Book Review: Reading and Writing Poetry With Teenagers

I read Reading and Writing Poetry with Teenagers by Fredric Lown and Judith W. Steinbergh. I chose this book because I wanted something that would be a helpful guide for teaching poetry since many teenagers fin it to be a daunting task. I wasn’t disappointed. This book was set up very nicely for any teacher—new or experienced—to teach poetry. This book is set up for use as a full poetry unit that slowly progresses in intensity. When I first looked at the book the outside pulled me in because it looked a lot like a bulletin board. The little pieces of poems that I have read pulled me in. When I first opened the book, I was slightly disappointed because the inside wasn’t what I expected for such an interesting cover. As I read through the book, I found that I really liked it.

The book started with a “To the Teacher” chapter. This chapter is important for guiding teachers through the rest of the book. It tells teachers of the authors’ goals of putting together this book. These goals include things such as making poetry accessible, showing a diverse set of poetry to students, and providing students the chance to create their own poetry. The authors then discuss the reason that they have put the chapters in the order they are in. Each chapter has a theme. “This order has a progression of theme and technique that begins with the most concrete and least threatening source material and moves to the more personal and then abstract source material. Also, the techniques start with basic skills for making poems and progress toward more sophisticated tools for the crafting and revising of poetry” (p. xiii). This book would be best used for an entire poetry unit, but you can always modify to fit what you need and teach a chapter in other units. The next part of the “To the Teacher” talks about the different approaches a teacher could take to teach this book—from a full unit to a chapter or two elsewhere. The authors’ also talk about the importance of creating an atmosphere of trust in the classroom. Sharing poetry can be hard, especially for teenagers who don’t want to stand out. The authors also provide a revision guide for you and the students as well as tips for evaluating student work.

The authors have decided on the following order for the themes to progress: nature and environment; animals; sports; childhood, adolescence, and growing up; family and relationships; social and global issues; form and content: sonnets, villanelles, and sestinas; and praise poems and odes. Each chapter includes an introduction, reading aloud, poems for discussion, questions for discussion and analysis, bibliography of additional poems, and writing exercises with student examples. I like that the authors have included these in each chapter. This means that if a teacher chooses to take one chapter at a time instead of teaching the whole unit they still have the same resources available no matter what chapter they are on. I also like that it provides real student examples so that students can see that these activities are possible.

Overall, I find that this book is great for teachers. I think its only downfall is that it is best taught together as a unit. This book is set up nicely for teachers. Its topics are entertaining and are relevant to students. The activities provided are easy for students to understand and to follow. The book doesn’t provide anything for teachers to follow on how to teach poetry structure so teachers will have to go over structure during the unit. The fact that there is many types of poems and different authors is essential because it exposes students the classic authors we think of as well as those that we don’t usually teach. Overall, I would highly recommend this book to teachers.

To order this book on Amazon visit: https://www.amazon.com/Reading-Writing-Poetry-Teenagers-Fredric/dp/0825127939 

Works Cited

Lown, Fredric, and Judith W. Steinbergh. Reading and Writing Poetry with Teenagers. Walch Publishing, 1996.