All posts in Taft

Cutting Up!

For our final poem, we created cut- up poetry. We used found language and images to create new meaning. Lesson Note: Creative Artist guru, Julia Cameron, says the part of us that creates art […]

Be A Kid…Again! Nostalgia and Memory in Poetry

Students shared childhood stories before writing their own poem reflecting back on their younger selves, as the speaker does in Billy Collins’ poem, On Turning Ten. Lesson Note. “I think one of the strengths […]

Syntax Error

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. Lesson Note: ‘There is no […]

‘My father, to whom I consider’: Hero Poems…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 […]

‘This is-not a-Shakespeare-sonnet-of course’: Iambic Pentameter Without Question

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

Booked!

This lesson circulated around the concept of lists. Through Albert Goldbarth’ s long form list poem, ‘Library’ (truncated for our purposes ) we took time to create our own list poems. Lesson Note: A […]

‘Just too big to be loved’: Personifcation & the Lyric Form

This week…a lesson on Personification, giving human qualities to something non-human via the poem: A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island. We took a look at Frank O’ Hara’s touching […]

Bright Lights, Big City… and Beats Pills (TM)

We began class with a reading of Lucille Clifton’s deceptively simple poem,’ in the inner city’. We looked at how the poet used lines and white space to draw us in. Students turned the […]

Blackout Poetry

Our final lesson for 8th Grade A.P. English was on Blackout Poetry: A blackout poem is when a poet takes a marker (usually black marker) to already established text–like in a newspaper–and starts redacting […]

‘I was sailing in a small fishing boat.’: Meditation Poems

Students participated in a 10- minute creative writing meditation and breathing exercise. I read them I Close My Eyes by David Ignatow. After the meditation, they were asked to write whatever came to mind. […]

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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