"Incredible Bridges: Poets Creating Community" is a series developed by the Academy of American Poets in collaboration with EDSITEment that enlists the voices of nine contemporary American poets, each delivering a poem that has been selected in support of the National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman's initiative, "The Common Good." The discourse is guided by nine companion lesson plans with activities designed for secondary-level students.

Students take poetic license when they interpret William Carlos William's poem "The Red Wheelbarrow" to help create a poem of their own.

The onset of winter weather varies from year to year and from place to place, but December 21, the winter solstice, is considered the first official day of winter.

Students will be singing the blues in this lesson in which they identify themes from "The Gift of the Magi" and write and present blues poetry based on those themes.

Jamila Lyiscott is a “tri-tongued orator;” in her powerful spoken-word essay “Broken English,” she celebrates — and challenges — the three distinct flavors of English she speaks with her friends, in the classroom and with her parents. As she explores the complicated history and present-day identity that each language represents, she unpacks what it means to be “articulate.”

This lesson asks students to analyze the features of a poet's work then create their own poems based on the original model.

In this lesson, students use blogs to hold discussions about the effect of the factors of culture, history, and environment on Latino poetry.

Students across the board will get a kick out of researching a historical figure from the American Revolution to create an acrostic poem.

Reading Emily Dickinson's letters alongside her poems helps students to better appreciate a remarkable voice in American literature, grasp how Dickinson perceived herself and her poetry, and perhaps most relevant to their own endeavors consider the ways in which a writer constructs a "supposed person."

This lesson allow students to explore the forces that prompted the literary modernism movement, specifically focusing on modernist poetry. By allowing students to explore the movement independently, they will also be able to develop research and inquiry skills.

In this lesson, students will explore Dickinson's poem "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers" both as it was published as well as how it developed through Dickinson's correspondence with her sister-in-law Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson.

This lesson prompts students to think about a poem's speaker within the larger context of modernist poetry. First, students will review the role of the speaker in two poems of the Romanticism period before focusing on the differences in Wallace Stevens' modernist"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.

In this lesson, students closely examine Dickinson's poem "There's a certain slant of light" in order to understand her craft. Students explore different components of Dickinson's poetry and then practice their own critical and poetry writing skills in an emulation exercise. Finally, in the spirit of Dickinson's correspondences, students will exchange their poems and offer informed critiques of each others' work.

In this lesson, students will explore the role of the individual in the modern world by closely reading and analyzing T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

The Letter Poem Creator provides an online model for the thought process involved in creating poems based upon a letter; then, students are invited to experiment with letter poems independently.

Students explore letter poems and experiment with writing letters as poems, using the placement of line breaks to enhance rhythm, sound, meaning, and appearance.

Long perceived as a recluse who wrote purely in isolation, Emily Dickinson in reality maintained many dynamic correspondences throughout her lifetime and specifically sought out dialogues on her poetry. These correspondences"”both professional and private"”reveal a poet keenly aware of the interdependent relationship between poet and reader.

In this lesson, students will review what limericks are, write their own Limericks, and then use iMovie to turn their limerick into a short movie.

The interactive explores the ways that poets choose line breaks in their writing. After viewing the demonstration, students are invited to experiment with line breaks themselves.

Students identify similes in poetry and gain experience in using similes as a poetic device in their own work.