Through haiku, students learn to slow down and become mindful of their natural surroundings, enabling them to capture experiences vividly through description. In this unit, students read and listen to examples of haiku, and learn about the history and structure behind this Japanese poetic form. They engage in both outdoor and classroom activities that encourage mindfulness and the exploration of sensory imagery. After writing, illustrating, and pairing their haiku with instrumental music, students collaborate with classmates in creating movements to their poems. The final project is a student compilation of choreographed haiku performances put to movement and music.

Students use art and poetry to explore and understand major characteristics of the Romantic period.

Annie Finch is a contemporary American poet whose work is deeply engaged with the connection between feminism and formalism. This essay, “Female Tradition as Feminist Tradition,” which was published in her essay collection The Body of Poetry (2005), traces the historical and psychological paths that have drawn contemporary women poets toward the use of traditional formal structure, despite a lack of critical and theoretical attention.

In his essay “The Fire,” Blaser writes, “the real business of poetry is cosmology.” He discusses poetry and the quality of its connection to the world, a world that is entered by the poet’s writing: “the processional aspect of the world has to be caught in the language also.

Students research, evaluate, and synthesize information about the Harlem Renaissance from varied resources, create an exhibit, and highlight connections across disciplines (i.e., art, music, and poetry) using a Venn diagram.

Who are all these people? Where is this waste land they inhabit? What is this chaos of impressions we are privy to? Wherefore such madness?

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.

After reading John Updike's "Ex-Basketball Player," students write poems describing themselves five years in the future. The teacher takes the poems and mails them to students in five years.

Through a variety of techniques such as the “new sentence,” language writers sought to engage the reader in new ways, making them active participants in the process of reading and meaning-making. Like other language writers, Hejinian’s own work is a blend of philosophy, literary theory, and experimental lyricism. Her essays on poetics are important in understanding her work and the aims of the language movement in general.

On this day in 1961, Robert Frost recited a poem he had written for the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy. Frost was 86 years old.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, author of the poems “God’s Grandeur,” “Pied Beauty,” and “The Windhover,” among others, was one of the most innovative poets of late 19th-century England. Since the posthumous publication of his poetry in 1918, his original poetics has influenced modern and contemporary poets.

The sources of Mackey’s poetry are diverse and include West Africa folklore and music, American jazz, Bedouin traditions, the Koran, and African American music and history.

Created in partnership with Motionpoems, this animated film explores the complex and multifaceted beauty that can be overlooked by unobservant eyes. Jamaal May, “There Are Birds Here” from The Big Book of Exit Strategies. Copyright © 2016 by Jamaal May. Reprinted by permission of Alice James Books. Produced by USC Film School.

As a person who loves poetry and believes that there is a poem out there for each of us when we need it, I want students to find poems they enjoy. I also know that reading poems thoughtfully can help them expand their world views whether they enjoy them or not.

Using simple, illuminative paper-cut puppetry, this enchanting video imagines the moment of witness that inspired Gwendolyn Brooks to write her landmark poem, “We Real Cool.” Created by Manual Cinema in association with Crescendo Literary, with story by Eve Ewing and Nate Marshall and music by Jamila Woods and Ayanna Woods.

Created in partnership with Motionpoems, this animated film explores Rhina P. Espaillat’s meditative poem on the cycle of life and the beauty and wisdom that accompany aging. Rhina Espaillat, “Weighing In” from Where Horizons Go. Copyright © 1998 by Rhina Espaillat. Reprinted by permission of Truman State University Press. Produced by Moving Picture Company.