What Do You See on Your Mind's Screen?

Looks like? Sounds like? Smells like? Feels like? Tastes like? Sometimes a white, blank, soulless piece of paper can intimidate writers. Provide potential poets with this template that can serve as a parking lot for words and phrases to...

Whether you are viewing a landscape painting of a farm, examining a still-life portrait of a bowl of fruit, or reading a descriptive poem about cultivating food, you can't deny that agriculture plays a major role in visual and language...

Nascent poets carefully examine a color photograph and then respond to a series of questions. Using these responses, they craft a poem prompted by the image. A link to powerful photos is included so the exercise can be repeated.

It's hard to beat the beauty of John Steinbeck's prose, so borrow a little of it to form your own found poetry. After kids finish Chapter One of The Pearl, they select the most evocative and vivid words to create found poems.

Can beautiful words change the world? Literary scholars discover how to paint their visions of change using poetry in a series of three workshops. Each independent topic gives participants a chance to examine their feelings about...

Jane Hirshfield's poem "My Skeleton" asks readers to pause and think about the amazing, often taken-for-granted structure that protects and gives form to human bodies. After observing the human skeleton's image, class members read the...

Listening to poems about feeling lonely and feeling like an outsider set the stage for a group activity that focuses on Stevie Smith's "Not Waving But Drowning." Groups examine the three stanzas of Smith's poem separately and identify in...

After a series of close reading activities that focus on modernist elements in T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," individuals are asked to adopt the point of view of a mental health professional and e-mail Prufrock...

Focus on the musicality of poetry by reading out loud or playing a recording of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Bells" and "The City and the Sea." Discuss the tone, rhythm, and sounds of the poems before launching into a written analysis of the...

Introduce your class to ekphrastic poetry with an exercise that asks them to examine Edward Hooper's painting House by the Railroad and Edward Hirsch's poem "Edward Hopper and the House By the Railroad." After a close reading of the two...