With the excellent example of Amanda Gorman reciting her poem during this year’s Inauguration, I have a feeling there will be an uptick of interest in authoring and performing spoken word poetry. Of course, spoken word poetry has experienced waves of popularity over the years as you can read in this article from 2020, or see in this collection of videos from Edutopia in 2014. But, as Professor Kathleen M. Alley states, “When I heard Amanda Gorman recite her poem, “The Hill We Climb,” at President Biden’s inauguration, I instantly decided to throw my plans for the week out the window. I hope teachers throughout the nation will similarly be willing to put their regular lesson plans aside in order to seize the opportunity to use the poetry of Gorman to engage with students who are not much younger in age.”

To begin a unit on spoken word poetry, a teacher might use one of Amanda Gorman’s videos, a selection from the Edutopia link above, or perhaps one from this list curated by Amanda Cardenas. You can find advice on writing spoken word poetry from Masterclass, writer Tonya Thompson, and educator Shannon Reed. Lesson plans include this one from Facing History and one from Remake Learning – both of which weave in social justice topics – or this one from Read Write Think that approaches it with a bilingual perspective.

In case you missed this one in Amy Erin Borovoy’s Edutopia article, the video below shows that spoken word poetry can be written and performed by students at any age level. While younger children may not have the polished presentation style of an Amanda Gorman, they make up for this with their enthusiastic gestures and unusual choices for topics!

I will be adding this post to my Wakelet of poetry resources – all available to you for National Poetry Month in April!

As we continue our week-long poetry theme, I want to introduce you to Language is a Virus. Though the site includes all types of writing, there are several poetry-related pages you may want to explore. One of them is the Visual Poetry tool. When you launch this, you can draw in the browser with your text. It reminds me of the TypeDrawing app my students used on the iPads long ago, which is sadly not available any longer. There are not as many variables you can change in the Visual Poetry tool, but can choose different colored backgrounds and text. For some reason, the “Save” button did not work for me. However, right-click and “Save As” did the trick; just be aware that your page will clear as soon as you save.

I learned about “Square Poems” from another interactive tool on the site. (Sorry, I didn’t have the bandwidth to create my own example.) I had no idea that Lewis Carroll was a mathematician as well as an author. Here is more about square poetry.

Along with the text manipulation interactives that you will find on Language is a Virus are some games. Letter Link Poetry looks like a fun challenge, and Electronic Poetry is like a digital version of magnetic poetry. Several of the games allow you to choose from an extensive group of word lists, which makes for endless amounts of creativity.

I will be adding this site to my Wakelet of poetry resources – all available to you for National Poetry Month in April!