This document provides an overview of teaching poetry writing and reading to students. It discusses challenges of teaching poetry, provides examples of poetry analysis exercises and activities, and describes different poetic forms like odes, sestinas, and tritinas. Web resources and guidelines for creative writing are also included. The document aims to give teachers tools and prompts to engage students in reading, analyzing, and writing poetry.

1. Poetry: the Reading and
Writing Connection
Jennifer Nabers
The Latin School of Chicago
jnabers@latinschool.org

2. Presentation Information
• Web Resources:
– www.delicious.com
– Choose the drop down menu PEOPLE
– Choose “Go to a User”
– Enter “poetry2008”

3. Challenges to teaching poetry

4. For teachers: fear.

5. For students: boredom.

6. For your curriculum: time

7. Dictation
• Open your poetry notebook.
• Start on a new page.
• Follow my directions.
• It’s okay to ask questions.

8. Poems are not
hierarchical---every
word matters.
Baron Wormser & David Capella
A Surge of Language

9. Exercise in the Cemetery
At dusk I walk up and down
among the rows of the dead.
What do the thoughts I think
have to do with another living being?
In the eastern sky, blue-green as a bird’s egg,
a cloud with a neck like a goose
swims achingly toward the zenith.
Jane Gentry

10. W&C’s Ten questions to ask about words.
• What word intrigues you the most?
• Is there a word that confuses you?
• What word surprises you?
• What word seems metaphorical?
• Is there a word that seems unnecessary?
• What word is most important?
• What is the most physical word in the poem?
• What is the most specific word in the poem?
• What is the strongest sound word in the poem?
• What is the most dynamic verb in the poem?

11. Every poem is a prompt.
• Dictate the poem.
• Discuss the poem
• Examine the structure line by line.
• Assign a prompt that uses the same/
similar structure.

12. W& C’s Creativity Guidelines
1. Give the task a chance.
2. Feel free to discard.
3. Don’t denigrate your effort.
4. Share with others (once you feel
comfortable).
5. Don’t worry about what should be
because there is no should be.

13. Prompt for our poem.
• Write a poem that’s 3 sentences long.
– The FIRST sentence sets the setting
– The SECOND sentence asks a question.
– The THIRD sentence gives us an image from
that world.
– For YOU: being at ISACS.
– For your kids: lunch room, lockers, etc.

14. The first poem I dictate:
In a Station of the Metro
Ezra Pound
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

15. 3 Great Poetry Activities
1. Compare narrative to lyrical
poems.
– A narrative poem is a poem that tells a story.
– A lyrical poem portrays feelings,
perceptions, or state of mind.

16. Ed by Louis Simpson
Ed was in love with a cocktail waitress,
but Ed’s family, and his friends,
didn’t approve. So he broke it off.
He married a respectable woman
who played the piano. She played well
enough
to have been a professional.

17. Ed’s wife left him…
Years later, at a family gathering
Ed got drunk and made a fool of himself.
He said, “I should have married Doreen.”
“Well,” they said, “why didn’t you?”

18. Can we think of a prompt for Ed?

19. The Long Rain by John Haines
Rain falls
in the quiet woods.
Smoke hangs
above the evening fire,
fragrant with pitch.
Alone, deep
in a willow thicket,
the olive thrush
is singing.

20. Can we think of a prompt?

21. #2: Teach poetic forms
The ODE
• A lyric poem that focuses on one object
or one subject.
• Pablo Neruda’s Odes to Common Things
is an invaluable resource.

22. Teaching and writing Odes
• Read a selection of contemporary odes.
• If you think your kids are up to it,
compare/contrast to a classical ode such
as Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn.
• Use Nancie Atwell’s tips for
Neruda-esque Odes.

23. Tips for Neruda-esque Odes
• Choose a subject you have strong feelings
about.
• Describe the subject inside and out.
• Exaggerate its admirable qualities.
• Tap all 5 senses.
• Use metaphors and similies.
• Directly address the subject of the ode.
• Balance your feelings with description.
• Keep the lines short.
• Choose strong words.

24. from Ode to a pair of scissors
Prodigious
scissors
(looking like
birds, or
fish),
you are as polished as a knight’s
shining armor.

25. Another fun form: Sestina
• The sestina is quot;song of sixes,quot; a medieval
verse form of six six-line stanzas, in
which the poet repeats six end-words in
a prescribed order, reintroducing the six
repeated words (in any order) in a
closing three line envoy.
• Example: Elizabeth Bishop’s Sestina.
• Students can try a tritina.

26. Tritina
• 3 repeating end words
• 4 total stanzas
– 3 lines each in the first 3 stanzas:
• ABC
• CAB
• BCA
– Last stanza is one line that uses each word.

27. #3: Photograph Poems
• From John O’Conner’s Wordplaygrounds
• Students bring in a picture that has
meaning.
• Ask students to “carefully descibe the
photo, describing everything in the
frame.”

28. Add drama to the poem
• “Write about what is NOT in the frame:
the photographer, missing signs of the
setting, the occasion, an important
person who is not pictured.”
• “your poem should reconcile or explain
why the contents of the frame do not
contain all the information necessary to
understand the event fully.”

30. Please contact me!
• Jennifer Nabers
• Jennifer.nabers@gmail. com or
• jnabers@latinschool.org