All posts in Taft

Shelter- In Poems #2: ‘There is no movie’

As we all shelter-in-place, students at Taft Freshman Academy continue to generate beautiful poems via E-Learning. This week’s poems are inspired by ‘Quiet Night Thoughts’ by Li Po. Quiet Night Thoughts by Li Po […]

Shelter-In Poems Series: #1 ‘There Are Monsters Nearby’

As we all shelter-in-place, students at Taft Freshman Academy continue to generate beautiful poems via E-Learning. This week’s poems are inspired by ‘Because’ by Greek poet, Yannis Ritsos. Lesson Note: ‘In a time of […]

‘…Jorge here, Jorge there’ & ‘I used to live in Jordan…’: Journey Poems in Two Styles

9th Grade students explored the literary device of repetition through a poem by Phil Kaye of the same name. 7th Grade students crafted poems using personification after reading Frank O’Hara’s, A True Account of […]

‘When we made our/dream houses’: School Daze

Students read Peggy Trojan’s deceptively simple poem, Noon Hour. We talked about the two-word title, the two stanza poem, short lines, putting big ideas into small containers, empathy, marginalized characters, and the one period […]

‘Disappear’: Graduation Poems

8th-grade students looked forward and 9th-grade students looked back (respectively) before writing their own poems about the act of ‘putting away’ and ‘looking forward’ as the speaker did in Nate Marshall’s poem, ‘the last […]

‘It was like I was sleeping/But I noticed it.’ Meditation Poems

Students participated in a 10- minute creative writing meditation and breathing exercise. I read them “I Close My Eyes’ by David Ignatow. After the meditation, they were asked to write whatever came to mind. […]

Blackout Poetry

Blackout Poetry: A blackout poem is when a poet takes a marker (usually black marker) to already established text–like in a newspaper–and starts redacting words until a poem is formed. The key thing with […]

Repetition

In the last session, we explored the powerful device of Repetition in Phil Kaye’s poem of the same name. Some poems in our workshop are ‘after’ Kaye’s work. Lesson Note: Writer/Performer Anna Deavere Smith […]

Fabled

Students created as well as performed their own group pieces of fractured fables and fairy tales after reading ‘aesop revised by archy’ by don marquis, where a cockroach takes a stab at putting his […]

‘she looks like a pool/ full sadness and doubt’: Well Traveled

We took a look at Richard Blanco’s prose/mix poem about missed destinations, We Are Not Going To Malta. Students were then given travel brochures exhibiting lush locales (decidedly not always depicting reality), and asked […]

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I’M FROM THE CITY LIGHTS / STREAMING OUT IN THE NIGHT / AND HUGE SKYSCRAPERS / TOWERING OVER THE LAKE – MELISSA E., 7TH GRADE POET