It was way too crazy a week ago for me to post the poems I was going to read. Instead, on Mondays I will be posting the poems I read the previous week to my students. In fact, I didn’t get to reading any poems aloud until the fourth day, when I read four in a row.
- I started with “Introduction to Poetry” by Billy Collins.
- “The Tyger” by William Blake.
- “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll.
- “This Is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams.
- “Lines” by Martha Collins.
In the spirit of “Introduction to Poetry”, we just “walk inside the poem’s room”. Students are welcome to comment, if they like, but I ask no questions of them. There is no analysis. That may come later – and as a separate activity. I am going to try poems with VTS, Visual Thinking Strategies, this year. I think “The Tyger” might be an interesting one to try later in the year.
“Jabberwocky” was a poem some students had heard or read before. All the others were new to them. We did comment on the made up words in the Lewis Carroll poem. And a student did mention how “This Is Just to Say” was a poem of apology.
Sadly Waiting for Recess 
Thank you for this, Richard. If you continue posting the poem selections you use in your teaching, perhaps my formal poetry education has begun. I found your first four poems interesting. My youthful wanderings had brought me into contact with Tyger and Jabberwocky.
My Tyger memory was refreshed by a wonderful posting of Versebender’s: http://versebender.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/blakes-mistake/.
I’d forgotten that Jabberwocky was penned by Lewis Carroll. Love this computer age, I jumped over and read his biography—didn’t realize he had written a couple more children’s books.
I was born at a awkward time in history—too late to be a cowboy and too early to have computers and the internet for my school years.
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Mike, thank you so much. I’ll keep posting what I’m sharing with my students. I’m hoping posting them like this will motivate me to keep going and make it to a poem every day of the school year, so your encouragement is much appreciated.
Yeah, I don’t know how we managed without it. We were just talking about pennies in class, and I had a student do a little internet research on pennies, which he brought in. I shared what he’d found with the rest of the class. Like you, I didn’t have the internet in school, but it’s great to have it now. Poetry blogging, who would have thunk it?
Richard
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