Sean Tangey's List: Poetry resources

• In this light, how much more careful should those who study poetry be in fixing "final" interpretations to poems. In fact, the virtue of a great poem is that it can be interpreted inexhaustibly, from generation to generation, century to century, and even from culture to culture.

• Acrostics encourage interesting  line-breaks, show the kids that lines are not just sentences, or  thought, but also sound units and fragmentation devises.
• The lune is a simplification of formal haiku. Instead of counting  syllables in the three lines, which might make kids overly concerned  with the mere mechanics, one counts words: three/five/three, and  subject, any mood.
• Thus there's a  push toward the knowledge that ideas do not exist without their  expressive articulations
• That I once wrote 100 in an evening and by the  end of everything I saw or thought registered in my brain  three/five/three, and that I told a junior high class this and a girl  came back the next day with 120,
• I ask them first to write a poem apologizing for something "bad"  they have done, imaginary or real.

• THING POEMS

     

  I talk up the wonders of common but relatively unnoticed objects--hand,  egg, floor, sky, hair, river, piece of bread--and ask them to write  in prose or poetry about one of them. I urge them to get beyond the  expectable sentiments that gather about familiar things

4 more annotations...

• A Dylan Thomas Portrait is a type of poetry that tries to get people to use words in an

   

  adventurous way