This post is written by Zach Czaia, a poet and high school English teacher working in Minneapolis, MN. His second poetry collection, Knucklehead, was published in 2021 with Nodin Press. Check out his Substack, “Teacher / Poet” here.

The longer I teach English literature, the more convinced I am that to do justice both to the subject I teach and the students I am responsible for guiding, we need to write in the forms we are studying. Or to adapt a phrase from Alfie Kohn, I want the students I teach to learn literature “from the inside out.” That is, if students are, as they were in the unit I’m sharing here, studying and analyzing forms of poetry like the sonnet, the ode, the abecedarian, and the ‘list poem,’ then they also ought to have a sense for what it feels like to create those very same forms. I believe this makes for learning that extends beyond our classrooms, and into the world. 

This particular version of the Poetry Portfolio assignment owes a big debt to three outstanding English Language Arts teachers and thinkers: Melissa Alter Smith & Lindsay Illich (of course!) and Tom Romano. So many of the prompts that inspired the poems in the portfolios I’ll be sharing are directly from the bookmarked, dog-eared, and many-times photocopied pages of Chapter 7 of  Teach Living Poets. Thank you for this beautiful and life-giving book, Melissa and Lindsay!

As for Tom Romano: while I’ve utilized for years Romano’s idea of having students create writing pieces in multiple genres as a ‘way in’ to research (see his wonderful Fearless Writing: Multigenre Writing to Motivate and Inspire), it’s only more recently that I’ve thought of applying it to the creative writing work students do in the poetry units–and specifically here, in poetry units in the AP English Literature classes I teach.

Students study different ‘genres’ of poetry all the time in class–for instance, in this particular unit, we looked at and read sonnets, odes, abecedarian poems, list poems, and ‘reverse’ poems. What better way to truly understand that form or ‘subgenre’ of a poem than to write one yourself?  Here are some of the pairings between readings and creative writing prompts, and the lovely student poems that came from them:

Sonnets

We read and discussed Shakespeare’s powerful “When I Do Count the Clock That Tells the Time”. And then watched and discussed Brian Sztabnik’s excellent minilesson on sound features within that poem that’s on the AP Classroom site. And then we looked at Laurie Ann Guererro’s beautiful sonnet honoring her grandfather, “Without You I Am Cactus”. Students noted differences and similarities between the contemporary and Elizabethan sonnet. I then gave them the option of writing their own 14-line sonnet, either within the strict rhyme and meter of the Elizabethan or solely with the limitation of 14 lines. Here is Joaquin’s beautiful sonnet, honoring the recent passing of his dog, Shadow, “Reaping the Harvest” and Lupita’s terrific “El Nopalito” which bounces back and forth between Spanish and English.

Odes

Teach Living Poets offers some excellent introductory background on the form of the ode, and has some great mentor texts that we read and studied, including José Olivarez’s wonderful “Ode to Cheese Fries” (featured in Chapter 7 of Teach Living Poets).  Because our class has included a generous amount of spoken word poetry, (and because students will be sharing their own spoken word poems in a school poetry slam later this year), I gravitated toward LMS Curriculum’s wonderful catalog of poems (and AP English prompts) on Odes. So, as students were composing their own odes, they were reading and doing analysis on Tyree Daye’s “Ode to Small Towns,” Amina Fatima’s “Ode to Kindergarten,” Angel Nafis’ “Ode to Dalya’s Bald Spot,” Elizabeth Acevedo’s “Rat Ode,” and Camisha Jones’ “Ode to the Chronically Ill Body.” After reading and analyzing these mentor texts and working with the prompts in Teach Living Poets, students were moved to create their own odes. Here is Justyce’s “Ode to My Locs” inspired by the work of Jayden Antwine, as she explains here:

Abecedarians

Reverse Poems

Teach Living Poets features Matt Rasmussen’s moving “Reverse Suicide” as an example of the power of starting from the ‘end’ of an event and moving ‘backward.’ This got students thinking of lots of ways they might begin at the end, and even have the poem work backwards ‘line by line.’ Liberty’s poem, “From my Ego” works beautifully backwards and forwards, and in that granular sense, as does Josselyn’s, “I Can”.

Critical Response Process as a Way In to Student Workshop and Feedback

In my experience, having a real, live audience for students to share their own work is so important for their developing agency and power as writers. And feedback (from each other) that is more than a checklist but actually motivates the student writer to continue revising their piece is hard to facilitate. Enter the Critical Response Process, courtesy of the scholarship and practice of Liz Lerman (and made popular for creative writing programs and teachers through the writing of Felicia Rose Chavez’s Anti-Racist Writing Workshop). In the Critical Response Process, or CRP for short, it is the student artist who initiates and directs the agenda of the feedback they receive, and it is according to their own intentions and needs as a writer, rather than a pre-written or prescribed rubric or checklist. The whole goal of CRP is conversation about the work, rather than on some end product. In my experience over the past two years facilitating and listening in on these kinds of conversation, they can be truly transformative. And very often allow ways in to STUDENT-directed revision, making more and more rare and useless those questions we teachers dread: “So how do I fix this? How do I make this an “A” / 4.0 / passing grade, etc.?”

Student Portfolio Samples

Because this part of the unit followed on the heels of a “Literature Circles” part in which students studied and discussed in small groups a contemporary poetry collection of their choice, the students had TONS of great mentor texts to choose from. And as part of the portfolio assignment (see rubric here), I made sure to have students reflect on the ways their analysis and interpretation of the published poems in the collections influenced their own creation of poetry in that genre. 

I’ve gotten permission to share a few of the full student portfolios here, as google sites But it’s also worth noting that many of the students committed poems to memory for an in class recital at the end of the unit, and also worth noting that 12-15 will be sharing their poetry in our Poetry Slam this month! So, in a real way, they have stood and will stand by the words they have written as they look to build up and transform their communit(ies). Year after year, these students MOVE EACH OTHER with their thoughtful, funny, and passionate work. I’m grateful to be able to share some of that work with you here!

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Thank you, Zach! Check out Zach’s other post about poetry literature circles.

If you would like to write a guest post, please reach out to Melissa via DM on Instagram or X at @melaltersmith.

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