Teaching Writing Through Poetry: Understanding Poetic Form and Its Power to Unleash Creative Expression(Teaching Writing Series)

Poetry is experiencing a cultural renaissance in the United States, capturing attention in ways not seen since the days of Robert Frost and Rod McKuen. With Amanda Gorman's rise to fame and Rupi Kaur drawing stadium-sized crowds, students are engaging with poetry on social media and discovering it as an accessible and expressive art form. Teaching Writing through Poetry, the 2nd book in a new series on Teaching Writing meets this moment by offering a structural approach that demystifies poetic form and illustrates how poems make rhetorical demands through formal choices. Designed for both seasoned poetry lovers and hesitant beginners, the book provides clear, practical guides for reading and writing poems. It helps students move beyond the misconception that poetry is simply unshaped emotional expression and instead equips them to appreciate and create poetry with intention and craft. Series; This series for K-12 and collegiate writing and English teachers, educators, curriculum specialists, and preservice teacher education candidates provides methods, pedagogy and practical exercises in the teaching of writing. Books in the series explore the vast array of ideas, strategies and topics that actively engage students in developing skills that will help them become better writers, critical readers and critical thinkers. These fresh methodologies will expand students' ideas on what writing means, as well as what learning can mean. Various approaches in the series will rejuvenate instructors and feed educators' own desires as lifelong learners. Each book is meant to make the educators lives both easier and more fulfilling, as the texts in this series include a plethora of writing exercises, prompts and approaches. Many titles will benefit educators from various disciplines who are interested in implementing more writing into their curriculum.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Form is Content 1. An Arbitrary Order Still Makes Demands: The Abecedarian 2. Looking in the Broken Mirror: The Ghazal 3. The Divided Self is a Field of Play: The Sonnet 4. Satellites and Snowballs: The Villanelle 5. An Obsession is a Tether: The Sestina 6. One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: The Pantoum 7. Write What You See: Ekphrastic Poems 8. Structuring Devices: Rhythm, Rhyme, and Line Bibliography About the Author

About the Author :
Jason Schneiderman has taught creative writing and lectured on poetry for over twenty years. He is the author of five books of poetry as well as the forthcoming essay collection Nothingism: Poetry at the End of Print Culture. For many years, he wrote a column for Teachers and Writers on teaching poetic form. He is Professor of English at the City University of New Yorks’s Borough of Manhattan Community College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Adept at working with novices and experts, Schneiderman’s approach creates shared knowledge and community within any classroom. Jason’s love of teaching has brought him into many settings outside of the university. He has taught in elementary schools, summer camps, and community based programs. He has been a visiting writer at high schools and colleges across the country, and has worked with both college and high school faculty on successfully integrating writing in their pedagogy. As guest host of The Slowdown, and longtime cohost of Painted Bride Quarterly, his voice has brought both poetry and his understanding of poetry to thousands of listeners. He has received fellowships and awards from Yaddo, The Fine Arts Work Center, The Fulbright Foundation, and the Poetry Society of America.

Review :
Teaching Writing Through Poetry is a gem of a handbook, combining the joyful celebration of poetry with practical guidance from an essential voice in American letters. In each concise chapter, Schneiderman provides a schematic for a different verse form, complete with an overview of its global history and several examples from his own and others’ poetry. This book is a series of warm and witty invitations to create, imagine, and reinvent with language. Newcomers to poetry and more advanced writers will find much to learn and enjoy in these pages. This book is a fabulous resource for all writers. This dazzling instruction manual makes you want to applaud every chapter—and try every form. Teaching Writing Through Poetry will turn any reader into a poetry adventurer and give any teacher a smooth entrée into poetry that is both useful and delightful. With a casual voice and a complete knowledge of poetry’s techniques, Jason Schneiderman executes many of the poetic forms himself, showing how to write them in lucid lines. He even tackles those tough-to-explain tools rhythm and rhyme—and ventures from the ghazal to the ekphrastic. Teaching Writing Through Poetry is more than a handbook—it’s a companion in verse.