Like the after-Christmas sale, only with poems

So Poetry month is actually almost over, but here's my bibliography for it anyway (made for teachers at Woonsocket High School).

Top Websites for Teaching Poetry

Online Poetry Classroom
http://www.onlinepoetryclassroom.org/
This is a division of the Academy of American Poets (http://www.poets.org/) for educators. It has lesson plans, a list of the best poems to teach, and information about the how and why of poetry month. It’s linked to poets.org, so you can access short biographies, selected poems, audio, and critical essays on American poets and movements. You can also sign up for a poem-a-day e-mail for the month of April.

Library of Congress Poetry Page
http://www.loc.gov/poetry/
Check this site for online exhibits and webcasts that pair poetry with primary documents from the library of congress collections, as well as info about state and national poet laureates. Also check out the Poetry 180, a collection of new poems (“full-text available online!”) specifically selected for high school students by former laureate Billy Collins. With titles like “Fat is not a Fairy Tale,” “Cartoon Physics,” “Hate Poem,” and “The Death of Santa Claus,” these poems defy expectations.

The Poetry Foundation
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/
This is the U.S. Mecca of poetry. Click on “Children” in the top left menu box to get lesson plans designed by none other than Maya Angelou, as well as reviews of children’s poetry collections, and an archive of poems organized by age and theme (if you don’t see it, click on “Poetry Tool” in the Archive menu box).

Poetry Out Loud: National Recitation Project
http://www.poetryoutloud.org/
This is the site of a national contest that challenges students to perform poetry –not just read it. Search the archive using keywords to find full-text of brilliant poems for reading out loud. There’s also audio of some poems read by actors like Anthony Hopkins and James Earl Jones. Go to the teacher’s guide for information about having a recitation contest in the classroom, as well as a few lesson plans.

Slam Poetry on Web English Teacher
http://www.webenglishteacher.com/poetryslam.html
This site links to FAQs, history, and how-to. If you already know a little about slam poetry, proceed straight to http://www.poetryslam.com/ and go to the poets gallery to read about past winners and (more importantly) listen to mp3s of them slamming. You can also visit the related blog, http://www.livepoets.com/, to hear more.

PBS News Hour Special on Poetry
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/poetry/
If you’re looking for some short and sweet introductory essays for your students to read, this is the place. Just a few paragraphs long, these essays on appreciating poetry use simple language and striking imagery—just like the medium they describe.

Will this poem make me look fat?

Last night I watched a tape of myself introducing a poetry project to students at Woonsocket High School. (This is for my beginning teacher portfolio. I don't just tape myself for kicks.) Tough crowd. It actually looks like I'm presenting to a crowd of comatose car crash victims. But I did eventually get them reading poems and looking for material for their project--mostly by pretending to be grading them when really I was just writing their names down on a random piece of paper with a dry erase marker.

Anyway, I collected citations for the poems they looked at and, after analyzing the data using an ineffable methodology, I came to these conclusions:

High school students ...

• basically think poetry should sound like poetry (in other words, rhyme).
• still like nonsense poems.
• are shocked by poems with "swear words" or references to body fluids. Body parts are OK, just not fluids.
• like poems written by other teenagers and are more likely to read these poems critically.
• love the Tupac, Aaliyah, and Atwone Fisher collections.
• are surprised to find poems about things like going to the pool, talking on the phone, skipping class, and accidentally having sex.
• like their poems to be certified as "good" by experts--hence the popularity of Shakespeare, Longfellow, Neruda, and Robert Frost.
• think that poems are written for specific groups of people. There are poems for girls, for children, for men (see Rudyard Kipling), for English majors, for gay people, for black people, and for old people. And if you try to give a high school student a collection of poems that's not "famous, overused, and misunderstood poems that rhyme, by old white men, a few women, and maybe some Rainer Maria Rilke," he has to check and make sure it falls in the right category--or he will actually give you some obvious piece of information, such as, "But I'm not a girl," or "I'm not Asian" (you need to be Asian to read haiku? really?).
• prefer writing poetry to reading it. (I really want to know why it occurs to them to write poetry when they generally refuse to read it. Is the desire to write poetry something universal and subconscious? Does it meet a basic human need? Do people figure out how to do it the way they figure out how to have sex, even without experience or instructions, even if they were raised by wolves?)
• are afraid to read poems out loud.
• have a strong sense of ownership toward poems they can relate to. They'll tell you "that's my poem," the way they tell the DJ, their friends, or their car radio, "that's my song!"
• are most receptive to poems that have appeared in films.

When you think about it, poetry actually taps into one of adolescents' greatest fears: the fear of being tricked into confessing something embarrassing. Poetry has all these inside jokes, allusions, metaphors, euphemisms, and double entendres. When students choose poems to read in front of the class, they want to be sure they're not accidentally communicating something embarrassing.

It's like when someone goes, "what is that under there?" and you go, "under where?" and they go, "You just said underwear!" I mean, that's the elementary school version. If you're in high school, they'll find some way to get you to admit that you only have one testicle or you're giving fellatio to your math teacher. And I think high school students are afraid that these poems are going to trick them in the same way. They're not comfortable with ambiguity, and that's why I probably shouldn't have used this poem as an example.