Yearly Archives: 2012

Kenneth Koch (1925-2002) is often linked to the founding of the New York School poets in the 1950s, a group that includes John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and Barbara Guest. The seemingly spontaneous, cosmopolitan and exuberant poetry he wrote helped define not only characteristics of the New York School, but Koch’s work in New York City public schools.

“I was onto this new way of writing that I could tell people about, and help them to write, give them feelings of power, confidence, excitement,” Koch told Teachers & Writers Collaborative in an interview. Often, getting students to feel this excitement involved opening them up to poetry in the first place, which initially proved difficult.  "A lot of the best writers in that school already hated poetry,” Koch said, when talking about his work at P.S. 61, where he started teaching in 1968. He blamed some of this hatred on what he called “essay-poems,” poetry that was overly academic and that contained obligatory allusions to figures like Helen of Troy or Cuchulain. Koch wanted to make language fresh and concrete for his students. (more...)

Your students have been working hard to prep for the ELA tests.  Reward them with a springtime poetry program that will recharge their imaginations and remind them that writing can be deeply satisfying and (wait for it...wait for it...) FUN. 

A T&W poetry program will not only celebrate Poetry Month right, but it will also increase your students' participation in class and their motivation for writing. 

Take a look at the T&W poetry programs that are already underway:

• With funding from the New York Community Trust's "Beyond Teaching to the Test" initiative, T&W has partnered with CFN #534 to implement several poetry writing programs in middle school social studies and science classrooms.
• Students at Booker T. Washington (054M) are writing poetry as it relates to the American Revolution with one T&W writer.
• Two T&W writers are leading poetry workshops with first and second graders at Adolph Ochs (111M).
• Spoken word and performance poetry are getting shout-outs at Liberty Partnerships Program/LaGuardia Community College and at VISIONS @ Selis Manor. 
• T&W writers have been teaching poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and even bookmaking in Gifted & Talented programs at four schools: Mamie Fay (122Q), Louis Marshall (276K), Adam Clayton Powell (153M), and Helen Keller (153X).
• At the Newbridge Road School in North Bellmore, New York, one T&W poet is in his sixth year of residence.
• And after our successful pilot program at two schools last year, T&W and the Center for the Art of Translation have trained additional writers in  Poetry Inside Out, a curriculum that increases students' ELA skills through translation and exploration of world literature.

To learn more about the details and costs of our student programs, contact us at 212-691-6590 or workshops@twc.org today!

April brings us National Poetry Month,and to mark the
occasion the spring Issue of Teachers & Writers Magazine 
features three exciting new exercises for bringing poetry 
to the elementary, middle, and high school classroom.
Written by experienced teaching artists, these exercises offer suggestions for using contemporary poems to inspire fresh writing from students. This week we feature Sarah Dohrmann's exercise, inspired by Ross Gay's poem, "The Truth."

Three Classroom Writing Exercises for National Poetry Month
Three:

Because Poems:Teaching Ross Gay's "The Truth"
to Middle and High School Students

Sarah Dohrmann

At the age of 14 my first “real” job was at Wendy’s. I worked the potato ovens for several weeks until I burned my hand badly. I was then switched over to cashier, but when my drawer was forty bucks short one day, I was demoted to sweeping up the dining area. This presented another problem in the form of a school nemesis who’d come into the restaurant, order French fries, sit in the dining room, and toss her fries one-by-one onto the floor so she could watch me sweep each one with a broom into a long-handled dustpan that I could never seem to hold right.

At the same time I worked at Wendy’s, my family was about nine years into a disperate attempt to patch itself together after my mother’s death. The patching process is still underway these thirty-odd years later, because recovery is slow when no one talks about loss. We prefer to mime our way through innuendo and pain, making our non-actions as weighted and important as anything we might actually say or do.

Perhaps it’s my personal background, then, that first drew me to Ross Gay’s poem “The Truth”, which appears in his first collection, called Against Which:

The Truth

          Ross Gay

Because he was 38, because this
was his second job, because
he had two daughters, because his hands
looked like my father’s, because at 7
he would walk to the furniture warehouse,
unload trucks ‘til 3 AM, because I
was fourteen and training him, because he made
$3.75 an hour, because he had a wife
to look in the face, because
he acted like he respected me,
because he was sick and would not call out
I didn’t blink when the water
dropped from his nose
into the onion’s perfectly circular
mouth on the Whopper Jr.
I coached him through preparing.
I did not blink.
Tell me this didn’t happen.
I dare you.

(From Against Which by Ross Gay (CavanKerry Press, Ltd. 2006). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

Like all poems we choose to teach, Gay’s poem moved me. It moved me not because of what the narrator chooses to do, but because of what he chooses not to do. I liked that it is a humble reflection, and that the narrator made a choice that others may not approve of. And I liked the repetition of the word “because,” how it lilted me along until I came to a full-stop of truth. Naturally I also liked that the narrator is fourteen years old, working at a fast food restaurant just like I once did—only this narrator is the better version of me, the less narcissistic one capable of thinking beyond his own discomforts while he works at a job he probably doesn’t love. (more...)

April brings us National Poetry Month,
and to mark the occasion the spring Issue of
Teachers & Writers Magazine features
three exciting new exercises for bringing poetry
to the elementary, middle, and high school
classroom. Written by experienced teaching artists,
these exercises offer suggestions for using
contemporary poems to inspire fresh writing from
students. This week we feature Bushra Rehman's
exercise, inspired by the poems of Ishle Yi Park.

Three Classroom Writing Exercises for National Poetry Month
Two:

Rosebuds Folded Over in Sleep:
Teaching the Sonnets of Ishle Yi Park to High School Students

Bushra Rehman

 “Peer closer: a soul and a soul. He folds over her like a rosebud in sleep.”
 ~ Ishle Yi Park

How to bring a love of sonnets to my high school students? Easy. I was a student, once upon a time in the old hip-hop life of Queens, and I am armed with sonnets so fierce that whenever I’ve taught them, students are unable to resist. I teach the work of Ishle Yi Park, a Korean-American woman who was a touring cast member of Def Poetry Jam and whose book, The Temperature of This Water, was the winner of the pen America Beyond Margins Award. The poems I teach are drawn from Angel & Hannah: A Love Story in Sonnets, published alongside Park’s performance in the 2006 Hip Hop Theater Festival. They center on what is still forbidden for most students: interracial teenage love.

As the sound of a fight on a playground makes the ground electric, Park’s poems shock and excite students, spur them to keep reading. Her sonnets trace the trajectory of love between Angel, a Puerto Rican boy from Brooklyn and Hannah, a Korean-American girl from Queens. I prefer to teach the entire book, but when short on time, I choose the following three poems as touchstones: “Quinceañera Sonnet,” “Wind Sonnet,” and “Gold Hoop Sonnet.”  ( “Quinceañera Sonnet,” “Wind Sonnet,” and “Gold Hoop Sonnet” all reprinted with permission of Ishle Yi Park)   (more...)

April brings us National Poetry Month, and to mark the occasion the spring Issue of Teachers & Writers Magazine features three exciting new exercises for bringing poetry to the elementary, middle, and high school classroom.  Written by experienced teaching artists, these exercises offer suggestions for using contemporary poems to inspire fresh writing from students.  This week we feature Jane LeCroy's exercise, based on a poem by May Swenson.

Three Classroom Writing Exercises for National Poetry Month

One:

Exercising the Imagination:
Teaching May Swenson’s “Cardinal Ideograms” to Elementary School Students

Jane LeCroy

‘‘Cardinal Ideograms” by May Swenson is a poem that works like a puzzle; experimental in form and appearance, it engages the imagination by inspiring playful connections with the familiar. Poetry is so much about the play of language leading one to see things in a new way. A successful poem, like Swenson’s, creates space for new thoughts to emerge, expanding our world and our thinking. Students in a classroom setting generally focus on being correct; this impulse is often detrimental to experimentation and creativity. Here is an excellent exercise in playing with language that can encourage students to imagine and take risks as writers, and to see things in a new way.

I introduce “Cardinal Ideograms” by inviting the students to think of it like a game. “Who can figure out the game of this poem? I know you won’t know the meaning of every word but you can figure out what the poet is playing with. Listen and look closely, follow along as I read, and see if you can figure it out.” I read aloud, without clarifying any of the vocabulary so that the students have a raw experience with the text, giving them a chance to discover what is happening within it themselves. It’s a great way to get them to take responsibility for interacting with the poem, and it builds confidence in kids when they discern meaning from a text without having a complete grasp of every word in it. (more...)

miss rosie
by Lucille Clifton

when I watch you
wrapped up like garbage
sitting, surrounded by the smell
of too old potato peels
or
when I watch you
in your old man's shoes
with the little toe cut out
sitting, waiting for your mind
like next week's grocery
I say
when I watch you
you wet brown bag of a woman
who used to be the best looking gal inGeorgia
used to be called the Georgia Rose
I stand up
through your destruction
I stand up

It’s hard to escape “miss rosie.” She is everywhere just as the speaker is everywhere. We might recognize our own gaze in the watchful, judgmental, and direct gaze of the speaker who notices how this poor woman wears “old man’s shoes/with the little toe cut out.” In the character of miss rosie, as she is brought to life through startling and precise images, similes and metaphors, we might see the homeless woman on the street corner—perhaps even our mothers, aunts, and grandmothers. Who is the woman being watched? What might it mean to watch a person you once knew as beautiful and loved become a “wet brown bag of a woman”? How common, insulting, and necessary is this urge to stand up through someone else’s destruction? Does responsibility play a role in this poem?

I have heard students call this poem sad, disrespectful, angering, powerful, true, and false. After discussing our personal responses to “miss rosie,” I often ask my students to consider somebody they have observed closely and to try writing their own “miss rosie” poems for or about that person. Students work to paint a picture with words of somebody they either know personally or have seen frequently. The exercise becomes an engaged character study. I ask them to use similes and metaphors while addressing that person directly. As writers, they are expected to be both observers and communicators, aware of their relationship with the person they choose to portray. How will they use the literary tools of imagery, simile and metaphor to breath life and color into their subject? What do they want to say to the person of their choice?

Clifton’s careful and short line breaks—how she moves the poem along—is a skill we discuss. Usually, students findClifton’s lack of punctuation to be freeing and empowering, as the rules of grammar clearly don’t apply to the rules, or anti-rules, of poetry. I encourage students to followClifton’s form as they explore their own images, tones, and subjects. The slow movement of this poem and the ways in which each line leads us, painfully, to the next, is something to be studied. As a result, many students begin their poems with the words “when I watch you” and stay close toClifton’s form, as they find a personal path in the luminous dark. (more...)

I believe most lesson plans can be tweaked to fit writers at all levels. This idea came to me a decade ago while getting an MFA in Creative Writing.

During a workshop, Honor Moore, author of The Bishop’s Daughter, gave us a writing prompt and quickly added: “Don’t forget to use descriptive detail. Appeal to all five senses.” 

I found her words humbling, because hours earlier I’d conveyed them to twelfth graders. Yet the message can’t be repeated often enough as many writers, young and not so young, often share only what they see, omitting the other senses.

Fast forward to today, and I just finished teaching the use of sensory details to second- through fifth-graders whose skills vary depending on their age and placement in general education or a gifted and talented program.

The challenge: How to adapt one lesson plan to fit many needs?

With younger students (say first- through third-graders), I suggest spending a lot of time brainstorming, followed by creating a group description of their classroom.

As inspiration, I offer passages from The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, and Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings. (more...)

There are few things more comforting than committing a poem to memory. To know that if everything around you suddenly crumbled, you would have—safely tucked in the deepest part of your heart—Ruth Stone’s “Mantra” or Robert Frost’s “Snowy Evening” is to understand that, eventually, everything will be okay. Because of this, I begin every poetry workshop I teach by having students memorize Langston Hughes’s “Dreams”:

Hold fast to dreams

For if dreams die

Life is a broken-winged bird

That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams

For when dreams go

Life is a barren field

Frozen with snow.

This tiny two-stanza poem replete with poor bird and cold, barren field has proven to be accessible to people of all ages and abilities. Years ago when I was working with children with autism who were mostly nonverbal, I found that, with the use of simple hand gestures and repeated motions, the children were able to “memorize” the poem themselves. Their sense of accomplishment in “performing” the poem for others never failed to delight me or their classroom teachers.

The hand gestures are straightforward: a quick clasping of the hands for “hold fast,” followed by a waving of the fingers at the temples for “dreams.” You can surely imagine what “die” looks like (and how funny it can be to enact), as well as, that limp arm of the “broken-winged bird that cannot fly.” “Life” is the most exciting: a shooting-up of the arm into the sky, and a pronouncement of “Life,” often followed by my request to “Say it like you mean it,” which leads to an even faster extension of the arm and an even louder saying of “Life!!!”

Just this past Tuesday, I taught this poem to a group of three-year-olds at my daughter’s preschool.  I was amazed not only by how quickly they were able to take it in but also by how much they grasped it on a conceptual level. “Life without dreams,” I explained to them, “is like a bird that can’t fly. It would be like…like what?” I urged them. “A ballerina,” Zoe said, and then she frowned a little as she went on: “A ballerina that can’t dance.” And yet, I told them, all we have to do—so we can dance and dance and dance!—is hold fast to our dreams.

Last winter, walking down the street in Brooklyn late one evening I ran into a classroom teacher that I hadn’t seen in years. “I still know the poem!” she said. “The poem?” I asked. “Dreams!” she said. “I still know it by heart. I say it to myself over and over on the subway sometimes!”

Imagine if that’s what everyone on the subway was doing—not going over the endless to-do list or mentally drafting out yet another e-mail or staring blankly at the rows and rows of advertisements, but instead, reciting poems that they’ve carried around in their hearts for years—oh, what a different city it would be!

-Nicole Callihan

Nicole Callihan writes poems, stories, and essays, and has been a T&W teaching artist since 1998.  You can read more about Nicole here.

Welcome to the Teachers & Writers Collaborative blog, where you’ll find discussions, insights, and reflections from the T&W community.

Our blog will feature lesson plans for teaching the craft of writing to children and adults in schools and communities; student writers’ poetry and prose; sample articles from Teachers & Writers Magazine, a print quarterly that’s winner of 10 Educational Press Awards for Excellence; T&W news and events; writing prompts, Haiku interviews, and a compelling history of T&W’s early writers such as June Jordan, Kenneth Koch, Anne Sexton, Herbert Kohl, and many others.

And who knows what else? Like all good writing projects, our blog is a living experiment.

As part of the T&W community, we encourage you to read, comment, read, respond, write a few lines of poetry, start your next book project, learn some great teaching ideas and expand upon them as you see fit for your own writing practice, for your students, or your writing group. We look forward to hearing from you!

Eliciting Playfulness and the Unexpected: Teaching the Poems of Kenneth Koch

Joanna Fuhrman

In addition to being a central member of the group of poets whose surreal, funny, and chatty poems came to be labeled “New York School,” Kenneth Koch (1925–2002) is well known as an innovator in teaching poetry writing to children. My pedagogy, like that of many poets who teach in elementary and high schools, has been deeply influenced by Koch’s writing about teaching poetry. In his books, Wishes, Lies and Dreams and Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? Koch explains his method: Students will read a poem, and then use a structural element in the poem as a starting point for their own work. For example, after reading Williams Carlos Williams’ poem “This is Just to Say” (in which the speaker says he is sorry for eating the plums in the icebox, but then brags, “they were delicious/so sweet/ and so cold”), (more...)