Articles

Showing 1-20 of 50 articles
  • Article for Teachers

    On Listening to Poetry

    By Hannah Brooks-Motl
    Usually it’s at the beginning of a poetry class. Usually there’s some fumbling around with cords, plugs, outdated or unforeseen technologies—there’s no HDMI, there’s only HDMI. Sometimes there’s ...
    A view from above of a record player.
  • Article for Teachers

    The Lune Link

    By Susan Karwoska
    The students are studying immigration, explorers, or Native American cultures. They are studying community or New York City. The subjects change from class to class, year to year. I’m in their elementary...
    Polaroid photos of different families.
  • Article for Teachers

    The Poetics of Liberation

    By Alex Cuff
    A central question I grapple with as a white teacher working in a predominantly Black and Latinx school community is how to effectively teach racialized content in a way that brings joy and empowerment...
    Gold Weight in Form of Sankofa Bird. Brass, 1 x 2 3/4 x 1 1/4 in.
  • Article for Teachers

    Teaching with Blues Poems

    By Sheila Maldonado
    This form is one of my tried and true exercises, one I have used with a range of ages that always gets the pens going. It also allows me to play music in the classroom, which is always a game-changer...
    Black and white photo of Lead Belly with a guitar, surrounded by audience.
  • Article for Teachers

    Your Secret Hideout

    By Matthew Burgess
    As an undergraduate English major, I underlined a passage in Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, Memory, in which he describes, as a boy, crawling through a dark tunnel between the sofa and the wall. ...
    A hut in a forest
  • Article for Teachers

    Adding Latinx Poetry to Your Curriculum

    By Lupe Mendez
    The very landscape of what being Latinx means is in flux. The brown and black bodies that make up this diverse ethnic group—and the centuries of their culture in the Americas—are often overlooked...
    Image map of the Americas
  • Article for Teachers

    Before We Begin

    By B. Metzger Sampson
    Poetry is tricky to define. We want to give our students enough of a definition to orient themselves, but often, the one we choose is so restrictive that the next poem we encounter will contradict...
    Small student seating with green chairs and tables.
  • Article for Teachers

    Letters, Inventions, and Questions

    By John S. O'Connor
    “Poems exist to create a space for the possibilities of language as material.” —Matthew Zapruder, Why PoetryI was asked once to lead two poetry writing workshops in the same day: one in a graduate education...
    Illustrations of the letter J in various styles.
  • Article for Teachers

    Agents of Imagination

    By Carol Jago
    Poetry lessons too often progress something like this: a teacher reads aloud with feeling a poem she loves. Because she is a good teacher, she doesn’t immediately start peppering students with questions...
    Illustration of a student dressed as an astronaut.
  • Article for Teachers

    Virtual Poetry Teachers Institute

    By The Editors
    Get inspired to teach poetry! Last July, the Poetry Foundation hosted its fifth annual Summer Poetry Teachers Institute entirely online, and we will host two separate online sessions in 2021: July...
  • Article for Teachers

    Hidden Beauty, Willful Craziness

    By Mark Statman


     
                              Under the Edge of February
                              Under the edge of February
               ...

    Image of an abandoned church in Gary, Indiana.
  • Article for Teachers

    Seeing Ourselves in the World

    By Mark Statman

    I. Identity: What Do You Want Me to Know about You?
              Life Harbor
              what you get
              is a beginning
              middle and
           ...

    Reflection of people in the Cloudgate sculpture in Chicago
  • Article for Teachers

    On Sound and Rhythm

    By Jack Collom
    The speech of children is songs of innocence and experience. Seven- through eleven-year-old kids (apprentice writers) have already had thousands upon thousands of hours of practice talking (and listening) ...
    Image of buildings on a waterfront becoming a sound wave
  • Article for Teachers

    Memory Is a Cozy Old Blanket

    By Opal Palmer Adisa
    I have been teaching writing, primarily poetry, to students in the second grade through college for many years, and I have found that the same lesson that I use successfully with college students...
    Image of a red knit blanket.
  • Article for Teachers

    Painting Poems

    By Janice A. Lowe


                   “I saw color and I saw a story. I saw a face and I knew a lifetime.” 
                        —Ntozake Shange, Riding the Moon in Texas:...

    Artwork featuring Red Cross Nurses handing out wool to a line of Black families.
  • Article for Teachers

    Questions We Didn’t Know We Wanted to Ask

    By Deborah Cummins
    The teachers who early in my life stood out—who made a difference in how I felt about school, about learning, about myself—have at least one thing in common: they were questioners. They asked questions...
    Image of scrabble tiles spelling 'QUESTIONS.'
  • Article for Teachers

    Sticks and Stones and Words as Weapons

    By Opal Palmer Adisa
    The extraordinary difficulty of childhood, as I recall it, is making sense of an often contradictory and unpredictable world handed down by adults. Adults offer children maxims meant to buffer and...
    Illustration of an African American woman holding her shoulder
  • Article for Teachers

    Be a Bunch of Yous

    By Laura Solomon
    This lesson exercises students’ capacity for imagination and memory. It may be adapted to the very young, the very old, and anyone in between. The key is simply to excite the students’ capacity to...
    Image of book pages cut and sculpted into the shape of roses.
  • Article for Teachers

    Autobiographia Litter-Aria

    By Christina Davis
    T.S. Eliot may have been on to something when he declared Ezra Pound to be “il miglior fabbro” (“the better craftsman”) for his work as editor of The Waste Land. Pound notoriously culled and cultivated Eliot’s original...
    Image of torn scraps of paper.
  • Article for Teachers

    Bad Titles

    By Matthew Zapruder
    This lesson plan was originally designed for a class of tenth graders, though it can be adapted for younger students. It is intended to free students from any limiting ideas they may have that “good...
    Image of two pairs of mismatched socks.
Newsletters

Sign up for Poetry Foundation newsletters

Sign Up