Scouting Poetry for Inspiration

As I read through English teacher threads on social media, one thing that strikes me is that a teacher who is genuinely passionate about what he or she is teaching will probably communicate that to the students. Ditto for a teacher who's teaching content under constraint. One teacher says her students love a given book which she loves teaching; another says of the same book that neither she nor her students could get into it. 

That makes me a little nervous because while I am passionate about poems that I love, I don't actually love that many poems. (Shhh...I know...You may have never heard an English teacher admit that before.) But really: I've been on a poem-a-day email list for years, and I'll only love a couple out of each year. (I copy them out in a notebook I keep.) I had my favorites that I taught to high school for years, and now I have to find new poems for middle school. Ones that I love.

So I’ve spent some of my spring break hunting for poetic inspiration on a 6th and 7th grade level. Spring break here in Japan is three weeks—which seems like a long time, until you realize that’s all the time one has to gear up for a new academic year. And for a combination 6th and 7th grade class, that means all new content, since the rising 7th graders have already had the class once! That means is getting a new line-up for the poetry unit that starts the year. So I’ve been spending some time this spring break browsing the CommonLit.org poems for 4th through 7th grades. 

You know what I found? Some poems I love. And I fell in love with the power of language condensed into poetry all over again. Here’s an example.

Truth

Nikki Grimes

The truth is every day we rise is like thunder—

a clap of surprise. Could be echoes of trouble, or blossoms

of blessing. You never know what garish or gorgeously

disguised memories-to-be might rain down from above.

So look up! Claim that cloud with a silver lining. Our

job, if you ask me, is to follow it. See where it heads.

Besides being beautiful, this is a “Golden Shovel” poem. If you’ve never heard of it, that’s because it was just invented in 2010. You take an inspiring line from a poem and turn it into the last word of each line of a new poem. The inspiration for “Truth” is the first line of “Storm Ending” by Harlem Renaissance poet Jean Toomer: “Thunder blossoms gorgeously above our heads.” That line itself grabs me in so many ways: I’d never thought of thunder blossoming. One, because it’s a sound, not a sight. And two, because it’s big and scary—not small and fragile. On the other hand, both thunder and blossoms start small, swell, burst, and fade in a short time.

“Truth” is about similar surprises, from the way the new day’s unknown events are described as “memories-to-be” to the internal rhymes tucked away inside the lines (rise…surprise…disguised). It’s decorated with alliteration: blossoms of blessing, garish or gorgeously, claim that cloud. As surprising and beautiful as a cloud’s silver lining—a dead metaphor startlingly resurrected. 

I discovered some more new poems to love like “Bird-Foot’s Grandpa” by Joseph Bruchac and “Eating Together” by Li-Young Lee. I was reminded of old favorites like “Mama Is a Sunrise” by Evelyn Tooley Hunt, “Dreams” by Langston Hughes, “The Creation” by James Weldon Johnson, “Gate A-4” by Naomi Shibab Nye, and “Knock Knock” by Daniel Beaty.

And I remembered that I want to introduce novels in verse like The Crossover by Kwame Alexander, Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson, Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai, and The Red Pencil by Andrea Davis Pinkney.

Now I have so much inspiration, I’ll have to prune. That’s okay—I’ve got a week, and I’ve got my poetry passion back.

How do you revive flagging inspiration? What poems do you love?

P.S. Another source of inspiration this break: got myself a bookshelf so I can take some of my books out of the moving boxes!