To make things worse, they are extremely supportive of my choices" is such a strange and quintessentially immigrant utterance-I am smiling with affectionate recognition. What to do with the guilt we feel that our lives are often so much easier than the lives of our parents? How can any of our fears, anxieties, lonelinesses be worth mentioning when theirs have been so great? For you (and often, for myself), I prescribe Hai-Dang Phan's " My Father's 'Norton Introduction to Literature,' Third Edition (1981). "

Read More

In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets-Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz-take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Claire Schwartz is on the line. Dear Poets, My family and I are what the newspaper headlines would deem immigrants. Living in a city where people of my kind are under constant scrutiny and threat has caused me to lose hope. I used to find solace in the community of poetry nights until I found myself subject to the same questioning stares there because of my headscarf. There are small acts of hatred that take place that don't make their way into newspapers. My parents drop me off at university and their breath is suspended in the air until I text them, 'reached alright.' And again, they hold their breath till I walk through the front door at night. I no longer think about my big dreams of writing or research. I pray for safety, for me and for everyone in need of it right now. Do you have a poem for this? For this feeling of being like a lost spaceship, floating with no promise of a return?
Sincerely,
Lost in a Big Crowd and Scared

Read More

In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets-Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz-take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Sarah Kay is on the line. Dear Poets, My birthday is coming. It's not a "big" one-not twenty-one or fifty or a hundred or any other special number-just a regular number in the middle. Honestly, there's no particular reason I should feel this year is so much more painful than others, but I do. I'm not sure I can describe the feeling-it's not something to wear purple for, per se . It's more of a lost feeling: How did I get old? This body is mine and yet surely must also be someone else's. I want to age gracefully and, most of all, I do not want to become invisible-to myself or anyone else. And I could use some encouragement, a vote of confidence, to know that this is possible. Is there a poem that could help? Sincerely,
Me
Read More

In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets-Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz-take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Kaveh Akbar is on the line. Dear Poets, I was in an abusive relationship for several years, and two years ago today the man I'd been involved with died by suicide. We had not been in touch for a long while before his death, but I'm still not through dealing with all the damage from our relationship and completely unequipped to know how to grieve him. Is there a poem that might help me make more sense of an overwhelming amount of conflicting emotions?
Sincerely,
Still Not Over It

Dear Still Not Over It,

I thought a long time about which poem to prescribe you, and kept coming up against the reality that no poem would precisely correspond to your exact experience (unless you wrote it!), nor would any poem help you "make more sense" of a situation that is aggressively hostile to sense-a man claimed to love you but he hurt you, you freed yourself but he died and now you need to learn how to grieve him despite his abuse. It's profoundly irrational, which is to say, it's profoundly human and true.

I give you Kevin Prufer's "Black Woods." The poem ends:

Listen to yourself. Did he step inside you?
Listen to yourself. Is he trapped inside you?
Let go of me. Is it black woods in there?

It seems to me a poem deeply invested in exploring our inherently illogical response to grief. The chilling, unforgettable closing repetition of "Listen to yourself" is, of course, what the griever can never do, not really, so overpowering is the noise of grief itself. The open, bracketed spaces remind me of Anne Carson's translations of Sappho-here are moments too thundering for history to keep them, the silences not silences at all, but rather typographical concessions to the failure of a medium.

This sounds like an excruciating situation, and I hope so much you have people in your life with whom you can speak about it. Prufer's poem offers a glimpse of the irrational heart of grief warring with the omnipresent pressure to conceal it, to move beyond it and once more conform to convention. I hope you find the freedom to argue, grapple, and grow with the grief you're experiencing.

-KA

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK) or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources. Read More

In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets-Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz-take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Claire Schwartz is on the line. Dear Poets, Is there a word for the feeling when you know the wise thing to do, but you, always a fool, do the opposite? I wish I knew the word-I would have said it when this boy slept a night by my side. I would have said it when I first lost him, and then six months later, he came back for me. I would have said it, even if only a whisper, when I fell for him all over again, even harder than before. And now I would repeat it to myself, like a benediction, as I face the possibility of him drifting away. That is the feeling for which I need a poem. The feeling when you know that he's going to leave, and you're remembering how hard it was to lose him the first time, and this time you're in deeper, and you know you should cut it off now to reduce the heartache a little, but you foolishly continue to hope. The feeling every lover has, before sadness makes them wise.
Sincerely,
A Hopeful Fool

Dear Hopeful Fool,

I love your letter. What you're seeking-a word for a feeling you know but have no language for-gets exactly at one reason I hold poems close: not necessarily to choose differently but to experience differently. For you, Mary Szybist's " The Troubadours Etc.":

Just for this evening, let's not mock them.
Not their curtsies or cross-garters
or ever-recurring pepper trees in their gardens
promising, promising.
At least they had ideas about love.

I think one word for what you describe is the one you use: hope. But hope's wisdom buckles when the vision it was pinned to dissipates. So here is a sturdier word: faith. Faith's intelligence is not bound to the outcome of any single situation; faith is something surer that you build when you choose the not-knowing. Faith marks an interior constitution, a way of being that says more about the self than it says about any external event. "At least they had ideas about love." Read More

By Tom Bean and Luke Poling

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Dear Poets, This year, I have seen so much death. Losing the people I love used to be my biggest fear, but now I have lost so many so quickly that I find myself with a new one. I jump into problem-solving zombie mode every time it happens.

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Classroom Activities

The following activities and questions are designed to help your students use their noticing skills to move through the poem and develop their thinking about its meaning with confidence, using what they've noticed as evidence for their interpretations. Read more about the framework upon which these activities are based.

Warm-up: Look closely at the image of the famous painting Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh. What colors and images stand out to you in the painting? Why? Look again. What else do you see in the painting? What mood does the painting have? What makes you say that?

Before Reading the Poem: Listen to Yasmine Hamdan's NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert. What lyrics or sounds stand out to you? Why? How does her music make you feel? Based on your listening, what do you think of the poem's title "Reflections"?

Reading the Poem: Silently read the poem "Reflections" by Ameen Rihani. What do you notice about the poem? Note any words or phrases that stand out to you or any questions you might have.

Listening to the Poem (enlist two volunteers to read the poem aloud): Listen as the poem is read aloud twice, and write down any additional words and phrases that stand out to you.

Small-group Discussion: Share what you noticed about the poem with a small group of students. How does this poem connect to and differ from the song and the painting from the beginning of class? Why?

Whole-class Discussion: What do you think of the title "Reflections?" How might the poem be different without this poem, or can you think of another title?

Extension for Grades 7-8: In honor of National Poetry Month, create a digital anthology of poetry. These poems might have similar themes to Rihani's poem, or they might evoke new themes. Then, create three discussion questions about your selected poem. During National Poetry Month, read one poem from your anthology each day, and use your discussion questions to discuss these poems. (Teachers, you can learn more about National Poetry Month , as well as find more lessons and materials. Happy Poetry Month!)

Extension for Grades 9-12: Learn more about Ameen Rihani and read more of Rihani's work. In honor of Arab American month, you can read more Arab American poets . Choose an Arab American poet to read and learn more about. Create a presentation that celebrates your chosen poet's work. Present to your class.

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Classroom Activities The following activities and questions are designed to help your students use their noticing skills to move through the poem and develop their thinking about its meaning with confidence, using what they've noticed as evidence for their interpretations. Read more about the framework upon which these activities are based.