While we all love curling up on the couch with a great book of poetry and a warm cup of tea (or a cool cup of something stronger maybe, in this heat wave!), one of the best ways to get out and meet our fellow writers and readers is by attending a poetry reading. Many…

Teaching History with Poetry, Glen Sorestad Identity and Autobiography, Aaron Tucker Canadian Poets Across the Curriculum, Kathryn Bjornson Poetry for Performance, Hilary Peach Contemporary Canadian Poetry-Tasting Hour, Catherine Grahm The Art of the Chapbook, Ursula Vaira (PDF) Using Contemporary Canadian Poetry in the Classroom, John Oughton Book Arts Unit for Teen Authors, Cathalynn Labonté-Smith Suggested…

Introduction “The sonnet might be one of the greatest achievements of human ingenuity; […] it isn’t some arbitrary construct that poets pit themselves against out of a perverse sense of craftsmanlike duty – it’s a box for their dreams and represents one of the most characteristic shapes human thought can take.” Don Patterson, 101 Sonnets…

Teaching poetry, and how to write it, can be a daunting exercise the first time. Unlike the tidy step-by-step structures of math or science, poems can feel like obscure jungles full of strangely coloured birds and sly, teacher-threatening predators: “Teacher … what does assonance mean (giggle, giggle)?” There is some help. The resources in this…

Finding the Actor Inside of You By Penn Kemp Reading your poem is a performance. It is not a lecture, a talking-to; it is a deep sharing of your creativity. Performance is simply communicating, telling your story to those who want to hear it. Believe me, the audience wants to be entertained. The audience wants…

By Michael Mirolla 1. Poetic emotion: You can’t just slap it together, pardner Poetry is about making a lasting impression with words. Too often, however, the main impression that poetry makes on students is that it is little more than a gushing out of personal emotions; a haphazard explosion of feelings that scatters words across…

by Aaron Tucker “ten miles in from horsefly shoulders sore from my pack feet blistered i asked for and got a job cleaning a barn for the price of a meal” – Patrick Lane “Ten Miles in from Horsefly”   Beginning   One of the strongest gifts of literature is the ability to capture the…

Teaching students to hear rhythm & metre By Katherine Parrish In poetry, sound is paramount. As it approaches music, it reaches our body, and moves through our body to our emotions in ways that only the best prose can rival. Yet, I have found that the sonic elements of poetry are often the most difficult…

By Dawna Proudman Not many of us would tell a new mother that their baby has an ugly nose. Just so, all criticism is caustic when writing is newborn. The more a person writes, the better their writing will become. The more they enjoy writing, the more they will write. When we encourage what is best…