Writing Teachers and Students (K-12): Links to Other Resources
Fishtrap Summer programs for writers of all ages
Honoring our Rivers Annual K-12 student poetry and art honoring the rivers of Oregon and the Pacific northwest
Poetry 180 A poem a day for students to read and recite
Poetry Out Loud National competition for high school students to memorize and recite poetry
RYPA Annual anthology of youth poetry, open to all, sponsored by RATTLE magazine
Sit Down and Write poetry resource blog
The Academy of American Poets has numerous resources for teachers and students:
Materials for Teachers (including lesson plans)
Writing Teachers and Students (K-12): Student Writing Prompts and Revision Strategies
Re-Seeing What We Write
When asking “What Next?” of a first draft, remember grandfather, Peter Elbow’s maxim: Our first draft is often only half there. Revision is the opportunity to grow and discover the missing half––often the half that makes our work fully present, complete and publishable.
1. Leave your work to cool for a couple days when possible and find multiple ways to read aloud for your own ear and for friends and family. Have them ask questions. What would they like to know more about? What has not been explored yet? What is unclear or confusing? What comes to mind when they hear your piece?
2. Write a second version from memory, recasting the piece, looking for new expressions and details. Then combine the best of both versions.
3. Look at your verbs and dump the “it is’s”, looking for vivid verbs and detailed, specific nouns.
4. What have you not said yet? If there is a touchy or delicate topic to be explored, do it. You don’t have to use this writing in the final draft, but Nat Goldberg cautions us that what is difficult to write about is likely important, unique and interesting.
5. Watch for ways to include several of the five senses in telling detail: touch/smell/sound/sight/feel and maybe intuition.
6. Read lots and lots of poems in little magazines, anthologies bound and online, looking for unique approaches, words and ideas to explore. This wide reading helps you understand the poetry genre and often can supply a missing or pivotal word that can expand your work in progress.
7. Apply the Strunk and White maxim: Like a machine, a sentence should have not extra parts. Watch for wordy constructions that can be boiled down to lively speech-like prose.
8. What images are featured so far? In other words, What are the visual pictures you paint in the reader’s head. List these. What additional pictures might be powerful?
9. Do some “Peter Elbow Looping” where you freewrite around the topic of your poem to discover new ways of seeing––What are you “prejudices” on this topic? What are your first and second thoughts when this topic comes to mind? Invent a conversation between advocates pro and con on this topic.
Vary the audience: younger, older, workers, teachers, experts. List things that are almost true about your topic. Freewrite as if you were someone else writing on this topic. Like all freewriting, you don’t need to believe in “looping” for it to work, for it to expand your thinking and ideas. Be reckless in your freewritten exploration.
Some Playful, Aggravating & Reusable Poetry Prompts
1. Things I’m afraid to tell myself
2. Ways of Oregon rain
3. I’m from a place where
4. Things Momma don’t allow
5. Things I’ve learned lately
6. Nerudian questions like––What truly sleeps in a riverbed? Why is everything more beautiful underwater? Why do rivers journey? How far can you travel downriver? Who is the river murmuring to? What cleans and aerates you like rapids?
7. What’s hidden in the trance of high school?
8. How best can we share this ocean of air?
9. What of the silence around your name?
10. When is there a vortex of noise?
11. What is the simplicity of trees?
12. Being quiet and listening to breath
13. What is meditative for you?
14. What can night teach us?
15. Finding our way in the dark
16. Earth teaches her children . . .
17. Fall was in the air
18. Winter falls like a shroud
19. The warmth of wool
20. Slouching in mud
21. Hills dodge everywhere
22. This careless river
23. The reckless surf
24. Slow children at play
25. Meditation: Don’t even think about it
26. Walking perpetually changes the scenery
27. Hot winds discourage clothing
28. How dusty and barren Mexico’s inland womb
29. It’s better tomorrow/Mejores manana
30. Travel provides new perspective
31. Exchanging greetings with everyone I pass
32. Travel is unpredictable like me
33. A walk through the house through a child’s eyes
34. What good is a day?
35. “Absence” as positive and/or negative
36. What can a poem do?
37. A paradise of strangers
38. An ode to transitory things
39. In celebration of favorite foods
40. An ode to small objects
41. Seeing through the layers
Poems as Prompts
Finding poetry prompts in the captivating richness of poems: Use the following strategies to start your own poem drafts (notes for poems) in response to favorite poems, playfully finding poetry prompts in the captivating richness of poems by reading, reading, reading poems:
*Quick write all that comes to mind initially after first reading the poem title. Then read the poem and add your responses to this initial reflection toward your own new draft poem.
*Pick a favorite line or phrase for your draft title or use as a repeating refrain. Variation of above––pick a series of phrases (3-4), freewrite a few lines to each one and put the writing together for a draft poem with interesting leaps.
*Make a list of several favorite words from the poem and use them in your draft.
*What could happen next in the model poem? Quick write on this. What has not been mentioned yet in the model poem? Quick write other ways to see this topic.
*Copy the model poem out in longhand and watch how it’s constructed, underlining your favorite words and phrases to be responded to in your draft.
*Read the model poem aloud to fully savor the nuances of rhythm and sound, then find a way to develop a similar sound in your own work––possibly using a phrase from the model as a refrain, or repeating a question and/or statement throughout your new draft poem.
*What does reading the model poem make you think of––list the mind pictures and images that come to mind––write about these in a series of short freewrites and juxtapose these short passages together in a new poem draft.
*Use a favorite line from the model poem as an epigraph and draft a new poem as an expansion on this idea or image, always striving to see with new eyes.
*Re-vision: Begin several new draft poems, notes for poems, and pick your most interesting for revision and expansion. Re-read your drafts and watch for opportunities to add more vivid detail and images, knowing that first drafts are most often only half-written––only half there.
*By encouraging writers to find prompts in the poems they read, they accomplish two or more things at once––they are encouraged to read lots of poems, finding favorite phrases, words and ideas, and they always have an abundance of writing starts at hand––all the published poems in the world around them.