Synopses & Reviews
Today You Are My Favorite Poet is a refreshing look at the art of poetry writing. It is also a vigorous exploration of a variety of approaches-involving form, style, content, and attitude. Hewitt offers proven strategies for writing and revision, provides definitions of a variety of poetic forms, suggests more than thirty writing exercises, outlines a thirty-week poetry curriculum, and best of all, provides numerous models (most of them written by teenagers), all thoughtfully selected to instill confidence in both teacher and student.
Synopsis
Today You Are My Favorite Poet is a refreshing look at the art of poetry writing.
About the Author
Geof Hewitt started writing poems as a teenager. Ten years later, he was teaching teenagers and publishing their poems, while publishing and performing his own work in venues as diverse as Harpers, The Paris Review, Exquisite Corpse, the Whitney Museum, and the Honolulu Zoo. Hewitt brings his quirky sense of "poetry" to his workshops with junior high and high school students, and continues to write, publish, and perform his poems wherever he can. Hewitt teaches in the Adult Degree Program at Vermont College and serves as Writing/Secondary English Consultant to the Vermont Department of Education. In 1995, Heinemann published his first book for teachers, A Portfolio Primer: Teaching, Collecting, and Assessing Student Writing.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Make It New!
1. Anatomy of a Poetry Workshop
Experiments: Persona, Discovery, and Reflection
Finding Topics, Providing Attitude, and Guiding Revision
Word-machines: Writing the Shorter Forms
Longer and Lesser-known Forms
Music and Wordplay: Breaking Rules and Breaking Lines
Metaphor and Simile, Unmetaphor and Symbolism
The Poems of Others: Assessing and Responding to Student Poems
Writing for Performance, Writing to Publish
Portfolios and the Poetry-centered Classroom
Appendix: Six Poems, Six Exercises
Works Cited
Bibliography