Week 10 - Poetry Resources

The first site I'm going to look at is The Poetry Archive (http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/aboutus.do). This website is an archive of recordings of poets reading their own works. The site description reads, "The Poetry Archive exists to help make poetry accessible, relevant and enjoyable to a wide audience. It came into being as a result of a meeting, in a recording studio, between Andrew Motion, soon after he became U.K. Poet Laureate in 1999, and the recording producer, Richard Carrington. They agreed about how enjoyable and illuminating it is to hear poets reading their work and about how regrettable it was that, even in the recent past, many important poets had not been properly recorded."

The site enables readers to search for poets by name, or by geographic region, and poems can be searched by title, theme, or poetic form, the last being particularly useful for teachers. It also contains a glossary of poetic terms, which would be useful for teachers and students. There are lesson plans and ideas for teachers to incorporate poetry into lessons, to make learning poetry more interesting and creative for students.

It gives tips on listening activities, and activities for students to interact with the poetry they've heard/read. there is also background, and biographical details of poets to help contextualise their poetry. The site also has a list of links to other poetry websites with even more resources.

Another site with a varied array of resources is Poets Graves (http://www.poetsgraves.co.uk/index.html).

This site is valuable for dealing with personal information about poets, to help set the scene in a lesson, to make poetry more personal and human. It lists poets grave sites, but also has a glossary of poetic terms, a selection of classic poems, a timeline of poets' lives to contextualise them, as well as poetry book reviews, and further links to other poetry sites. There are also forums for poetry discussions which contain a lot of valuable information and resources.

A site to encourage poetry writing in the classroom is Instant Poetry Forms (http://ettcweb.lr.k12.nj.us/forms/newpoem.htm). The site provides a lot of templates for poems where students fill in words in a poetic structure to create a poem. The students are scaffolded in writing simple poetry, can then be led to create a similar poem without the scaffolding, and then be able to work with their own words and styles. It also provides lesson plan ideas for teachers to incorporate the poetic structures and sample poems into the classroom. I think it's an easy, non-threatening way to introduce young students, or students who feel poetry is not for them, to poetry and poetry writing.