Sometimes I begin with Billy Collins’s “Introduction to Poetry,” a wonderful poem about what a poem can do, what a poem can be, and what happens when students try to torture meaning out of one. The piece is a good place to start — my kids enjoy drawing images of mice running through or water skiing across poems — and it’s funny. But since I have promised a structured approach, it’s time to deliver the goods.

Here’s where I’m tempted to share with you all the pearls I’ve borrowed over the years, but in all honesty it’s more important to fit your approach to your students. Once I had the class help me come up with an anagram of poetic terms: WRIST (W for word choice. R for rhythm and rhyme. I for imagery. S for sounds and structure. T for tone.). Despite there being no M for metaphor, it worked well.

With other classes, I’ve drawn from Molly Peacock’s “Three Systems of a Poem” (the second chapter of How to Read a Poem…and Start a Poetry Circle). She breaks poems down into their lines, where to find the poem’s music; the sentence, where to find the poem’s meaning or story; and the image, where to find the poet’s vision. In short, I try to let my students’ experiences guide my teaching so that it will complement what they already know about poetry and give them tools they can use immediately.

In the last few years, I’ve been starting my freshmen with ballads. The form is musical, the poems tell exciting stories, and the imagery is challenging but not daunting. The first time we read a ballad as a class, our goal is simply to enjoy the piece and form an initial impression. The second time through I ask students to explain the poem’s story and come up with a theory about how that story is being told. (Does the ballad use humor or horror to make its point? Do variations in the refrain reveal something about the character?) And now the heavy lifting starts: it’s time to go through the poem a third time, carefully, and test our theory by looking at evidence from the text and any of the techniques or “moves” used by the poet.

Okay, in reality you can’t always read a poem three times. Still, the approach — to develop a first impression, generate a theory, and demonstrate your theory through close analysis — models purposeful reading habits and stresses the idea that a poem’s meaning, as well as its beauty, doesn’t always emerge the first time through.

Tools and Resources

We have shelves of poetry anthologies in our bookroom, but I have students read from photocopies, so they can annotate, ask and answer questions of poems, identify exciting images, highlight the poetic elements they recognize, and even take class notes on their own copies. Photocopies can be turned in and assessed, and I can walk around the room and easily get a sense of my students’ effort and understanding.

Projectors are also a great tool for learning about poetry. A class’s ability to see a poem’s structure seems to improve when all eyes are trained on the same image. Also, when working with a “big” poem on a wall, students’ collaborations and ideas become easier for all to see.

Audio and video presentations open yet another world to my students. On a site like Fooling with Words with Bill Moyers, kids can see video of poets reading their work at the Dodge Poetry Festival. When watching a “polished” reading, students can see if a performance matches their interpretations of a poem or clarifies its meaning. For example, when watching Lucille Clifton read her poem “won’t you celebrate with me” the viewer gains a greater understanding of her free-verse sonnet from the growing intensity of her voice and the broad smile she breaks into as her last lines turn the poem around.

The Favorite Poem Project is another great site. There people — some famous, most not — talk about poems and the impact they have on their lives. These short videos make the poems fresh and they provide good models for students who want to create their own videos.

The Poetry Foundation has a wonderful collection of audio files of poets reading. In one, Thomas Lux performs “To Help the Monkey Cross the River” and discusses how the piece blurs the distinction between metaphor and allegory. (This insight and this poem would add to any class studying either of these topics.)

Two other impressive sites are The Online NewsHour Poetry Series, where you can find videos of readings, biographical notes, links and lesson plans, and Poetry Everywhere, a site featuring video clips of readings by poets and celebrities and bios of well-known poets. In addition, Teachers’ Domain just launched its Poetry Everywhere Collection, which offers video from the Poetry Everywhere site accompanied by analysis suitable for teachers and students alike, links to background information, and lesson plans.

Keeping It Fun: Some Student Favorites

The following pieces are great for introducing poetry and talking about what poems can do:

• “Passwords” by William Stafford
• “Poetry” by Marianne Moore
• “Poetry” by Octavio Paz
• “On Reading Poems to a Senior Class at South High” by D. C. Berry

These are exciting poems that get kids thinking about the power or words and sounds:

• “Blackberry Eating” by Gallway Kinnell
• “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll
• “The Sound of Night” by Maxine Kumin

• “Remember” by Joy Harjo
• “Ego Tripping” by Nikki Giovanni
• “Dream Variations” by Langston Hughes

Some great poems about Man and Nature include:

• “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” by Walt Whitman
• “(Me up at does)” by e. e. cummings
• “Acquainted with the Night” by Robert Frost

Finally, I’ve had success with these amazing poems about family and the power of memory:

• “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden
• “Poem for My Father’s Ghost” by Mary Oliver
• “Digging” by Seamus Heaney
• “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke
• “Mnemonic” by Li-Young Lee

An Invitation

I realize I’ve said very little about student writing. In the past, my students have compiled anthologies, made illustrations and art books, written imitation pieces, response poems and straight-forward analytical essays. I’m happy to describe these projects in more detail, but I’d be interested in hearing from other teachers. What kinds of assessments and approaches to poetry have worked for you?