Posts tagged as:

Poetry

“Try to See It My Way” (Writers and Negative Capability)

October 13, 2010

Image by Getty Images via @daylife “The wise man questions the wisdom of others because he questions his own, the foolish man, because it is different from his own.” —Leo Stein, American art collector and critic In an 1817 letter to a friend, the poet John Keats describes one of the qualities that makes writers [...]

Read the full article →

Books That Influence: A Coney Island of the Mind

June 23, 2010

Lawrence Ferlinghetti via last.fm Starting out as a young writer I never wrote stories. Poetry was more my speed. And as a young poet I wrote my share of really, really bad poetry complete with awkward rhymes and sappy subject matter. But somewhere in my junior year of high school I was introduced to a [...]

Read the full article →

A Pocketful of Prosody

April 30, 2010

I love poetry, and as a high school English teacher, I would like my students to enjoy it as much as I do. While this may be an inherently futile endeavor, I continue to fight the good fight anyway and make pitches for my favorite poems and poets. If I’m lucky, the students who’ve learned [...]

Read the full article →

Poetry 1-2-3, Easy as Writing About a Tree!

February 10, 2010

There is really no “rhyme or reason” on how to write a good poem. Most people think of poetry as short creative pieces with rhythm, stanzas or some musical flow. However, many strong poems are written that do not rhyme at all. The Haiku poem is a great example of this. My love of poetry [...]

Read the full article →

Poetic Pain: Teaching Poetry to High Schoolers

January 8, 2010

Image by Micheo via Flickr During the holidays, I met up with a longtime friend who, like me, teaches high school English. He told me that he was going to be teaching a semester-long poetry class at his school, and he asked if I had any suggestions. Here’s what I said: Pick poems that you [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries