What is Poetry?
A poem is not a description, but an experience in itself.
Rhythm, sound, and connotation expan meaning; imagery heightens our sensory awareness; and apt figurative comparisons tempt our imaginations.
Poetry comes in two kinds: Narritive and lyrical. Narrative poetry is situational or storytelling poetry. Lyrical poetry is more like a song.
Activities For Teachers:
Poetry time!- Allow students to try their hand at creating poems that focus on their school years.
Title:
Swimming Upstream: Middle School Poems
Author:
Kristine George
Sub-Genre:
Poetry
A little bit about the book:
Middle school is a time in any adolescent’s life that is both confusing and intimidating. Beginning a new school year in a new school with new faces and new expectations can at times be overwhelming and difficult to bear. In SWIMMING UPSTREAM, Kristine O’Connell George creates an anthology of poems about the middle school struggles, successes, joys, and woes that a sixth grade girl encounters throughout the year. Chronologically moving from the first day of school to the last, the book highlights those important middle school moments that current middle schoolers can relate to and that solicit vivid memories in adult readers. Through her variety of poems, George hits the middle school nail right on the head! Read more...
Reviews:
A Kirkus Review- In simply worded verse, George (Little Dog and Duncan, not reviewed, etc.) writes of lockers and lunches, new friends and typical experiences, as she tracks a child's first year of middle school. She invites readers stepping across that (or any) threshold to embrace change: "Where do I fit? / Nothing is clear. / Can already tell / this will be / a jigsaw year" becomes, in "Long Jump," "I can do anything. / All I need / is a running start," and by "Last Day of School," "I am shining / from the inside out." Aside from a superficial poem about "the boy who's so tough / the one who scares us so much," plus a few passing anxieties, there's little sign of tears or fears here-just a growing sense of self-confidence, a promise of good things to come calculated, and apt, to buoy up young grammar school graduates. Illustrations not seen. (Poetry. 10-12)
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/kristine-oconnell-george/swimming-upstream/
Poem excerpts from the book Swimming Upstreams
Wake-Up Call
September morning, still remembering
last night's strange dream-
lost in an endless corridor,
opening a single door,
finding doezens more
not knowing
where
I'm going.
Before School
I spot them in the crowd,
three familiar faces from elementary school-
Sumako got braces!
Ryan is so much taller!
Zach looks just the same.
The warning bell rings,
everyone scatters
each of us going
our separate ways.
Activities For Teachers:
Poetry time!- Have students create their own poems about honeybees or any other insect.
Title:
Honeybee: Poems & Short Prose
Author:
Naomi Shihab Nye
Sub-Genre:
Poetry
A little bit about the book:
Honey. Beeswax. Pollinate. Hive. Colony. Work. Dance. Communicate. Industrious. Buzz. Sting. Cooperate. Where would we be without them? Where would we be without one another? In eighty-two poems and paragraphs, Naomi Shihab Nye alights on the essentials of our time—our loved ones, our dense air, our wars, our memories, our planet—and leaves us feeling curiously sweeter and profoundly soothed. Read more...
Reviews:
A Kirkus Review- Mixing memory, science and social issues, these selections vary widely in their accessibility and interest. As always, however, Nye's sheer joy in communicating, creativity and caring shine through. The focus shifts continually—from honeybees (champion communicators, threatened species) to the continuing violence in the Middle East to memories of childhood (her own and her son's) to specific situations in which people manage to transcend their differences. These shifts in tone, topic and format require both flexibility and concentration from readers. Rereading, however, is rewarded because of delicate connections and graceful phrases that might be missed the first time through. While much of the work is serious in tone, there are moments of humor also. Most likely to appeal to adults and older teens, this will be warmly welcomed by fans as it offers intriguing glimpses of Nye's personal beliefs and experience. (Poetry. 12+)
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/naomi-shihab-nye/honeybee/
Poem from Honeybee: Poems & Short Prose
A Stone So Big You Could Live in It
It happens in the woods
A laugh just pops out
It happens with a stone so big you could live in it
Round mounds of soil and stone
Blaze of bees around a single blooming branch
Path so quiet one foot answers the other
Charred ashes by Jericho Bay
Blue dots on trees lining the trail
Sudden sweetness of it
Someone was here before you
Didn't want you to get lost
Thank you
Someone
Thank you
Blue
Activities For Teachers:
Poetry time!- Have students write a poem narrated by a child in a chosen historical era.
Title:
The Year Of Goodbyes : A True Story Of Friendship, Family, And Farewells
Author:
Debbie Levy
Sub-Genre:
Poetry
A little bit about the book:
This book tells the true story of what happened to a 12-year-old girl named Jutta (Debbie Levy's mother) in 1938. Actual entries in a posiealbum (autograph book) serve as stepping stones in a crucial year in history, when people of Jewish ancestry in Germany and Austria were systematically stripped of their rights, subjected to violence, and arrested without cause. Jutta was one of the lucky ones who escaped to America before the rising tide of violence erupted into World War II and the tragedy of the Holocaust. Read more...
Reviews:
A Kirkus Review- Writing for modern readers about the Holocaust is fraught, and when children are the intended audience, the difficulties can be insurmountable. Levy meets the challenges admirably, partly because she had access to unique primary sources: Her mother’s autograph book, a poesiealbum, written by friends and family in Hamburg in 1938 and a diary from that same year, when she was 12, form a poignant and chilling basis for the true story of her family’s experiences. Each chapter is a translation of an album or diary entry followed by a poem that evokes sadness, despair, anger and longing to escape. The author’s introduction and afterword are integral to the work, as they explain some of the history and tell the fates of friends and family members—those who escaped and survived, those who “died at the hands of the Nazis” and those whose exact fate she was unable to discern. While writing as truthfully as the subject demands, she also spares young readers the gruesome details of those deaths. An immensely powerful experience that needs to be read with an adult. (Poetry/nonfiction. 10 & up)
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/debbie-levy/the-year-of-goodbyes/
The Year of Goodbyes Book Trailer
Activities For Teachers:
Make Connections- In YourOwn,Sylvia, Stephanie Hemphill presents the life of Sylvia Plath in free verse. How do her notes at the end of many of the poems help the reader further connect to Plath’s life? Ask students to research the life and work of one poet and then have them write three free verse poems that reveal a particular period in the poet’s life. Have them make notes at the bottom of each poem as Hemphill did in some of her poems. See here for more...
Title:
Your Own, Sylvia: A Verse Portrait of Sylvia Plath
Author:
Stephanie Hemphill
Sub-Genre:
Poetry
A little bit about the book:
On a bleak February day in 1963 a young American poet died by her own hand, and passed into a myth that has since imprinted itself on the hearts and minds of millions. She was and is Sylvia Plath and "Your Own," "Sylvia "is a portrait of her life, told in poems. Read more...
Reviews:
A Kirkus Review- Perhaps at this literary juncture, where novelists supply bibliographies for their fiction and memoirists fictionalize to liberate certain “truths” and dramatize their memories, a “verse portrait” seems entirely in order. Here, though, this book-length series of poems telling the biography of the revered Sylvia Plath forms a novel where pages pair poetry with nonfiction sources that work to make the borders of genre entirely transparent. Each poem speaks through a different point of view in the voices of those who knew Sylvia; a subtitle makes clear who the speaker is. Notes from the author explain the poem’s inspiration or style along the base of the page. All of this works to an astonishing effect: readers come away with a sense of really knowing Plath—her life, her art, her process and her being. Hemphill’s own poetry is often remarkable, whether she is aiming to write in the style of Plath (she indicates when she is doing precisely that) or in her own free verse. The backmatter includes an extensive bibliography and source notes. A must for any young-adult reader of poetry or Plath. (Fiction/poetry. 12+)
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/stephanie-hemphill/your-own-sylvia/
Your Own, Sylvia Book Trailer
Title:
The Way a Door Closes
Author:
Hope Anita Smith
Sub-Genre:
Poetry
A little bit about the book:
With a click, a bang, a whisper—or no noise at all. There are so many ways that a door can close, but it’s not just the closing; it’s the knowing. And thirteen-year-old CJ knows too much—about losing his father, about his family’s pain, and especially about what it means to hold things together when times are the toughest. Read more...
Reviews:
A Kirkus Review- A spare cycle of mostly free verse details the anguish of one family when the father loses his job. Thirteen-year-old C.J. traces, in separate poems, the arc taken by his family from pre-layoff security to despair when his father leaves, shutting the door behind him, “and we were vacuum-sealed inside. . . . I can tell a lot by / the way a door closes.” C.J.’s own transformation from youthful hero-worship to pained disillusionment is delicately limned, making his conscious decision to commit to his family all the more poignant. Evans’s illustrations are characteristically powerful, the naturalistic renderings carrying great emotion. Newcomer Smith’s verse is not so well-seasoned; it is occasionally more prosaic than poetic, and its one attempt at rhymed verse seems quite forced. For all this, however, C.J.’s story is a touching and memorable one, its eventual happy ending not a capitulation but a blessing. (Poetry. 8-12)
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/hope-anita-smith/the-way-a-door-closes/
Activities For Teachers:
Collage- C.J. spends time looking at pictures of his family to evaluate different things. At the beginning of the book, he looks at the way everyone is placed in a family portrait and how they all look happy. By the middle of the book, C.J. looks at family pictures to try to gain clues into why his father left. Have students cut pictures out of a magazine and make a collage of different people and their expressions. See here for more details...
Excerpt from The Way a Door Closes
Legacy
My brother and I
love to watch our daddy shave.
He sings as his razor
mows away his beard
and we ask,
"When Daddy?
When can we shave like you?"
And Daddy says,
"When you're older."
He rubs my brother's
smooth brown cheeks and says,
"You've got a ways to go, my man."
And my brother pouts
at the thought of how long
he has to wait.
And then Daddy turns to me
and says,
"C. J., on the other hand ...
it's almost time.
You almos' a man."
I look in the mirror at my daddy's face
and try to imagine
the man I am going to be.