As we approach the end of the Poetry Center's residency at Skinner Classical school, the students and I took advantage of the moment of reflection; not just on the year, but on their own great histories. We read the poem On Turning Ten, by Billy Collins; a poem that honors the memories we already have of our lives while we are still young people. It praises the history we already possess, and considers how a young person's past informs and shapes who he or she already is.

Welcome Back!  During this lesson, the students and I took the opportunity to think about the beauty that we see in the world, and especially in small things. Studying imagism, which is a minimalist form of poetry that favors precise imagry and clear, plain language, we looked at Ezra Pound's two line poem "In a Station of the Metro", which, in it's entirity, reads like this:

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Welcome back! During this lesson, students continued to explore the power of descriptive language to evoke emotion and relate the mood of a setting. We read an excerpt of T.S. Elliot's Poem Preludes, which conveys the mood of a dreary neighborhood in the rain at lamp-lighting time. Without ever saying "the neighborhood was sad" or "lonely", Elliot relates the emotion of the place by sharing a series of images: "...the burnt-out ends of smoky days. And now a gusty shower wraps the grimy scraps of withered leaves about your feet...".

Welcome back! This week at Skinner, the students and I read an excerpt from the poem Flare, by the great Mary Oliver. In her poem, Oliver recalls the sights, sounds, smells and general feeling of an empty barn on her grandfather's farm; a place where she liked to be alone. She used sensory details to bring us there, and also utilized the "second person", or You, to place the memory directly in our hands. I invited the students to write poems that welcome the reader into their own alone place...

Welcome back! In Poetry class before the spring break, we read a poem rich in sensory detail, From Blossoms, by Li-Young Lee, about the memory of a joyful day when Lee ate peaches bought from a road-side stand. We examined the author's use of specific images and detailed description to evoke emotion and relate a memory. We also listened to the voice of the poem, which is more narrative than others we have read so far. I invited students to write a poem about a food memory that they have... a time when emotional associations are connected with the memory of a certain food...

Thanks for coming back! This past week, the 2nd grade poets read The Delight Song of Tsoai-Talee, by Navarre Scott Momaday, which is a jubilant meditation on the connectedness of things. We looked at this poem as an example of someone using metaphor to communicate the essential feeling of something. A step beyond simile or comparison, metaphor lets a writer relate a quality of something by saying that it IS something else.

Welcome back! The 3rd graders at Skinner wrote wonderful poems last week, following a discussion about the use of simile- or comparison- in poetry. The day's poem was the very vivid Sweet Like a Crow, by Michael Ondaatje, in which the author plainly conveys the character and quality of a person's voice without ever using adjectives to describe it. He does this by comparing it to a number of specific, detailed images and situations... "Your voice sounds like a scorpion being pushed through a glass tube...". I invited the students to write poems sharing a quality of someone they know well...

Welcome back to the Skinner Student Poetry Blog!  Last week, we used two-time Poet Laureate, Billy Collins', poem Introduction to Poetry as a point of departure for talking about the freedom and play that poetry writing invites, and also for looking at at some practical tools we have at our disposal. We are noticing that-- while every poem can be different-- line and stanza are terms we can always use to recognize a poem's unique arrangement of words. We talked about how words in poems (unlike many other forms of writing) may be arranged like objects, or used to create an image on a page.

Hello!  Welcome to Skinner Classical School's 3rd Grade Poetry Blog! The Poetry Center of Chicago's Hands on Stanza's residency continues this year with Ms. Howlett, Ms. Rupp, and Ms. Getting's classrooms. The residency is designed to give the 3rd grade classes a special opportunity to study poetry more deeply and to have their own poems published here throughout the second half of the school year. It is being my pleasure to work with the 3rd graders already.

On our first day of class the students and I read the poem Driftwood by Harold Witter Bynner.

On our last writing day, the students and I read the poem On Turning Ten, by Billy Collins. read more »