Our thesis is more finely tuned to Thomas Merton (1915-68) the writer, more specifically, the poet/artist/writer and thinker. These are the components of the "Merton" voice. Merton senses the quality of innocence as the "sine qua non" of the poet or writer's vocation: "His art depends on an ingrained innocence which he would lose in business, in…

In this article, the author narrates his lifelong relationship with a major American poet, Walt Whitman. He describes how Whitman's "Song of Myself" and poetic idea influenced his life and way of thinking.

The stereotype of the poet or novelist working in unappreciated solitude got a workout recently at the Carbondale campus of Southern Illinois University. The 9th annual Young Writer's Workshop brought 30 high-school students onto the campus for four intense days of poetry and fiction writing, critiques, panels and readings. The workshop is one of…

In many classrooms, poetry is shoved to the neglected edge of language arts, out of the bright core of content that may (should) include grammar, vocabulary, and strong literature. If time permits, a class may read a few poems and discuss them from a so-called "interpretive" point of view. All of this takes place in the context of an apparent…

Presents the poetry of a talented 13-year-old student. Describes how the teacher's writing workshop helped the young writer to flourish. (PRA)

Describes how one teacher/poet communicates to students the feeling of spontaneity and ease with language, a similar sense of poetry as activity, gesture, and flight, and the notion that both words and sounds carry poetic meaning while letting students know it is acceptable to explore on paper while creating poetry. (MG)

I invite and encourage students to take risks in their writing, to engage innovatively with a wide range of genre, to push limits in order to explore creatively how language and discourse are never ossified, but always organic, how language use is integrally and inextricably connected to identity, knowledge, subjectivity, and living. Informed by…

The "Voices and Visions" series, a set of instructional videos on the lives and art of 13 important American poets, has the desirable potential to reach an audience that is virtually unlimited. The videos are a skillful blend of photographs, film footage, interviews with scholars, critics, and poets, readings by actors, and sometimes by…

Describes how one teacher links the study of British Victorian and twentieth-century war poets to the world of her students. (MG)

Describes a two-day residence in a fifth- and sixth-grade classroom of poet Arnold Adoff. Presents his interaction with five students as they struggle with their poetry writing. (HTH)

Describes a successful unit on poetry, characterized by collaborative planning, creation of the collection of poems used as the text, variation of the approaches and types of assignments, use of recorded music and poetry collected, use of local poets who read and performed for the students, online sharing and critiquing of students' poetry, and a…

This article describes a day in the life of Charley Hoce, a teacher and poet. Hoce starts each day with at least an hour and a half of writing and revising before leaving for his teaching job at the National Trail Elementary School in New Paris, Ohio where he teaches reading and writing to first, second, and third graders, as well as Title I…

A product of Hawaii's Poets-in-the-Schools program, this second volume of a compilation of essays and poems addresses diverse artistic and educational concerns about poetry writing and is divided into two sections. Section I consists of essays by three of the poets who were involved in the program: (1) "Evaluating Student Poems" by Tim…

Proving the efficacy of Hawaii's Poets-in-the-Schools program, this collection of descriptive statements by some of Hawaii's leading poets and teachers of poetry, and accompanied by illustrative poems produced by classroom pupils, describes the theories that were generally accepted as a working basis and the related methods each writer used in the…