National Poetry Month Issue 12

During National Poetry Month, are you looking for ways to add poetry to your English/Language Arts classroom?

One of my favorite suggestions is to use a poem when you introduce a new work of literature. My students and I used to read "The Funeral," by Gordon Parks before diving into his novel, The Learning Tree.

The poem helped generate some pre-reading discussion on themes related to the novel. At the close of the unit, we looked at the poem again and saw that our ideas  had developed over the last few weeks.

I've also paired W.B. Yeats' poem, "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which helped students work deeply on the theme of aspirations vs. dreams.

Here is Maryland poet Patricia VanAmburg's poem, "World Literature." The prince of Denmark makes a cameo appearance in this poem, so why not pair it with your unit on Hamlet?

World Literature

by Patricia VanAmburg

Wherever one thing stands,

 something stands beside it.

~ Dr. Chudi Okpala

Do we read another culture with

our eyes or its own? Will either way

of looking work? Must we soften

the focus—novice seekers hoping for

an aura—gazers of stars in the night

sky whose steady stare can make light

vanish.  The camera obscura, and

our own brains, see things backwards

first—projecting silhouettes and

ghosts.  Like Hamlet, we know “there

are more things under heaven, Horatio…”

Like seers, we sense “wherever one

thing stands, something stands beside it.”

When those things fall like dominoes,

we  choose to see, or not.  Stories tell how

love and faith cure blindness—love and

faith and spit.  Spirit.  The physical thing

and the thing beside it—reading all that is.

Posted with permission of the author.