April is National Poetry Month, but many teachers work to infuse poetry into their high school ELA classrooms all year long. However, if your students are anything like mine, even the slightest mention of poetry can make students cringe. I just got finished a two week poetry unit with my Honors sophomores and they were surprised it went so fast. Some even, dare I say it, enjoyed themselves! Here are 9 poetry lesson ideas to make poetry engaging and relevant all year long.
Pair With Literature—and I Mean ALL Literature
The concept of pairing a poem with a novel is definitely not a new one. But have you tried infusing poetry in EVERY unit you teach? With my honors sophomores we use a curriculum sorted by theme, and every thematic unit has at least two poems. Sometimes we study them individually and sometimes as a gallery walk, but I want them to have a decent exposure to poetry. This way, by the time they get to their poetry unit in April, they’ve already studied half a dozen poems or more through various poetry lessons.
Here are some of my poems based on the thematic units I teach:
Disillusionment
Power & Corruption
The Danger of Making Assumptions
The Allusion Switch-Up
Just last week I was teaching our lesson on allusion and I decided I was bored with it. It feels like allusion is just pointing to references, many of them over students’ heads, and saying, “Look! A reference to something you don’t know!…Moving on…”
My poetry lesson called for me to show a clip from Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, where Michael Caine’s character recites a portion of “Do Not Go Gentle,” then teach a poem. Instead, I taught “Do Not Go Gentle” to the class, where we discussed humanity’s innate tendency to fight our own mortality. Afterwards, I showed about 15 minutes of clips from Interstellar, ending with the moment the poem is recited. Students then discussed what the poem meant in the context of the film. Essentially, I turned this lesson around and studied how the poem was used as an allegory in a movie, but they loved it!
Kickstart Conversations About Current Events
Poems discuss all kinds of topics, including controversial and hot button issues. My students know where I stand on using AI to substitute for authentic writing, as I’ve preached against it several times. However, when I want to say something similar with fewer words, I post “For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper” by Joseph Fasano. This short but thought-provoking poem is a great kickstarter for a conversation on AI.
Here are some other suggestions for poem lessons about current events:
- “A Woman Speaks” by Audre Lorde – gender and identity
- Thoughts and Prayers by Alissa Quart – gun violence
- “Langston Blue” by Jericho Brown – LGBTQ rights
- “Diving Into the Wreck” by Adrienne Rich – identity
- “next to of course god america i” by e. e. cummings – political division
- “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath – gender and identity
- “Männerbünde” by Rodrigo Toscano – gun violence
- “Self-Portrait as Exit Wounds” by Ocean Vuong – LGBTQ rights
- “For the Student Strikers” by Richard Wilbur – political division
Study Poem Collections
Last year I had a group of AP Lit students who were interested in exploring poetry collections. It felt like a good group to experiment with, so I created a poetry collection project as our last unit for poetry. Each student had a month to read an entire poetry collection, then create a 20-30 minute lesson where they taught three selected poems to their peers. It worked wonderfully and we had some engaging lessons on new poems!
This project is available for FREE in my Free Resource Library!
Here are some of the poetry collections I included:
- Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman
- Devotions by Mary Oliver
- Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky
- Citizen by Claudia Rankine
- The Trouble With Poetry by Billy Collins
- The Tradition by Jericho Brown
Explore High School Poets
In 2023, I attended the NCTE Conference in Columbus, Ohio. One of the last presentations I attended was hosted by Melissa Smith, Peter Kahn, and Hanif Abdurraquib (among others). I learned about a poetry collection compiled of student-written poetry called Respect the Mic. I bought it immediately to share with my students, because how often does a student get to read published poetry by other students?
Study Regional Poets
In my AP Lit class, I try to do at least one poetry lesson each week. One year, I taught Robert Burns one week, followed by Seamus Heaney another. I spoke about both as regional poets, poets who celebrated their homeland and heritage through poetry. Regional poets are often most beloved by people who live in the same place as well. My students loved learning about regional poets so much that I created a small collection of regional poetry and taught one per week for a whole semester.
Here’s a great essay on the importance of regional poetry by Sandra Beasley. And here are some poets known for writing regional poetry:
- Robert Burns – Scotland
- Seamus Heaney – Ireland
- Campbell McGrath – Miami
- Natalya O’Flaherty – Ireland
- Anna Akhmatova – Russia
- Richard Blanco – Florida
- Richard Hugo – The Pacific Northwest
Study a Poetic Short Film
A few years ago, someone posted this video on the AP Lit Facebook group. The short film, which was nominated for an Oscar in 2017, depicts Ron Koertge’s poem “Negative Space” through imagery. I have students read the poem first, discussing its meaning and significance for about 10 minutes. Then, I show them the short film. They love to analyze how the poem’s meaning changed from words to film and debate which “version” is better.
Crack a Riddle Poem
One of my favorite poems to teach is Sylvia Plath’s “Metaphors” and I do so in the first few weeks of AP Lit. I’ve found that poetry is too often taught like a riddle, one where only the teacher knows the answer and students can only guess at it. However, if you preface that a poem is acting like a riddle beforehand, then students can approach it looking for clues. “Metaphors” acts as a riddle for pregnancy and uses diction, figures of speech, and structural choices to hint at it. It usually takes my students 10 minutes to guess the answer and another 10 to fully understand the poem’s meaning.
Try a Call and Response
Another unique poetry discourse is call and response poetry. This is my term (it may have a better one) for when a poem was written directly in response to another. Take Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing,” which was written to celebrate the working man’s song in early 20th century America. Langston Hughes’ “I, Too” comments on this as well, noting that men who look like him are often not invited to sing. Hughes’ poem says he also has a beautiful song and will one day he will be celebrated alongside his brothers.
Here are some call and response or partner poems:
- “I Hear America Singing” by Walt Whitman & “I, Too” by Langston Hughes
- “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” by Christopher Marlowe & “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” by Walter Raleigh
- “To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell & “To His Coy Mistress—An Answer” by Annie Finch
- “The White Man’s Burden” by Rudyard Kipling & “The Black Man’s Burden” by H. T. Johnson
