Poetry spaces provide a place where young people can express themselves and develop skills like critical thinking, empathy, and creativity. They empower young people, particularly those at the margins of society. I organized an extracurricular poetry club, Yo Misma, with Latina adolescents in which we read the work of ten Latin American women…

The author, forty-five years into a teaching career--seventeen as a high school English teacher, twenty-eight as a university professor--reflects on his career and his relationship with the poet John Keats that began in his second-period English class in 1967.

Poetry has been around for nearly five millennia, yet never has it been more puzzling. Technology, social media, and the blinding pace of contemporary life leave many students and readers in the dark. Just in time, this book comes to the rescue not just with a response to the problem of understanding and enjoying poetry, but it offers a solution.…

Deconstruction, as a critical theory, maintains that language is a system of signs and, more precisely, a system of oppositions, differences and contradictions. Accordingly, the theory is operative in the sense that meanings are ultimately, unstable, and that a text, any text, contradicts, dismantles and even destroys itself. Hence, literary texts…

The famous Anglo-American poet W. H. Auden held a summer residence in a small village near Vienna from 1958 until his death in 1973. In 1995, the attic of his house was opened as a local museum dedicated to the writer. And in 2015, a relaunch of the exhibition tried to bring the heritage of Auden back to presence. A major challenge for the new…

What do we see when we observe an excellent English lesson? What's going on in the room? Perhaps what stands out is a collaborative making of meanings inspired by stimulating texts. Perhaps what's most important is an ever-deepening knowledge about, and facility with, the many ways that language works. Maybe what we're seeing is a carefully…

Amongst a group of poet-scholar friends, all of us students of the American poet Robert Bly, we often speak of our "gratitude to old teachers," the title from one of Bly's (1999) poems. We cherish a meditative awareness of deeply rooted presences holding us up, buoying us as we stride across "Water that once could take no human…

This Artistic and Creative Inquiry (ACI) uses personal narrative to share examples of how poetry has been successfully used in both classroom and academic support settings to enhance students' understanding of course concepts and to identity their own learning preferences. This pragmatic discussion of poetry as a teaching tool is then coupled with…

Rabindranath Tagore (1861--1941) is primarily known worldwide as the first Asian poet to receive the Nobel Prize in literature, in 1913. He lived and died in colonial India as a British subject. However, any engagement with studies of Tagore would reveal that, despite his outstanding achievements in creative writing and music, he deserves to be…

Poets Laura Purdie Salas and Janet Wong have known each other for several years, but mostly in an online, task-driven environment, for example, serving on the board of the Children's Literature Assembly (CLA) and cochairing the 2014 CLA Master Class on Poetry Across the Curriculum (Salas et al., 2015). They strengthened their bond by interviewing…

Reflecting on a day of dangerous bushfire conditions in NSW, I recount my leadership responsibilities as a principal, highlighting the shaping force of my English teaching past in my response to certain managerial demands that I faced. I illustrate how the sense of ethical responsibility and a commitment to openness that came to define my…

The humanities are thriving at Phillips Exeter Academy (New Hampshire), and not just in the classroom. Though Exeter teachers need not publish or perish, publish many do, in the departments of History, Religion, and most of all English. An array of published poets at Phillips Exeter Academy present excerpts of their work in this article: (1)…

This research focuses on criticism and praise in Arabic literature, history and poetry towards those in charge of the scientific movement in the Medieval Era. The research method was theoretical and qualitative. Many poets and scholars praised the rulers and sultans who established mosques and other educational institutions (madrasa-s) based on…

This article presents the reflections of a research team from the ZAPP-IKS project. ZAPP (the South African Poetry Project) undertook a three-year NRF-funded research project titled "Reconceptualising Poetry Education for South African Classrooms through Infusing Indigenous Poetry Texts and Practices". The research on which we report…

Amongst the wide variety of poetic forms found across children's poetry, the list is strikingly prevalent. Drawing on Umberto Eco's theory of lists, the article examines how the poetic list plays out in the work of a number of children's poets, distinguishing four sub-categories, each of which operates in a slightly different way. After a brief…