Eviscerate

Need a new SAT word to learn? 
How about EVISCERATE. 
Read this poem for the vocabulary AND the puns!

Michael Salinger wrote this poem, "Eviscerate," for The Poetry Friday Anthology for Middle School.

Loss

This poem, "He Was So Little" by David L. Harrison (from The Poetry Friday Anthology for Middle School) gives us words for the difficult feelings we experience when a much-loved pet is gone. 

Love

Just in time for Valentine's Day, here is a poem from The Poetry Friday Anthology for Middle School. It's about love, but with a warning tucked inside. 

"Advice to Rapunzel" by Eileen Spinelli. Food for thought...

Fear

Time to restart, and rethink. What are we afraid of? Let's fight those fears!

Here's a downloadable poem postcard featuring Sara Holbrook's poem, "Fear Factor," from The Poetry Friday Anthology for Middle School.

And here are the Take 5 activities that go with this poem.

"The Cafe" by Guadalupe Garcia McCall

The Poetry Friday Anthology for Middle School continues to reach new readers. At the YALSA Symposium (Young Adult Library Services Association), poet Guadalupe Garcia McCall read one of her poems from the book and we managed to capture it on film here. It's "The Café" featured in the Eighth Grade section, Week 13: Families, page 205. 

Brace yourself. 
It's bittersweet and thought-provoking (and somewhat autobiographical).

Poetry Posters & Postcards

One of the things I love about poetry is how it conjures up images in our minds. What do you picture when you read a favorite poem? Talking about our (multiple) interpretations for a single poem is an interesting window into our own experiences and emotions. This is something young adults really "get." They enjoy linking poems they're reading with their own life experiences and understandings.

But they are also often surprised to discover that we can have very different images of the same poem. One way to highlight this imagistic power of poetry is to use poems in conjunction with images, matching poems and pictures that seem to go together. We have taken this idea and created several poem posters and postcards that pair poems with contemporary photographs. You can download and/or print them at the Pomelo Books site here. 

Here is one example from The Poetry Friday Anthology for Middle School, just to get you started.

"Body Art" by Marilyn Singer

Here is the last of our student-created "poem movies." This one features Marilyn Singer's poem, "Body Art," and is created by graduate student Phyllis Yarbro. Click here to watch it.

This poem is featured in The Poetry Friday Anthology for Middle School in the eighth grade section, week 35, for the theme, "Summer Vacation."

We hope you've enjoyed our homemade masterpieces. We've had fun making them and exploring ways to use technology to promote poetry!

Next up: Backstories for some of the poems in The Poetry Friday Anthology for Middle School from the poets themselves.




Image credit: rpghacker.com

"Grandma's House" by Kate Coombs

Here is a "poem movie" for Kate Coombs's poem, "Grandma's House," created by graduate student Sherri Wilcox. Watch it here.

This poem is featured in The Poetry Friday Anthology for Middle School in the seventh grade section, week 13, for the theme, "Families."