Modern and Postmodern Poetry
Gaithersburg High School Summer Reading Program 2014
Ms. BourqueMs. BourqueMs. BourqueMs. Bourque
To complete your summer reading assignment, follow these instructions:
1. Read all of the following poems.
2. Select four poems that you like the best.
3. Complete one poetry response form for each of the four poems you select.
4. Find one additional poem on your own, read it, and fill out a poetry response form for that poem. The fifth
poem can be one from this packet, one you already know and love, or a new one that you find through
independent reading.
5. Bring this packet, including your five completed poetry response forms, to the summer reading seminars in
September.
2
Contents
“A Girl Ago” ………………………………………………………………….……………………….. Lucie Brock-Broido ……………………………… 3
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/246818
“Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town”……………………………………………………. e.e. cummings ……………………………………. 4
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15403
“Blood” ………………………………………………………………………………………………….. Naomi Shihab Nye ………………………………. 5
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16411
“Boy at the Window”……………………………………………………………………………… Richard Wilbur…………………………………….. 6
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/boy-at-the-window/
“Cartoon Physics, Part 1”……………………………………………………………………….. Nick Flynn……………………………………………. 7
http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/038.html
“Did I Miss Anything?”……………………………………………………………………………. Tom Wayman………………………………………. 8
http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/013.html
“Facing It”………………………………………………………………………………………………. Yusef Komunyakaa………………………………. 9
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15830
“For My Daughter”…………………………………………………………………………………. David Ignatow……………………………………… 10
http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/064.html
“I Have Been a Stranger in a Strange Land”……………………………………………. Rita Dove ……………………………………………. 11
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/30842
“Introduction to Poetry”………………………………………………………………………… Billy Collins………………………………………….. 12
http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/001.html
“My Dad, In America”…………………………………………………………………………….. Shann Ray……………………………………………. 12
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/245138
“Near the Wall of a House”……………………………………………………………………. Yehuda Amichai ………………………………….. 13
http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/074.html
“Remora, Remora” ………………………………………………………………………………… Thomas Lux …………………………………………. 13
http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/022.html
“Tendency Toward Vagrancy”………………………………………………………………… Philip Nikolayev …………………………………… 14
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/247204
“The Rolling Saint”…………………………………………………………………………………. Aimee Nezhukumatathil………………………. 15
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/245518
“The Taxi”………………………………………………………………………………………………. Amy Lowell …………………………………………. 16
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171722
“To The One Who Is Reading Me”………………………………………………………….. Jorge Luis Borges…………………………………. 16
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/243616
“Tombo”………………………………………………………………………………………………… W.S. Di Piero ………………………………………. 17
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/246296
“Watching the Mayan Women” ……………………………………………………………. Luisa Villani …………………………………………. 18
http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/067.html
“Your World”…………………………………………………………………………………………..Georgia Douglas Johnson…………………….. 19
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/246766
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“A Girl Ago” Lucie Brock-Broido
No feeding on wisteria. No pitch-burner traipsing
In the nettled woods. No milk in metal cylinders, no
Buttering. No making small contusions on the page
But saying nothing no one has not said before.
No milkweed blown across your pony-coat, no burrs.
No scent of juniper on your Jacobean mouth. No crush
Of ink or injury, no lacerating wish.
Extinguish me from this.
I was sixteen for twenty years. By September I will be a ghost
And flickering in unison with all the other fireflies in Appalachia,
Blinking in the swarm of it, and all at once, above
And on a bare branch in a shepherd's sky. No Dove.
There is no thou to speak of.
Lucie Brock-Broido, "A Girl Ago" from Stay, Illusion. Copyright © 2013 by Lucie Brock-Broido. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Published with arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC.
Source: Stay, Illusion (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013)
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“Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town” e.e. cummings
anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn’t he danced his did
Women and men(both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn’t they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain
children guessed(but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more
when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone’s any was all to her
someones married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then)they
said their nevers they slept their dream
stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)
one day anyone died i guess
(and noone stooped to kiss his face)
busy folk buried them side by side
little by little and was by was
all by all and deep by deep
and more by more they dream their sleep
noone and anyone earth by april
wish by spirit and if by yes.
Women and men(both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came
sun moon stars rain
From Complete Poems: 1904-1962 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. Used with the permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Copyright © 1923, 1931, 1935, 1940, 1951, 1959, 1963, 1968, 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1976, 1978, 1979 by
George James Firmage.
5
“Blood” Naomi Shihab Nye
“A true Arab knows how to catch a fly in his hands,"
my father would say. And he’d prove it,
cupping the buzzer instantly
while the host with the swatter stared.
In the spring our palms peeled like snakes.
True Arabs believed watermelon could heal fifty ways.
I changed these to fit the occasion.
Years before, a girl knocked,
wanted to see the Arab.
I said we didn’t have one.
After that, my father told me who he was,
“Shihab”—“shooting star”—
a good name, borrowed from the sky.
Once I said, “When we die, we give it back?”
He said that’s what a true Arab would say.
Today the headlines clot in my blood.
A little Palestinian dangles a toy truck on the front page.
Homeless fig, this tragedy with a terrible root
is too big for us. What flag can we wave?
I wave the flag of stone and seed,
table mat stitched in blue.
I call my father, we talk around the news.
It is too much for him,
neither of his two languages can reach it.
I drive into the country to find sheep, cows,
to plead with the air:
Who calls anyone civilized?
Where can the crying heart graze?
What does a true Arab do now?
From 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East by Naomi Shihab Nye, published by Greenwillow Books (2002). Originally published in
Yellow Glove by Naomi Shihab Nye, published by Breitenbush Books. Copyright © 1986 by Naomi Shihab Nye. Reprinted by permission of the
author. All rights reserved.
6
“Boy at the Window” Richard Wilbur
Seeing the snowman standing all alone
In dusk and cold is more than he can bear.
The small boy weeps to hear the wind prepare
A night of gnashings and enormous moan.
His tearful sight can hardly reach to where
The pale-faced figure with bitumen eyes
Returns him such a God-forsaken stare
As outcast Adam gave to paradise.
The man of snow is, nonetheless, content,
Having no wish to go inside and die.
Still, he is moved to see the youngster cry.
Though frozen water is his element,
He melts enough to drop from one soft eye
A trickle of the purest rain, a tear
For the child at the bright pane surrounded by
Such warmth, such light, such love, and so much fear.
7
“Cartoon Physics, Part 1” Nick Flynn
Children under, say, ten, shouldn't know
that the universe is ever-expanding,
inexorably pushing into the vacuum, galaxies
swallowed by galaxies, whole
solar systems collapsing, all of it
acted out in silence. At ten we are still learning
the rules of cartoon animation,
that if a man draws a door on a rock
only he can pass through it.
Anyone else who tries
will crash into the rock. Ten-year-olds
should stick with burning houses, car wrecks,
ships going down -- earthbound, tangible
disasters, arenas
where they can be heroes. You can run
back into a burning house, sinking ships
have lifeboats, the trucks will come
with their ladders, if you jump
you will be saved. A child
places her hand on the roof of a schoolbus,
& drives across a city of sand. She knows
the exact spot it will skid, at which point
the bridge will give, who will swim to safety
& who will be pulled under by sharks. She will learn
that if a man runs off the edge of a cliff
he will not fall
until he notices his mistake.
from Some Ether, 2000
Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minn.
Copyright 2000 by Nick Flynn.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced with permission.
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“Did I Miss Anything?” Tom Wayman
Nothing. When we realized you weren’t here
we sat with our hands folded on our desks
in silence, for the full two hours
Everything. I gave an exam worth
40 percent of the grade for this term
and assigned some reading due today
on which I’m about to hand out a quiz
worth 50 percent
Nothing. None of the content of this course
has value or meaning
Take as many days off as you like:
any activities we undertake as a class
I assure you will not matter either to you or me
and are without purpose
Everything. A few minutes after we began last time
a shaft of light suddenly descended and an angel
or other heavenly being appeared
and revealed to us what each woman or man must do
to attain divine wisdom in this life and
the hereafter
This is the last time the class will meet
before we disperse to bring the good news to all people
on earth.
Nothing. When you are not present
how could something significant occur?
Everything. Contained in this classroom
is a microcosm of human experience
assembled for you to query and examine and ponder
This is not the only place such an opportunity has been
gathered
but it was one place
And you weren’t here
From Did I Miss Anything? Selected Poems 1973-1993, 1993
Harbour Publishing
Copyright 1993 Tom Wayman.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced with permission.
9
“Facing It” Yusef Komunyakaa
My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn’t,
dammit: No tears.
I’m stone. I’m flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way--the stone lets me go.
I turn that way--I’m inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap’s white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman’s blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird’s
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet’s image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I’m a window.
He’s lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she’s brushing a boy’s hair.
From Dien Cai Dau by Yusef Komunyakaa. Copyright © 1988 by Yusef Komunyakaa. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. All rights
reserved.
10
“For My Daughter” David Ignatow
When I die choose a star
and name it after me
that you may know
I have not abandoned
or forgotten you.
You were such a star to me,
following you through birth
and childhood, my hand
in your hand.
When I die
choose a star and name it
after me so that I may shine
down on you, until you join
me in darkness and silence
together.
from Against the Evidence: Selected Poems 1934-1994
Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, Conn.
Copyright 1993 by David Ignatow.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced with permission.
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“I Have Been a Stranger in a Strange Land” Rita Dove
Life's spell is so exquisite, everything conspires to break it. - Emily Dickinson
It wasn't bliss. What was bliss
but the ordinary life? She'd spend hours
in patter, moving through whole days
touching, sniffing, tasting . . . exquisite
housekeeping in a charmed world.
And yet there was always
more of the same, all that happiness,
the aimless Being There.
So she wandered for a while, bush to arbor,
lingered to look through a pond's restive mirror.
He was off cataloging the universe, probably,
pretending he could organize
what was clearly someone else's chaos.
That's when she found the tree,
the dark, crabbed branches
bearing up such speechless bounty,
she knew without being told
this was forbidden. It wasn't
a question of ownership—
who could lay claim to
such maddening perfection?
And there was no voice in her head,
no whispered intelligence lurking
in the leaves—just an ache that grew
until she knew she'd already lost everything
except desire, the red heft of it
warming her outstretched palm.
Source: Poetry (October 2002).
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“Introduction to Poetry” Billy Collins
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
from The Apple that Astonished Paris, 1996
University of Arkansas Press, Fayetteville, Ark.
Permissions information.
Copyright 1988 by Billy Collins.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced with permission.
“My Dad, In America” Shann Ray Source: Poetry (January 2013).
Your hand on my jaw
but gently
and that picture of you
punching through snow
to bring two deer, a gopher,
and a magpie
to the old Highwalker woman
who spoke only Cheyenne
and traced our footprints
on leather she later chewed to soften.
We need to know in America there is still blood
for forgiveness.
Dead things for the new day.
13
“Near the Wall of a House” Yehuda Amichai
Near the wall of a house painted
to look like stone,
I saw visions of God.
A sleepless night that gives others a headache
gave me flowers
opening beautifully inside my brain.
And he who was lost like a dog
will be found like a human being
and brought back home again.
Love is not the last room: there are others
after it, the whole length of the corridor
that has no end.
from Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai.
Edited and translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell (1986).
HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., New York, NY
Copyright 1986 by Yehuda Amichai.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced with permission.
“Remora, Remora” Thomas Lux
Clinging to the shark
is a sucker shark,
attached to which
and feeding off its crumbs
is one still tinier,
inch or two,
and on top of that one,
one the size of a nick of gauze;
smaller and smaller
(moron, idiot, imbecile, nincompoop)
until on top of that
is the last, a microdot sucker shark,
a filament’s tip – with a heartbeat – sliced off,
and the great sea
all around feeding
his host and thus him.
He’s too small
to be eaten himself
(though some things swim
with open mouths) so
he just rides along in the blue current,
the invisible point of the pyramid,
the top beneath all else.
From The Cradle Place
Houghton Mifflin, 2004
Copyright 2004 Thomas Lux.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced with permission.
14
“Tendency Toward Vagrancy” Philip Nikolayev
I’ve long had what Soviet psychiatrists
called “a tendency toward vagrancy.”
At four I would run away from home
repeatedly for a whole day, alone
or sometimes with a friend named Boris
of like age. Knew full well we “just can’t do this,”
but nudge for nudge and wink for wink,
we’d board the trolleybus #10, I think,
buy tickets at four kopeks each
from our gleanings and savings of the week,
stick them into the ticket punch on the wall,
watch the chad fall as you pulled,
and ride all across Kishinev in half an hour
to get off near that unforgettable restaurant
built in the likeness of a huge wine barrel.
We peered inside, it was cool.
Then we had options:
go and splash in the local artificial lake
(I couldn’t swim yet),
wonder in between along the banks,
catching frogs to take home in a glass jar
to populate a small construction pond (why
did we always use my shirt to do this?),
or go and explore the local flea market,
which was not at all safe to do,
but even at four it’s nice to have options.
(One guy sold what we thought was a gun,
we asked him and he confirmed it.)
Those were days of cholera epidemics
in Moldova. We’d buy peasant-cooked
fodder corn on the cob when we got hungry,
haggled with old ladies over pennies.
We wouldn’t catch the return trolley until sunset.
Then it’s always the same picture:
the wicket creaks open, the landlord’s mutant
barks through froth, my wet shirt clings.
I step out of the dark
toward my mother waiting by the door
of our “temporary house” on Kaluga Street,
which was a bit of a dirt road, probably still is.
She has been crying, takes me inside.
Room and kitchen (no bathroom
or running water): the room
had a brick stove, the kitchen
a dirt floor (with mice and sometimes grass)
and a white washstand — these lines
are all that has survived of them.
There was great beauty in their squalor.
She has been crying, takes me inside,
says she will scold me later.
I know it will be soon. First she must call
the cops to tell them I’ve been found.
Of course, back then I didn’t understand anything:
neither how a poet harms his mother,
nor how alienated (thank you, Marx, for that term)
one can be from the start, and free
in the grip of that greatest paradox of all —
a happy Soviet childhood.
Philip Nikolayev, “Tendency Toward Vagrancy” from Letters from Aldenderry. Copyright © 2006 by Philip Nikolayev. Reprinted by permission of
Philip Nikolayev.
Source: Letters from Aldenderry (Salt Publishing, 2006)
15
“The Rolling Saint” Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Lotan Baba, a holy man from India, rolled on his side for four thousand kilometers across the country in his quest for world peace and eternal salvation. —Reuters
He started small: fasting here and there,
days, then weeks. Once, he stood under
a banyan tree for a full seven years, sitting
for nothing—not even to sleep. It came
to him in a dream: You must roll
on this earth, spin your heart in rain,
desert, dust. At sunrise he’d stretch, swab
any cuts from the day before, and lay prone
on the road while his twelve men swept
the ground in front of him with sisal brooms.
Even monkeys stopped and stared at this man
rolling through puddles, past storefronts
where children would throw him pieces
of butter candy he’d try and catch
in his mouth at each rotation. His men
swept and sang, swept and sang
of jasmine-throated angels
and pineapple slices in kulfi cream.
He rolled and rolled. Sometimes
in his dizzying spins, he thought
he heard God. A whisper, but still.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil, "The Rolling Saint" from Miracle Fruit. Copyright © 2003 by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. Reprinted by permission of Tupelo
Press.
Source: Miracle Fruit (Tupelo Press, 2003)
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“The Taxi”
Amy Lowell
When I go away from you
The world beats dead
Like a slackened drum.
I call out for you against the jutted stars
And shout into the ridges of the wind.
Streets coming fast,
One after the other,
Wedge you away from me,
And the lamps of the city prick my eyes
So that I can no longer see your face.
Why should I leave you,
To wound myself upon the sharp edges of the
night?
Amy Lowell, “The Taxi” from The Complete Poetical Works of Amy
Lowell. Copyright © 1955 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Copyright
© renewed 1983 by Houghton Mifflin Company, Brinton P. Roberts,
and G. D'Andelot, Esquire. Reprinted with the permission of
Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
Source: Selected Poems of Amy Lowell (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,
2002)
“To The One Who Is Reading Me” Jorge Luis Borges
You are invulnerable. Didn’t they deliver
(those forces that control your destiny)
the certainty of dust? Couldn’t it be
your irreversible time is that river
in whose bright mirror Heraclitus read
his brevity? A marble slab is saved
for you, one you won’t read, already graved
with city, epitaph, dates of the dead.
And other men are also dreams of time,
not hardened bronze, purified gold. They’re dust
like you; the universe is Proteus.
Shadow, you’ll travel to what waits ahead,
the fatal shadow waiting at the rim.
Know this: in some way you’re already dead.
Translated from the Spanish by Tony Barnstone
Source: Poetry (March 2012).
17
“Tombo” W.S. Di Piero
In Safeway yesterday, a young man sat on the floor,
pulled off his shoes, granted audience to us,
his fellow seekers, and picked his naked feet.
He smiled, our brother, at the story he told
of deliverance at the hand of Master Tombo,
lord and creator, whose round energy
lives in us surrounds us surrounds our milk
our butter our eggs: see Him there,
in the Slurpee glaze upon the freezer case?
In that elder by the yogurt shelves?
I believed his happiness and coveted
a tidy universe. He picked his feet
while a child whimpered by the melons, her nanny’s
mango aura made the cold blown air
touch my brain, I smelled myself in my aging body
and felt my silly bones collapse again.
I wanted Tombo’s dispensation to save
this faint believer and the indifferent world
that rivers through and past me. Down my aisle
lavender respired from the flower stall
and Security spoke kind words to our prophet.
Oh I love and hate the fickle messy wash
of speech and flowers and winds and the tides
and crave plain rotund stories
to justify our continuity. To the Maya corn was god,
spilled blood made corn grow,
the blood gods shed watered needy ground
and became People who worshipped the corn.
Tombo’s grace carries us, convinced, from one
inarticulate incoherent moment to the next.
Tonight the wet streets and their limelight sigh.
Orion turns, burning, unchanged again.
Bread rises somewhere and its ovens scent the trees.
My poor belief lives in the only and all
of the slur of what these are, and what these are
streams toward loss in moments we live through.
As children we were lost in our opaque acts
but fresh and full in time. I remember
how I touched a girlish knee, how one boy
broke another’s face, how we all stood
in hard gray summer rain so it would run
down the tips of noses to our tongues.
Source: Poetry (September 2013).
18
“Watching the Mayan Women”
Luisa Villani
I hang the window inside out “Selva” means forest or jungle
like a shirt drying in a breeze
and the arms that are missing come to me
Yes, it's a song, one I don't quite comprehend
although I do understand the laundry.
White ash and rain water, a method
my aunt taught me, but I'll never know
how she learned it in Brooklyn. Her mind
has gone to seed, blown by a stroke,
and that dandelion puff called memory
has flown far from her eyes. Some things remain.
Procedures. Methods. If you burn
a fire all day, feeding it snapped
branches and newspapers—
the faces pressed against the print
fading into flames-you end up
with a barrel of white ash. If
you take that same barrel and fill it
with rain, let it sit for a day,
you will have water
that can bring brightness to anything.
If you take that water,
and in it soak your husband's shirts,
he'll pause at dawn when he puts one on,
its softness like a haunting afterthought.
And if he works all day in the selva,
he'll divine his way home
in shirtsleeves aglow with torchlight.
from Hayden's Ferry Review, Issue 26, Spring / Summer 2000
Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ
Copyright 2000 by Luisa Villani.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced with permission.
19
“Your World”
Georgia Douglas Johnson
Your world is as big as you make it.
I know, for I used to abide
In the narrowest nest in a corner,
My wings pressing close to my side.
But I sighted the distant horizon
Where the skyline encircled the sea
And I throbbed with a burning desire
To travel this immensity.
I battered the cordons around me
And cradled my wings on the breeze,
Then soared to the uttermost reaches
With rapture, with power, with ease!
Source:
Words with Wings: A Treasury of African-American Poetry and Art
(HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 2001)
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Poetry Poetry Poetry Poetry ResponseResponseResponseResponse FormFormFormForm 1111 Name _________________________________
Title of Poem _____________________________________ Name of Poet _____________________________________
Topic
What is the poem about?
Speaker
Who is the speaker / narrator?
Message
What is the main idea being
conveyed?
Diction
Which words or brief phrases
most effectively convey the
poem’s meaning?
Tone
What is the speaker’s attitude
toward the topic or message
of the poem?
Reflection
Why do I like this poem?
What does it remind me of?
How does it make me feel?
How does it relate to my life?
What does it make me think
about?
21
Poetry Poetry Poetry Poetry ResponseResponseResponseResponse FormFormFormForm 2 2 2 2 Name _________________________________
Title of Poem _____________________________________ Name of Poet _____________________________________
Topic
What is the poem about?
Speaker
Who is the speaker / narrator?
Message
What is the main idea being
conveyed?
Diction
Which words or brief phrases
most effectively convey the
poem’s meaning?
Tone
What is the speaker’s attitude
toward the topic or message
of the poem?
Reflection
Why do I like this poem?
What does it remind me of?
How does it make me feel?
How does it relate to my life?
What does it make me think
about?
22
Poetry Poetry Poetry Poetry ResponseResponseResponseResponse FormFormFormForm 3 3 3 3 Name _________________________________
Title of Poem _____________________________________ Name of Poet _____________________________________
Topic
What is the poem about?
Speaker
Who is the speaker / narrator?
Message
What is the main idea being
conveyed?
Diction
Which words or brief phrases
most effectively convey the
poem’s meaning?
Tone
What is the speaker’s attitude
toward the topic or message
of the poem?
Reflection
Why do I like this poem?
What does it remind me of?
How does it make me feel?
How does it relate to my life?
What does it make me think
about?
23
Poetry Poetry Poetry Poetry ResponseResponseResponseResponse FormFormFormForm 4 4 4 4 Name _________________________________
Title of Poem _____________________________________ Name of Poet _____________________________________
Topic
What is the poem about?
Speaker
Who is the speaker / narrator?
Message
What is the main idea being
conveyed?
Diction
Which words or brief phrases
most effectively convey the
poem’s meaning?
Tone
What is the speaker’s attitude
toward the topic or message
of the poem?
Reflection
Why do I like this poem?
What does it remind me of?
How does it make me feel?
How does it relate to my life?
What does it make me think
about?
24
Poetry Poetry Poetry Poetry ResponseResponseResponseResponse FormFormFormForm 5 5 5 5 Name _________________________________
Title of Poem _____________________________________ Name of Poet _____________________________________
Topic
What is the poem about?
Speaker
Who is the speaker / narrator?
Message
What is the main idea being
conveyed?
Diction
Which words or brief phrases
most effectively convey the
poem’s meaning?
Tone
What is the speaker’s attitude
toward the topic or message
of the poem?
Reflection
Why do I like this poem?
What does it remind me of?
How does it make me feel?
How does it relate to my life?
What does it make me think
about?