Additonal Poetry Resources

Crawford, Kathleen Marie; Hartke, Jill M.; Humphrey, Angela; Spycher, Ellen; Steffan, Marjorie; Wilson, Jennifer L. “The Aesthetic Power of Poetry.” Language Arts Vo. 78 No. 4 (March 2001): 385-91.

Discusses poetry books that highlight "the power of language to invite new relationships, to cast familiar experiences in a new light, to fill our minds with the richness of the people around us, and the world around us." Presents several poetry books addressing relationships with written words in a unique format, concepts in language learning, the environment, and with imagination.     

Illustrates how poems engage readers in heightened experiences of the world and of language itself. Shows some of the strategies that adults and elementary students employed when reading and responding to poems: summarizing the poem, entering in and opening out, entering the world of the poem, opening to the outside world, finding rich significance, acting out, and making links to other texts.

Follows the development, from fifth grade through eighth grade, of a student poet, who can teach educators what it means to "feel expressed." Offers new ways to think about who children are, what they need to say, and what they need to be taught. Discusses the possibilities of poetry for gaining access to children's deepest capacities for language.

Strickland, Dorothy S.; Strickland, Michael R. “Language and Literacy: The Poetry Connection."  Language Arts Vol. 74 No. 3 (March 1997): 201-05.

Offers a conceptual framework for building language awareness through the reading of poetry, encouraging children to reflect on language in interesting and powerful ways. Provides an instructional model for constructing literature-based experiences in the classroom.

Chance, Rosemary. “Beyond Silverstein: Poetry for Middle Schoolers.” Voices from the Middle Vol. 9 No. 2 (December 2001): 88-90.

Offers brief descriptions of 23 books of poetry for middle schoolers. Notes that these selections may lure readers who are dismayed with poetry back to a love of poetry.

Hobgood, Jayne M. “Finders Keepers: Owning the Reading They Do.” Voices from the Middle Vol. 5 No. 2 (April 1998): 26-33. 

Describes how the author has her students create "found poems" and use them in conjunction with the students' own Readers/Writers Logs to help students make more of a text, own it, and discover the power of effective language. Includes instructions, student samples of found poems, and samples of the entire process.

Brown, Margie K. “Silverstein and Seuss to Shakespeare: What Is in Between?” English Journal Vol. 90 No. 5 (May 2001): 150-56. 

Points out the rich variety of poetry for teenagers available today, and suggests reasons why teenagers might have a difficult time finding it. Appends a list of more than 120 collections of poetry, arranged in categories.

Bruce, Heather E. ; Davis, Bryan Dexter. “Slam: Hip-Hop Meets Poetry--A Strategy for Violence Intervention.” English Journal Vol. 89 No. 5 (May 2000): 119-27. 

Describes one strategy used in high school English classrooms to teach for peace and dislodge violence: the poetry slam, a burgeoning pop culture phenomenon that combines poetry and performance art. Describes poetry slams that incorporate hip-hop culture. Discusses promoting slams in English classrooms to show students the power of words and instruct them in nonviolence, leadership, character, and social change.

Scimone, Anthony J. “At Home with Poetry: Constructing Poetry Anthologies in the High School Classroom.” English Journal Vol. 89 No. 2 (November 1999):  78-82.  

Describes the success of a unit for tenth-grade students wherein they created a book of poetry. Provides guidelines for the unit and evaluation criteria. Claims the "books" turned out to be far superior to the "flat pro forma" poetry papers assigned in the past.

Elster, Charles A. ; Hanauer, David I. “Voicing Texts, Voices around Texts: Reading Poems in Elementary School Classrooms.” Research in the Teaching of English Vol. 37 No. 1 (August 2002): 89-134. 

Examines how 10 kindergarten through fourth-grade teachers shared poems and stories with their students. Notes that readings of poems were characterized by expressive reading style, multiple readings in one sitting, and children's active participation. Concludes poetry has the potential to draw children's attention to the resources of literate language.

Kamberelis, George. “Genre Development and Learning: Children Writing Stories, Science Reports, and Poems.” Research in the Teaching of English Vol. 33 No. 4 (May 1999):  403-60. 

Explores children's working knowledge of narrative, scientific, and poetic genres. Finds that children had significantly more experience with narrative genres than either scientific or poetic genres; and possessed more knowledge of text structure than micro-level features such as cohesion markers. Contributes to theorizing genre learning as a complex, contingent, and emergent process of differentiation and integration.

Hemphill, Lowry. “Narrative Style, Social Class, and Response to Poetry.” Research in the Teaching of English Vol. 33 No. 3 (February 1999): 275-302.

Explores differences in adolescents' styles of responding to poetry and relates these differences to contrasts in the way students narrate stories of personal experience. Finds contrasts between working-class and middle-class students in styles of responding to poetry which show parallels with their contrasting styles of narrating stories of personal experience. 

Chick, Nancy L. "Anthologizing Transformation: Breaking Down Students' 'Private Theories' about Poetry." Teaching English in the Two-Year College Vol. 29 No. 4 (May 2002): 418-23.

Presents an assignment in which students look through a handful of poetry collections or anthologies, seeking 20 poems they like and thus understand or want to understand to some extent. Describes the benefits of this assignment, including honing students' interpretive skills, dispelling their misconceptions about the genre, and continuing their "initiation into art."

Tompkins, Sandra Lee. “How Does a Reader Make a Poem Meaningful? Reader-Response Theory and the Poetry Portfolio." Teaching English in the Two-Year College Vol. 24 No. 4 (December 1997): 317-25.

Describes how a reader-response approach can help students construct a portfolio of readings that reflects their development as poetry readers. Describes using a reader-response journal, communal learning activities, and a portfolio to create a recursive process through which students develop a better understanding of how poetry works. Discusses evaluation of the portfolio.

Vertreace, Martha Modena. “Sestinas and Villanelles from the Inner City.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College Vol. 24 No. 1 (February 1997): 47-49.

Shows how the modeling of established poetic forms can help community college students to write poetry