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Poets: A Request

Lauren

I’m working on my unit plan on poetry and have run into a writing wall. I’m drawing blanks on post-Reconstruction American poets and need some examples of poets who are usable in a public high school. Not to mention compelling enough to use in a high school.

Funny that I can come up with tons for the blog, but not for school. Wonderful.

Any and all suggestions are welcome. The sooner the better.

21 thoughts on Poets: A Request

  2. Don’t overlook Marge Piercy. Early Grrl and Colors Passing Through Us both have a wide range of work. Also consider Alicia Ostriker – again, a very wide range of themes.

  3. I know this is going to be so blase’, and right up there with suggesting Whitman or Dickenson, but the one poem that really got me in high school was Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn.” I know it is pretty typical high school fare, but the whole “unsung song…” business really seemed to get at the heart of what art was all about for me, and as a budding writer and musician in high school, it stuck with me.

    And it is still the one line of poetry I quote to make it seem like I’m a literate, poetic, romantic type of guy to the ladies. And the answer is, yes, I’m single.

  4. Nice, Dylan. Whenever I hear anyone cite poetry in conversation without a hint of irony I laugh out loud. In fact, I’m laughing right now.

  5. Langston Hughes is very good…I don’t really know my poetry very well, though, so I can’t think of anyone else off the top of my head.

  6. Just for that, Lauren, I’m going to speak in nothing but poetry at the restaurant all day today, and we’ll find the answer to this question:

    If, as you say, poetry without irony will induce laughing or, as I posit, I bring people to tears as they come to terms with the beauty falling from my lips, entering their ears like the songs of birds or the words of angels, so full of wisdom and truth.

    Look at that… I’ve started already.

  7. Some suggestions:

    Wilfred Owen – most well known is “Dulce et decorum est” , but he has others which might be usable as well

    Gregory Corso is my favorite of the Beat poets – I like “Marriage”, but it may be too long to hold the attention of high school students. Here’s a page of his poems: http://www.rooknet.com/beatpage/writers/corso.html

    Stevie Smith also has some very good poems, which also lend themselves to discussion of meter.

    And a good chance that you might find current poets who aren’t as well known here: http://www.poems.com/

    Hope that helps!

  9. I’m not sure exactly what timeframe you’re looking for or what your unit goals are, but here are some suggestions (with emphasis on female poets that have poems which I think are both accessible and appropriate for HS students):

    –Edna St. Vincent Millay (very formal, but the emotional tension just beneath the formality–delightful. A couple favorites: “Spring” and “I Being Born a Woman and Distressed”)
    –Elizabeth Bishop (I love “In the Waiting Room”, though you might not be able to use it in a high school classroom)
    –Plath and/or Sexton (I prefer Sexton, but Plath is good too)
    –Gwendolyn Brooks (deals with both issues of race and gender)
    –Adrienne Rich (so many poems, though “Valediction Forbidding Mourning” is always a classic)

  11. Post-reconstruction as in writing in the immediate aftermath of the reconstruction or post-reconstruction as in anything from the late 1800’s on?

  12. gary snyder has some compelling work, in particular “what you should know to be a poet.”

    also, diane diprima is awesome and can be quite funny as well. i believe she had a series on bad breakups that were powerful and amusing.

    one of my personal favorites is robert creeley, whose odd rhythms and peculiar syntax always made me envious.

    they are all late-20th century, so i’m not sure if that’s too post-reconstruction.

  13. ah, well, seeing as how you’re already including ginsburg, i’d guess late-20th century is just fine.

    i also like barbara guest, whom you could actually tie to t.s. eliot in a rather tangential way. guest was something of a follower of the poet h.d., whose real name evades me at the moment, but h.d. was a she and she was the driving force, along with ezra pound, in the imagist movement, with which barbara guest later became affililated.

  15. Dorothy Parker. Brilliant verse and an insightful, incisive perspective, oten specifically female, from the 1920s-50s era. E-mail me if you’d like ideas for specific poems.

  17. I don’t know much poetry, but I’m very partial to Billy Collins. He has a great sense of humor and makes his precise craft look effortless. There was no poet I hated more in high school than TS Elliot, and the more I found out about him, the more I didn’t like him. But for Prufrock, I think I may forgive him.

  19. oh, i’d like to second Naomi Shihab Nye – she’s done lots of great work around youth & poetry.

    and Mr. Hughes too… here’s one of my favorites:

    The gangsters of the world
    Are riding high.
    It’s not the underworld
    Of which I speak.
    They leave that loot to smaller fry.
    Why should they great Capone’s
    Fallen headpiece seek
    When stolen crowns
    Sit easier on the head-
    Or Ethiopia’s band of gold
    For higher prices
    On the market can be sold-
    Or Iraq oil-
    Than any vice or bootleg crown of old?
    The gangsters of the world ride high-
    But not small fry.

    he wrote that in 1941… the more things change, no?

  20. The poet who writes so well about the environment and would be more than appropriate for high school students is Mary Oliver. I would also second Amy Lowell.
    A sample of Oliver:

    Wild Geese

    You do not have to be good.
    You do not have to walk on your knees
    for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
    You only have to let the soft animal of your body
    love what it loves.
    Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
    Meanwhile the world goes on.
    Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
    are moving across the landscapes,
    over the prairies and the deep trees,
    the mountains and the rivers.
    Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
    are heading home again.
    Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
    the world offers itself to your imagination,
    calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
    over and over announcing your place
    in the family of things.

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