All posts in Timothy David Rey

“In the hot Summer/Radio ready/ Blue leather walls”: Memory Poems

Students wrote poems about recent and not-so-recent memories and continued working with short lines and sometimes minimalism. Lesson Note: “To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement…Anybody can have […]

“After the glory of the day”: Night Poems

Students doodled and drew pictures of what happens at night before they drift off to sleep and then wrote short poems using sensory details. Lesson Note: “Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for […]

“I saved it/ then saved another”: Memory Poems

Memory is powerful! 6th and 8th-grade students warmed up with doodling, then crafted memory poems, using short lines, and sensory details! Lesson Note: ‘[Practice]…the act of moving the hand across the page and writing […]

Fade To Black: Blackout Poetry

Blackout Poetry: A blackout poem is created when a poet takes a marker (usually a black marker) to already established text–like that from a newspaper–and starts redacting words until a poem is formed or […]

‘go in search of crocodiles’: Travel Poems

We took a look at Richard Blanco’s prose/mix/hybrid poem about missed destinations, We Are Not Going to Malta. Students were then given travel brochures exhibiting lush locales (decidedly not always depicting reality), and asked […]

‘a secret/ Recipe passed down…’: Portrait Poems

Students read Instructions to the Artist by Billy Collins before crafting their own portrait-inspired poems. Lesson Note: According to findings by the leading researcher on the power of writing and journaling for healing purposes, […]

‘I’ll start’: Star Poems

Students read Choose Something Like A Star by Robert Frost and listened to a choral arrangement of the same poem, before trying their hands at their own poems addressing something… bigger than themselves. Lesson […]

‘when you separate it/ Into sections:’ Wallace Stevens Imitations

Inspired by Wallace Stevens’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, students examined a sea shell from different angles and then used similes to describe it in verse. Lesson Note: Perspective and Reality. As […]

Cutting Up: Collage and Visual Poetry!

Students used magazines and created cut-up poems! They used ‘found language’ and images to create new meaning. Lesson Note: Creative Artist guru, Julia Cameron, says the part of us that creates art is about […]

‘it’s a living thing you can’: Turning Tables

A common household object became the focus of this lesson while studying Joy Harjo’s poem, Perhaps The World Ends Here. The poet James Merrill once commented that ‘we understand history from the family around […]

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I’M FROM THE CITY LIGHTS / STREAMING OUT IN THE NIGHT / AND HUGE SKYSCRAPERS / TOWERING OVER THE LAKE – MELISSA E., 7TH GRADE POET