All posts in Skinner West

Poetry Is…

Today we had our final classes of the residency. After returning last week’s work, I said that we would be doing something different for our finale, based, as some other writing prompts have been, […]

Sock It to Me!

This week’s poem was our longest yet—“Ode to My Socks” by Pablo Neruda. Despite being 85 (!) lines long, it read quite briskly, because of its short lineation and enjambment, and we spent a […]

Read Letter Day

Letter writing is one of humankind’s earliest means of communication, and the epistle is a poetic form that plays with that concept. Emily Dickinson‘s “Dear March—Come in—” demonstrates how flexible epistles are, while also […]

Attitude: Gratitude

This week we read Robert Hayden‘s “Those Winter Sundays” and discussed the sonnet form. In the poem, the non-gendered speaker remembers their father who worked hard seven days per week, providing warmth for a […]

All’s (Un)fair

Joshua Mehigan employs powerful yet odd similes in his poem, “The Fair.” We discussed the comparisons they made, and how he structured his poem to accommodate one per stanza. What are the benefits of […]

Come to Think of It…

The title of Elizabeth Bishop‘s poem, “Little Exercise,” doesn’t immediately make sense, considering that it appears to describe, in detail, and with various forms of figurative language, a storm’s passage across a Florida vista. […]

It’s a Condition

Last week, we read Langston Hughes‘ “If-ing.” The speaker in the poem uses the conditional to talk about what might happen; in each instance, their ifs involve money—small change, greenbacks, a million—in order to […]

Crack of Dawn

Oliver de la Paz‘s poem, “Aubade with Bread for the Sparrows” provided inspiration for this week’s discussion and writing. It describes a speaker, rising early to feed birds with bread and “old crusts,” and […]

Memory Lane

For our second class—the first where we discussed a published poem before writing—we read Joy Harjo’s “Remember.” I asked the students to note the number of lines—since that would make ‘navigating’ the poem easier—as […]

Introductions & Aleacrostics

This week, I kicked off my residency with students at Skinner West! Some I had worked with previously, back in 2nd grade, but overall these were new students, exhibiting varying degrees of familiarity with […]

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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