Poems About Poetry

As I mentioned in my last post, we're reading poems about poetry this week. I'm not sure exactly why, but a huge number of poets have written poems about poems. These are some of my favorite kinds of poems and I hope the students have been enjoying them.

There are lots of reasons I read so many poems with my students. One of them is to get them thinking like poets--to get them to realize that poetry is everywhere and can be about everything. To get them to notice things that they wouldn't have noticed before. And to get them to appreciate language as an art form. All of these are pretty good goals, I think. And still that's only a few of the reasons we study poetry in my classroom.

Anyway, I counted them up yesterday and by the end of this week, our sixth week of school (29 days, I think), we will have read and discussed 23 poems. Not too shabby. Here's a poem about poetry that we're going to read tomorrow. I think it's lovely. I hope you like it:

"A Loaf of Poetry"
By Naoshi Koriyama

you mix
the dough
of experience
with
the yeast
of inspiration
and knead it well
with love
and pound it
with all your might
and then
leave it
until
it puffs out big
with its own inner force
and then
knead it again
and
shape it
into a round form
and bake it
in the oven
of your heart