Monthly Archives: April 2013

Here is a simple idea for getting your classroom thinking and talking about poetry.  The objective is to develop a daily practice of using poetry in the classroom that will build student competence in reading comprehension and in drawing inferences from written material.

LESSON PLAN: Recipe for a Simple Start Poem of the Week by Georgia A. Popoff

Anticipated Time: One poem per week, five to ten minutes daily

Check out the T&W archives in our Digital Resource Center for this article and other great resources!

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by Wisotsky

5th grade

What if the statue of liberty were reinvented?

Would it hold a hot dog?

Would we be able to see it in the fog?

Would it be wearing a dress

Would it be fashionable to impress?

Would it look like a Woman?

Would it look like someone

hailing a yellow cab?

Would it still be holding a tab?

Or would it be listening to an ipod

would we even find that odd?

Would it be crowded by other statues

on the cross town bus

trying to ignore all of us?

Would it be taller than

the Brooklyn Bridge?

Would it have a bronze image?

Would it have a diamond crown

Could it see from downtown?

Would it speak Spanish, Russian,

Japanese and Portuguese?

CROSSING BOUNDARIES: Joanna Fuhrman, Linda Morel, and J. Kathleen White

Join Teachers & Writers Collaborative for a multidisciplinary evening of images, words, and music from T&W writers Joanna Fuhrman, Linda Morel, and J. Kathleen White.

Tuesday, April 23, 2013 // Doors open at 6:30, Reading starts at 7:00

Bechtel Prize Essay: The tree project  

Looking for a poem to write? Maybe start by asking: What is a tree? “A tree is a lollipop of God!” and “A tree is a pigeon hotel” are just two possible answers to this question. Sam Swope was a writer-in-residence for two years with a group of children from 3^rd to 5^th grade. The students had immigrated to NYC from over 20 different countries and together they took on The Tree Project. In an attempt to cultivate their individual poetic passions, they were asked to write a list poem about trees. The responses the students gave during this project branched outwards and inwards in numerous directions, reflecting the relationship between their inner lives, outer lives and the stuff poems are made from. Sam Swope won the Bechtel Prize for this essay in 2004.  He remains dedicated and active in the engagement of children’s creativity; his book, “The Araboolies of Liberty Street” has been featured in numerous school plays and is even available in the form of an opera.

Check out our Digital Resource Center for this Bechtel-winning essay and many other great articles from our archives!

I Am New York, a poetry anthology about New York City, written by library workshop participants across the five boroughs, has been published and we're celebrating!  Here is part of our Brooklyn contingent:

Discussing the relationship between the dramatic monologue and poetry, Bob Hicok interrogates our assumptions about what constitutes “honesty” in narrative poetry, versus the simultaneous permission and assumption of “assumed identity” in dramatic monologue. “…it's hard not to think of all poems as dramatic monologues. By and large, we accept the notion of the self as a fiction, a construction that is not reliable, that shifts and which the individual, the self, offers with motives that vary. With this in mind, the dramatic monologue strikes me as honest about how much of this stuff is made up, how much we write what we want to write, how fundamentally we're constructing identities in our poems.” He discusses the poem as dramatic monologue as a forum for constructing identity, for filling the voids in our stories, for using language, as it is words and not the thing described itself as an inherent construction, explaining, “That may be the strongest impulse behind imagination: to construct the willed, the wanted world.”

If you're interested in discussing the use of “persona poems” and what constitutes an assumed character or identity in poetry and/or playwriting in your classroom, see the article in our Digital Resource Center titled "Other Bodies to Wear, Other Lives to Use: Bob Hicok on the Dramatic Monologue," by Daniel Godston, for Teachers & Writers Magazine.