Thursday is UNESCO World Poetry Day. It is an opportunity to experience voices you may not have heard before, or see the world through a lens that is dissimilar to your own. Poetry crosses cultural boundaries and global borders. As a writing form, poetry can succinctly express complex concepts or synthesize ideas in any content area. I have written many times about the importance of text sets, especially as a way to expose all students to complex texts. Poetry, because of its patterns and structures, is usually a more complex text. So, including a poem in a text set is one way to boost text complexity. Offering students the choice to create a poem to demonstrate their mastery of content, express their opinion, and make connections to their lived experience is one way to differentiate instruction. Poems can share joy, spark creativity, build empathy, capture deep emotion, honor a life, amplify a cause, or when poems become songs… move a generation.
My mind is an endless garden where seeds of knowledge grow,
Twining vines, branching trees, spreading moss, intruding weeds
Sometimes a jungle of tangled ideas
Sometimes an impenetrable hedgerow of frustration
Sometimes a winding path of inspiration waiting for the right time to bloom
Inhabited by people real and imagined
Their voices are the rain, the wind, the sun
Each new experience
Each new opportunity
Adds soil where new seeds take root
---- Char Shryock
Poems To Spark Your Thinking
UNESCO World Poetry Day Homepage
Poets.org World Poetry Day links to poems from across the world
While AI can provide feedback on word choice or suggest ideas, this article from the MIT Press Reader looks at Can AI Write Authentic Poetry?
TEDTalks on Poetry
My favorite book of modern poems from around the world edited by American poet Naomi Shahib Nye - This Same Sky: A Collection of Poems from Around the World.