Allen Ginsberg!

Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg is one of the most famous Beat poets, poets who questioned the social and ethical norms of the 1950s. They were rebels, and the poetry they wrote reflects the attitudes of the Beat movement. Although his poems are filled with disturbing images and borderline-racist comments, Ginsberg's tone and the messages that he conveyed through his poetry are essential to any discussion of poetry.

When I taught Ginsberg, I used the first 8 stanzas of his poem "Howl" because there wasn't much questionable material in them - if you're uncomfortable with reading some of the content in his poems, just use the cleaner parts (his poems are too long to read as wholes anyway :) ).

Copyright issues for teachers

Fair use rules apply to teachers who want to make copies of poems and other educational material to show to the class and to use in handouts. Also, in general, anything that is over 50 years old is public domain, so many of the poems you want to use are old enough that you can copy the whole thing and not need copyright permission.

Sherman Alexie!

Sherman Alexie

Sherman Alexie addresses issues of race and Native American identity without sounding preachy. Students love his work because it is easy to read and speaks in a voice that they can relate to, no matter what their ethnicity.

"How to Write the Great American Indian Novel" is a sarcastic poem that challenges racial stereotypes through sarcasm.


"Evolution" is about the power that white people used to take advantage of Native Americans and how there is still an unbalance of power in our country.


"On the Amtrak from Boston to New York City" talks about how the history of Native Americans is often ignored.

Choral poems

This Web site is great for getting started with reading poetry chorally. The link on the left called "Poetry Theater" turns the poems from the "School Poems" icon on the home page into poems for more than one reader.

Almost any poem can be read chorally, and it might be interesting to have students form groups and then give each group the same poem to break up into parts and read aloud in front of the class. A discussion about interpreting poems could follow.

There are many Web sites with choral reading resources and definitions of different types of choral reading.

Random Words!

I just found a very interesting Web site called the Random Word Generator. There are many ways you could use this, including generating a random word and then basing a poem off of it, or using it more like a Mad Lib and filling in key words of well-know or original poems to make the poem say something different.

You could connect this exercise with the poem "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carroll. If one of your goals is to teach your class grammar, you could make it more fun by giving the class some basic definitions of the parts of speech and then (either as a class, in groups, or individually) figuring out what part of speech each of the nonsense words in the poem is.