CCBC-Net Archives
Questions for Liz Rosenberg
- Contemporary messages sorted: [ by date ] [ by subject ] [ by author ]
From: Liz Rosenberg <1319402694>
Date: Thu, 23 Apr 1998 12:12:33 -0400 (EDT)
Megan:
First of all, I realized I should have included my e-mail address last time. So here it is: lrosenb at binghamton.edu.
As a fellow teacher of poetry, I would especially like to hear which poems people like to teach. Not verse--light verse--I mean poems. And I'd like to know which exercises 1) do and 2) don't work, and *why*, and any other ideas about teaching poetry or bringing poetry to young people would be welcome.
I'm also happy to answer any further questions.
To answer yours, Megan, of course I *have* included most of the poems I like to teach best in my two anthologies. I sometimes think I do these anthologies as an excuse to have something bound between two covers to teach from--it was exhausting hauling all those loose pages and many folders around. However. Kenneth Koch in Rose, Where Did You Get Hat Red? has many poems I like to teach: I especially like the Chinese vow of friendship. Children have a keen, passionate sense of friendship we seem to lose with age. I like many poems I could not afford to buy: almost any long poem by Langston Hughes, but especially the one called "Mother to Son" and "Life is Fine." ("The Dream-Keeper" is a beautiful, wonderful--if incomplete--selection of Hughes for kids.)I like to teach riddle poems, including some of Dickinson's--the ones about the hummingbird ("A route of evanescence/ with a revolving wheel") and snake.
Very often I teach "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Robert Frost because that was the first poem I memorized as a child, and I still love it. Also, the story of its composition is a wonderful and magical story about how poetry gets written. That poem appears in the first book of poems I was ever given as a gift, "You Come, Too" which is still available --even in paper--from Henry Holt. That and a handful of others are what I think of as "healing" or "making-whole" poems, which of course I didn't include in a book called "Earth-Shattering." Maybe someday....
Liz Rosenberg lrosenb at binghamton.edu
Received on Thu 23 Apr 1998 11:12:33 AM CDT
Date: Thu, 23 Apr 1998 12:12:33 -0400 (EDT)
Megan:
First of all, I realized I should have included my e-mail address last time. So here it is: lrosenb at binghamton.edu.
As a fellow teacher of poetry, I would especially like to hear which poems people like to teach. Not verse--light verse--I mean poems. And I'd like to know which exercises 1) do and 2) don't work, and *why*, and any other ideas about teaching poetry or bringing poetry to young people would be welcome.
I'm also happy to answer any further questions.
To answer yours, Megan, of course I *have* included most of the poems I like to teach best in my two anthologies. I sometimes think I do these anthologies as an excuse to have something bound between two covers to teach from--it was exhausting hauling all those loose pages and many folders around. However. Kenneth Koch in Rose, Where Did You Get Hat Red? has many poems I like to teach: I especially like the Chinese vow of friendship. Children have a keen, passionate sense of friendship we seem to lose with age. I like many poems I could not afford to buy: almost any long poem by Langston Hughes, but especially the one called "Mother to Son" and "Life is Fine." ("The Dream-Keeper" is a beautiful, wonderful--if incomplete--selection of Hughes for kids.)I like to teach riddle poems, including some of Dickinson's--the ones about the hummingbird ("A route of evanescence/ with a revolving wheel") and snake.
Very often I teach "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Robert Frost because that was the first poem I memorized as a child, and I still love it. Also, the story of its composition is a wonderful and magical story about how poetry gets written. That poem appears in the first book of poems I was ever given as a gift, "You Come, Too" which is still available --even in paper--from Henry Holt. That and a handful of others are what I think of as "healing" or "making-whole" poems, which of course I didn't include in a book called "Earth-Shattering." Maybe someday....
Liz Rosenberg lrosenb at binghamton.edu
Received on Thu 23 Apr 1998 11:12:33 AM CDT
