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Back to BlogA Compact Guide to Teaching Living Poets

A Compact Guide to Teaching Living Poets

To commemorate National Poetry Month, plan how to teach living poets all year round with this guide.

This is the second installment of our National Poetry Month series. Check out Part 1, "Why Teach Poetry?"

 

“The best way to enjoy contemporary verse is simply to read it as though you were dipping into a magazine, listening to a news report, overhearing a conversation. Don't make it a big deal… simply thrill to the words or story.”

Michael Dirda, Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life

 

A middle school or high school female student reading a book of contemporary poetryAh, the bright, direct stare of a new poem. It is a thing unconcerned with the coziness of prose or the patience of a slow story. It is, as Michael Dirda reminds us, simply there, pure coiled energy, true to itself. 

Teaching contemporary poetry can feel cumbersome or uncertain. Squinting into its bright light to find meaning—Is that what it could mean? Is that what it does mean?—is an act of curious vulnerability. 

There is a growing movement to stay with this vulnerability, both with ourselves and with our middle school and high school students. The Teach Living Poets movement invites us and our students to sit in the thrill of new poems in order to discover what they reveal about our lives.

Let this compact guide to teaching living poets be a resource as you decide what poetry to explore with your secondary students. I hope the lists of contemporary poems below spark productive precarity and wonder that lingers.

Why Teach Living Poets?

 

Before we get to the poetry you might teach, let’s consider what contemporary poetry offers that classical poetry doesn’t. Contemporary poetry can serve our students in several ways:

  • It can echo the ideas of the past, inviting students to compare and contrast the ways that writers across generations use language and form to convey shared experiences and ponder ancient questions.
  • It can evolve the ideas of the canon, inviting students to analyze how today’s voices stretch and tangle the meanings of the works that have come before them. 
  • It can explode the past, using innovative modes and structures that allow students to examine the complexity, diversity, and urgency of their lived experiences. 

I invite you to wander this world of living poets with me. Consider including the following poems in your language arts curriculum to echo, evolve, or explode the ideas of your classroom online or in person.

Poems to Position Ourselves

A group of high school students standing with, with one student with a pride flag draped over their shoulders

Our values, views, and experiences are shaped by the ways our gender, race, class, location, and many other aspects of our identities interact with the world. Living poets assert these interactions without apology, inviting students to affirm the ways that their multilayered identities influence their experiences. Consider the following contemporary poems for your middle or high school classroom:

  • Clint Smith’s "Ode to the Only Black Kid in the Class" and Elizabeth Acevedo’s "Hair" unpack the dynamics of being Black in contexts that consider their Blackness a thing to be tamed or tokenized. 
  • Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s "Like Totally Whatever" questions the ways in which men control our language and “turn women into question marks.” Consider pairing it with Taylor Mali’s popular “Totally like whatever, you know,” 
  • Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s “On Listening to Your Teacher Take Attendance” and Idris Goodwin’s "Say My Name" bring courage and humor to the moments when we are made to feel different, inviting students to identify the stories that they return to when they’re feeling vulnerable.
  • Chen Chen’s ”I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party” and Ethan Smith’s  "A Letter to the Girl I Used to Be" explore the forgiveness and patience that their LGBTQ identities ask of them.
  • Denice Frohman’s "Accents"  and Eloisa Amezcua’s  "Teaching My Mother English Over the Phone" celebrate and struggle with the ways that English might be “too neat” to hold the wonders of their multilingual identities. 
  • Megan Falley’s ”Fat Girl”  and Shane Koyczan’s ”To This Day” convey the pain of being bullied for the size and shape of their bodies, and the resilience in balancing that pain with beauty.
  • Rudy Francisco’s "My Honest Poem" and Clint Smith’s ”Something You Should Know” serve as models that students can use to position themselves in the world through writing their own poems.
     

Poems to Break and Remake Form

 

A middle school or high school student sitting on grass with laptop, tablet, phone, and books, enjoying reading living poetsThe living poet’s workbench of tools has expanded from pen and paper to a broad collection of microphones, keyboards, social media apps, and animations. Their work draws upon the same literacies that students hone each day, allowing students to analyze how tools such as artwork, audio, or the time limits of TikTok videos mediate the meaning of a poet’s words. 

  • The tradition of spoken word poetry has a natural home on the Internet, a place where performance videos can easily be shared, curated, remixed, and replayed. Jonathan Williams’s "A System Not Meant for Me" and Hiwot Adilow’s ”My Name Is Hiwot” are powerful introductions to the ways in which performers use their bodies to inject emotion and build structure around their words. Button Poetry: a poetry media that showcases diverse and powerful voices.
  • Button Poetry offers a curation of Classroom-Friendly Performance Poetry for your students to explore further.
  • Poets such as Rupi Kaur and Nayyirah Waheed draw on the tradition of concrete poetry, using the squares, stickers, and slides of social media to influence the tone and update the form of their words. 
  • TED-Ed’s There's a Poem for That series and Jason Reynolds’s ”For Every One” use animation to add a layer of visual storytelling that transforms the experience of the written word.
     

Poems to Celebrate Diverse Interests

 

Today’s poems embrace the joys and confusions of our hobbies, our favorite subjects, and our wobbly journeys with technology. They invite our students to do the same—that is, to observe and to share the parts of their lives that feel fascinating, fun, or just plain goofy. Here are a few poems that do so:

  • Harry Baker’s “A love poem for lonely prime numbers” 
  • Marshall Davis Jones’s "Touchscreen"  and Phil Kaye’s "Before the Internet"
  • Scientific American’s regular column of poetry about science
     

Poems as Bridges

 
A high school student walking across a bridge towards the horizon

The examples shared here invite us not only to see poems as mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors, as coined by Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop, but also to see poems as bridges. Bridges to the storytellers of the past. Bridges to the pain and the joy that our peers experience. Bridges to the radical empathy of observing and writing about our own lives. 

Contemporary poems can also remove the bridge of translation that so commonly exists between teacher and student. They invite us to simply step on the path alongside our students, wondering and analyzing and also asserting, as the poet Shane Koyczan reminds us:

This is my voice. There are many like it. But this one is mine.
 
Teach Living Poet Amanda Gorman with Free Lesson Plans

Author

  • Megan Jensen
  • Director, Literacy Impact
  • Carnegie Learning, Inc.

Megan Jensen is a former reading specialist with experience developing K-12 writing instruction and blended professional development for adults across the United States, as well as literacy and library programming abroad. Her work continues to uphold her belief that every student can learn and that there is transformative power in supporting students in reading and writing about their worlds. She holds a B.A. in English from UCLA and an M.A. in International and Comparative Education from Teachers College, Columbia University.

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The examples shared here invite us not only to see poems as mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors, but also to see poems as bridges.

Megan Jensen

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