Explains how students can be introduced to the delights and problems of lyric poetry by reading A.E. Housman's "Lovliest of Trees, the Cherry Now." (HOD)

Provides a series of suggestions to help students in poetry writing classes move past those periods when ideas for poems seem to have stopped flowing. (TJ)

Provides a guide for teaching Edwin Morgan's poem, "O Pioneers!" (TJ)

Suggests the use of parody to deepen students' understanding of how and why poems work. (TJ)

Recommends teaching Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" by using a grammatical approach to the reading. (TJ)

Because Robert Lowell's poem "Hawthorne" focuses on Puritan New England, both as a setting and a subject, and shows the dark side of human nature, and Hawthorne as the alienated artist with a definite place in American literature, it is a most appropriate conclusion for a teaching unit on Hawthorne.

Describes an assignment in which students are taught to develop poetry using the ideas and words found in newspaper or magazine stories. Includes model poems. (HTH)

Describes an assignment in which students sharpen their punctuation skills by arranging poems without punctuation in a prose form with appropriate punctuation. Suggests using the poetry of a fictional character from Don Marqui's "archy and mehitabel." (TB)

Offers a series of related approaches to teaching poetry and helping students to overcome their phobia of it. Suggests that students gain from discussion of vocabulary, the poem's speaker and his or her perspective, and word choices in the poem. (TB)

Suggests using poetry's short short forms for a methodical and rapid series of writing assignments that emphasize both careful writing at the sentence level and overall planning and respect for form. (HTH)

Discusses a unit designed to develop students' insights into the poetic experience by comparing poetry and photography; includes several student written poems. (DD)

Suggests the use of William Carlos Williams' poem, "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," as a way of demonstrating the use of punctuation to change the meaning of a piece of writing. (TJ)

Describes an exercise in which students learn to recognize cliches by locating them in a poem and generating them in a class discussion. Notes that by teaching students to recognize unimaginative and ineffective language in the work of other writers, they can learn to avoid it themselves. (MM)

An approach to teaching the writing of poetry is presented in this brief article. AUTHOR'S COMMENT (excerpt): A poet's purpose is to amuse, to instruct, to embellish truth, or to vitalize dull reality. Poets compress, using the minimum number of words to gain the maximum effect, yoking seemingly disparate ideas into metaphors, creating poetic…