All posts in Taft

‘like still want to live’: Tabled

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 […]

A Word (or Two)

8th and 9th-grade students at Taft Freshman Academy engaged in a timed writing exercise where they created their ‘life story’ in 24 words. They were then instructed to whittle that number down to one […]

In the Cut: Cut Up Poems

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 […]

‘I was waiting for Peter Pan’: Kid’s Stuff

In this lesson, students had lots to day! Students shared childhood stories before writing their own poem reflecting back their younger selves, as the speaker did in Billy Collin’s poem, On Turning Ten. Lesson […]

‘vummer sacation.’: A Lesson in Lousy Language

Students played word games that centered around sound and creative syntax, before delving into Kevin Young’s poem of altered cliché’s, Errata. ‘Errata’ means an error in a written text. ‘Syntax is identity,’ says poet […]

Hero Worship: Poems on Heroes of All Kinds

What makes a hero (both real or imagined), and how can we learn from them (even the villains) and the inner- hero inside of us? We explored those concepts and more in What I […]

Brush Up Your Shakespeare!

In this lesson, we focused on the Shakespearean Sonnet and iambic pentameter. In his Sonnet #127, William Shakespeare muses on beauty and its perception as a ‘currency’ in the modern world: ‘In the old […]

‘This book is a poem.’ : Listography!

This lesson circulated around the concept of lists. Through creative play we created and talked about lists and then read Albert Goldbarth’s, long poem , ‘Library’ ( a list poem truncated for our purposes […]

‘Talking sky’ /’Talking about my life’: Calling Us… By Name

7th Grade students read Frank O’Hara’s A True Account of Talking to the Sun At Fire Island and then wrote their own lyric/personifictaion poems that showcased their feelings. The Freshman classes looked at Sandra […]

Our City/Ourselves

7th Grade students created city- themed group exquistie corpse poems after reading Lucille Clifton’s, in the inner city, and Freshman students also experiemented with the concept of ‘line’ by creating their life story in […]

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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