Five Ways of Looking at a Poetry Class

I.
I bring in two poems: Langston Hughes’ Dream Variations, and He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven by William Butler Yeats. It’s too much material for an hour-long class. Especially since I also want to touch on Dream Deferred and MLK’s I Have a Dream speech.  
The night before class I dreamed that I saw Barack [...]

Poems on the theme of dreams:

These are some of the poems I use with my students to spark ideas for writing about dreams (read my previous post for more details!): 

 “Last Night I Dreamed of Chickens,” Jack Prelutsky 
 “A Dream Deferred,” Langston Hughes
“Stars,” Langston Hughes
“Let America Be America,” Langston Hughes
“Still I Rise,” (especially the last stanza) Maya Angelou
“City That Does Not [...]

Poems my Students* (*mostly Puerto Rican teen moms who’ve dropped out of school) Love

My students have seriously influenced my taste in poetry. After years of teaching the subject to teen mothers who’ve dropped out of high school, I’ve started to see poems through their eyes.

If you’ve never spent time with my students, you might think there’s a danger that my tastes have been dumbed down; that I [...]