Interviews Jack Prelutsky, a well-known poet for children who provides a perspective on the imperfect people and perplexing paradoxes that puzzle everyone. Provides a look at random notes from his notebook and drafts and a list of the books he has published. (MG)

Compares poetry to a dead body that teachers, like mad scientists, are trying to revive. Suggests that teachers stop trying to teach students to find the meaning in a poem but to simply accept the experience in a nonjudgmental, open way. Offers three activities designed to help students to explore poetry in their own way. (PRA)

Discusses what a poet can offer severely disturbed psychiatric patients and how that is distinct from what a clinician offers. (SR)

Discusses some theoretical considerations essential to understanding poetry's power to assist in healing mental, moral, or spiritual anguish. Presents two fundamental and contrasting notions of what a poet does, how a poem comes to be, what place a poet and poetry have in society, and what criteria determine whether a poem is art, or not. (RS)

Suggest that, emerging from a disturbance of consciousness and/or awakening of the unconscious, haiku does not lead to something, haiku is not about anything; it is a complete world, an end in itself; celebrating the present moment as a transition between psychological inattentiveness and enlightenment. (RS)

Alexander Pushkin, Russia's most celebrated literary figure, descended from an African slave. On both parents' sides, he was related to Avram Petrovich Gannibal, who was born to an African prince and abducted to become a slave to a Russian diplomat. Pushkin chose to pride himself on both his aristocratic life and his African ancestry. (SM)

Notes the prevailing notion about the superfluous nature of poetry, art, and starving artists, and the difficulty of educators in obtaining funds for the arts. Suggests that poetry teaches essential communication skills in small, digestible segments which are readily accessible to even young students. (RS)

Describes the 2000 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, the largest poetry event in North America. Notes the festival was designed to create opportunities for personal communication between poets and teachers, who share so many similar concerns for the future of language arts education. (RS)

This article provides excerpts from "The Four Ages of Poetry" (1820), by Thomas Love Peacock; "The Defence of Poetry" (1821), by Percy Bysshe Shelley; and "On Milton" (1826), by Thomas Babington Macaulay. Although Shelley is the main focus, the essays are arranged chronologically. Brackets indicate editorial asides; original spelling and…

A profile of Mary Ann Hoberman, the 13th winner of the NCTE Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children is given. She uses poetic techniques in innovative ways, yet her poems are very accessible to young children.

Americo Paredes's first collection of poetry, Cantos de Adolescencia in 1937, alongside his second poetry anthology, Between Two Worlds in 1991 is examined. Paredes's discourses of Mexican American identity demand a reassessment of the pocho as an icon for Chicanao literary and cultural studies.

In this article, the author relates how his friends do not understand the type of work that he does as a poetry teacher. His friends know him as someone who cheers on the Yankees voraciously with them and will roll his sleeves up and stuff three knockwurst sandwiches down his throat, trying to explain how Walt Whitman would approve of this, that…

As U.K. school exam results continue to rise, perennial accusations appear in the media of the "dumbing down" of the curriculum and of employers' complaints about school leavers' lack of basic literacy skills. In this context, Andrew Motion, the poet laureate, has raised questions about how to provide an inspiring English curriculum, the…

In this article, the author focuses on the development of a young poet from Bulgaria, Indiana Pehlivanova, who experienced an explosive growth as a poet. Activating memory, myth, and reality, Pehlivanova's imagination wove together what the author terms as "the finest lines I have ever witnessed in youth poetry."

This book integrates poetry and psychology to explore how people shape their childhood place memories and self-identities in conformity with their philosophies of nature. Drawing upon written work and original interviews, the book describes uses of memory through the perspectives of five contemporary American poets: William Bronk, David Ignatow,…