Poetry Commons^™

A Poet’S Cento: Reflecting On The Written Word Through Writing, Nicole Trackman

Understanding Poetry

Students will create their own cento using lines from poetry discussed in class during a poetry unit. In a short analysis, students reflect on the lines of poetry that they chose to include as well as their process as a poet. This lesson allows the students to become even more familiar with their previously studied work while working through the writing process as an author. The short reflective analysis prompts students to be metacognative about their process and product. This lesson is best used at the end of a poetry unit.

Explicating Poetry: Shakespeare's Sonnet 46, Adam Kotlarczyk

Understanding Poetry

The term “explication” comes from a Latin participle of explico, which means to “unfold” or “disentangle.” The term is often applied to philosophy and to literature; in literature, it has become a procedure very important to New Criticism. In the process of explication, a reader forges a detailed analysis of the structural and figurative components within a work, focusing on ambiguities, multiple possibilities of interpretation, and interrelationships between various elements of the text.

This lesson introduces students to explication through the reading of a complex poem, practice explicating it as a class, and reading a model explication about the poem. …

Name That Invention: Examining Connotation And Sound, Dan Gleason

Understanding Poetry

This exercise engages students with questions of diction, connotation, and sound patterns. Students discuss the field of product branding, and learn how much certain product names (e.g., Blackberry, Pentium, Swiffer) were considered in light their denotative, connotative, and aural elements. Then, in groups, students devise product names for four imagined products; afterward, as a class they debate the virtues of each name rate and choose a winner for each product. Such close attention to meanings, buried implications, and sound cues encourages students to adopt a very poetic form of word analysis, a skill that transfers nicely to more literary areas.

America In Verse: The Laureate Project, Leah Kind, Dan Gleason, Erin Micklo, Margaret T. Cain

Understanding Poetry

The purpose of this project is to allow students to use their (developing) skills of poetic explication and close reading, combined with research and analysis, to discover and establish a solid case for a poet they will nominate as the next American Poet Laureate. Working in groups of 3-4, students will identify a published, living American poet who has not yet been designated a laureate. The project demands a wide array of skills as the students research bibliographic information on the poet: read and analyze the poet’s body of work and select one central poem to represent that poet; amass …

Imitism: Learning Imagism Through Imitation, Nicole Trackman

Understanding Poetry

Students will learn the components of Imagism through works of William Carlos Williams and D.H. Lawrence. As authors, students will demonstrate their understanding of this poetic movement through an imitation of either Williams’ poem “This is just to Say” or Lawrence’s poem “Green”.

Millie Dies In Style: Crafting Poems In Four Poetic Styles, Dan Gleason

Understanding Poetry

This exercise helps students learn about poetic style by challenging them to write poetry in different styles. To make stylistic differences most obvious, students write about the same topic in four different ways (casual, formal, depressing, whimsical). Students write poems of 4-10 lines in groups, and then they share their writings with each other. Nearly any topic may be chosen, but the topic should be a bit unusual; I like to use the tragic tale of Millie, a fictional family dog that dies suddenly by falling down an open well, to generate interest. The exercise is a fun activity that …