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.

Poetry slams!

Rap and spoken word are some of the greatest forms of poetry being written today. Students who proclaim that they hate poetry might change their minds when they realize that any words with a rhythm can be called poetry! Here is an example of one of these types of poems.

Note: There is significant swearing in this video; play with discretion. I think that sometimes swearing in literature and poetry makes a big impact that other words can't, but you have to make sure that your students understand why the poet chose the words they did and how the tone of the language contributes to the message in the poem.

It is so important that students understand the wide range of poetry - it's not just Robert Frost and Shakespeare! I think that students can really relate to poems like the ones in these videos because they are written with such raw emotion about themes that show up in everyone's lives.

Please have a poetry slam of some sort in your classroom; students can write their own poems, or they can bring in poems and learn about the art of performing them for an audience. You may be surprised by what some of your students come up with!

Poetry terms

There are two lists of poetry terms that I found that complement each other.

Although it is important for students to learn the definitions of these terms so that they will know what their teacher is referring to in future classes, it is not much fun to just memorize the definitions without applying them.

One way that I had my students apply the terms was by having them choose a poem from a list and present it to the class with two or three classmates, highlighting not just the meaning and rhythm of the poem, but the literary devices by which the poet achieved these effects. For the final test, I had the students analyze a poem for several things we had discussed in class, including labeling the literary devices they saw in the peom. In another section of the test, I gave them three more poems to read, a list of poetry terms, and a chart with three columns. They had to choose five terms from the box to write in the first column, write a short definition of each of the terms in the middle, column, and list an example of that term from one of the three poems in the third column.