TEACHERS’ FIELD GUIDE TO POETRY:
For Those Who Teach Poetry At Any Level
(but wish they felt just a little more comfortable with the stuff themselves)

One-day workshop intensive
Saturday August 2 nd, 9am-4pm
Tuition $150
Instructor: Alice Fogel
Application Form

What am I missing when I read a poem? What makes a poem “good”? How do I teach an art I’m not sure I totally understand? Can students find poetry relevant to their lives ? Can I connect poetry to other school subjects, even non-language arts ones? How do I grade a poem, or a student’s reading of one? Can we talk about poetry without analyzing it to death? Will young kids like poems if they’re not funny?

Rather than repeating elements teachers are usually already familiar with, such as alliteration, rhyme or meter, we’ll be looking at 8 specific steps for discovering poetry and for approaching poems with students, which will work to demystify poetry and discover how to move through a poem, and be moved by it, without having to know what it “means”. Through discussion, readings, and analysis, we’ll make note of ways to incorporate the day’s process into lesson plans, including where to find contemporary resources for age-appropriate poetry, how to separate students’ reading and studying of published poems from their attempts to write poems, and how to include technical elements of poetry in other school subjects, such as science, and vice versa.

faculty

Alice B. Fogel is the author of three books of poems, most recently BE THAT EMPTY.  Poet Laureate Charles Simic has said, "Her poems shine with intelligence.  Fogel is a true phenomenologist of the soul, in that New England tradition of Emily Dickinson and Jane Kenyon."  She has taught writing at all age levels, and has led a variety of arts and reading discussion programs independently, through GRAI, the Frost Center, and the NH Councils on the Arts and the Humanities.  She lives in Acworth with her family.