Author

Poems in the Center

Master List

This list is a work in progress, organized by themes, annotated to show possible elements of poetry, grammatical aspects, and writing prompts for each poem. The writing prompts are meant to be simple and easy, and serve as starters for a daily five-minute writing time. Poems with an asterisk (*) are my students’ favorites.

Author	Title	Theme	Elements of Poetry	Grammar	Writing prompts
Ciardi, John	The Shark*	Animals	Rhyme Repetition	Predicate and attributive adjectives	- List all the adjectives - Use 2 lines of the poem as a pattern to write about something else - Write a rhyming poem warning someone about something.
McLeod, Irene Rutherford	Lone Dog	Animals	Rhyme Rhythm Repetition	Attributive adjectives	- List all the adjectives and whether they are predicate or attributive - Write a poem from the point of view of an unhappy animal.
Nash, Ogden	The Tale of Custard the Dragon	Animals	Ballad Refrain	Compound sentences.	- Write a rhyming poem in which the end-words have been changed in order to rhyme. - Write a poem in which each stanza is a sentence.
Hughes, Ted	Mooses	Animals	Personification	Different types of adjectives	- Identify five different parts of speech used as adjectives - Write a poem about being lost.
Dunbar, Paul Laurence	Sympathy	Animals	Repetition Rhyme scheme	Adjectives	- Write about someone whose inside is different from his outside.
Phillips, Robert	The Panic Bird*	Animals	Diction Metaphor	Concrete nouns	- List ten concrete nouns from this poem. - Describe an emotion as if it were an animal or other thing.
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord	The Kraken*	Animals	Imagery	Adjectives	- Choose five of Tennyson’s adjectives to describe some everyday event. - Create your own monster in poem, story, or list form
Dickinson, Emily	XXIV (“A Narrow Fellow”)	Animals	Ballad form	Abstract and concrete nouns. Mass nouns. Verbals	- Write about a time you encountered something unexpected.
Roethke, Theodore	The Heron	Animals	Imagery, Diction	Nouns Prepositional phrases	- Observe something closely and write about it as if it were the most important thing in the world.
Hughes, Ted	Hawk Roosting*	Animals	Voice (Mask)	Abstract and concrete nouns	- Name four concrete nouns and four abstract nouns in this poem. - Write a poem or story about some animal or thing as if it were speaking.
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord	The Eagle (a fragment)	Animals	Metaphor and simile	Verbs	- Describe a wild animal using verbs that normally are used for human beings.
Hoban, Russell	The Sparrow Hawk	Animals	Metaphor	Nouns	- Write a list of metaphors for something, either using the pattern “x is y” or using verbs to show the comparison.
Coleman, Mary Ann	If I Were a Hawk	Animals	Voice	Past subjunctive verb mood	- Write an “If I Were” poem. - Write a series of comparisons like “an umbrella of stars” in the form “a ---- of -----”
Stevens, Wallace	Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird	Animals	Variations	Verb person (1^st and 3^rd)	- List 13 words connected with some common thing, animal, person, place, or idea - Write as many stanzas as you can about ways to look at a pencil or other common object.
Angelou, Maya	I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings	Animals	Line length Diction (short words) (Compare with “Sympathy” by Dunbar)	Sentence subject (“bird”) Conjunctions	- write about any topic using only one-syllable or only two-syllable words. - Argue in favor of or against keeping animals in captivity. - Use the poem as a pattern to compare two different things.
Hopkins, Gerard Manley	The Windhover	Animals	Alliteration	Sentence fragments	- Choose a letter of the alphabet and describe something (waking up, walking the dog, going to school) with as many words starting with that letter as possible.
Oliver, Mary	The Summer Day	Animals	Prayer (invocation)	Pronouns	- Which two lines of this poem do not have any pronouns in them? - If you were going to write a prayer, what would it be and why would you write it?
Yeats, William Butler	The Cat and the Moon	Animals	Diction Metaphor	Nouns	- Compare something non-living to an animal. - Use ten nouns from this poem to write a different poem.
Hughes, Ted	Crow’s Fall	Animals	Denotation and connotation (Compare to “The Cat and the Moon” by Yeats)	Personal pronouns	- Write a list of connotations for the words “white” and “black” - Create a legend about the way something first happened.
Poe, Edgar Allan	The Raven	Animals	Meter (trochaic octameter)	Verbals (participles)	- Write a poem in which all the lines end in “-ing.”
Belloc, Hilaire	Jim Who Ran Away from His Nurse and Was Eaten by a Lion	Animals	Ballad Tetrameter	Capitalization	- “My parents always warned me . . . “ - Write a sentence that uses the rules of capitalization backwards.
Giovanni, Nikki	Possum Crossing	Animals	(Compare with “A Metaphor Crosses the Road” by McFerren and “Traveling through the Dark” by Stafford)	Adjectives Ellipsis Commas (there are non)	- “out of the corner of his eye, he saw . . .” - write a poem or song about road kill. - should animals have the same right to live as humans? Explain.
Dickey, James	The Heaven of Animals*	Animals	Stanza length	Varying sentence structure Adverbs	- describe your own heaven or the heaven of some other thing or person. - use the words “forever,” “desperately,” “silently,” and “again” in a sentence.
Field, Rachel	Something Told the Wild Geese	Animals	Personification	Indefinite pronouns	- Use the pattern “Something told . . .” as the base for a poem. Make it clear what the “something” is without saying so.
Anonymous	I Saw a Peacock	Animals	Enjambment	Capitalization Personal pronouns – first person singular subjective	- Write a four-line puzzle poem like this one, in which the poem reads differently depending on where you start in the line.
Revere, Jonathan	Gull Skeleton	Animals	Form, repetition, rhyme	Verb tense – simple present, present perfect, simple past	- In a poem, rewrite reality to suit you.
Cisneros, Sandra	Abuelito Who*	Family & Childhood	Metaphor and simile	Relative pronouns Complex sentences	- Write a poem about a father or other male relative. - Write as long a sentence as you can, using relative pronouns to create subordinate clauses
Eady, Cornelius	One Kind Favor	Family & Childhood	(Compare with “Abuelito Who” by Cisneros)	Personal and indefinite pronouns	- What things would you want to fix if you only had a little while to live? - Find the two indefinite pronouns in this poem
Collins, Billy	On Turning Ten	Family & Childhood	Irony (Compare with “Flash Cards” by Dove)	Pronouns – demonstrative, relative, indefinite	- Find one example each of four types of pronouns in this poem - What did you believe when you were younger that you don’t believe now?
Thiel, Diane	Memento Mori in Middle School*	Family & Childhood	Metaphor Terza rima	Verb tense – use of simple past, past perfect	- Compare school to heaven, a factory, the Olympics, a shopping mall, or any other complicated place.
Dove, Rita	Flash Cards	Family & Childhood	Imagery (Compare with “On Turning Ten” by Collins)	Prepositional phrases, personal pronouns	- Write a poem about something a parent makes you do.
Wright, Judith	Legend*	Family & Childhood	Myth Ballad (Compare with “I started early, took my dog” by Dickinson)	Comparative adjectives Personal and indefinite pronouns	- Why doesn’t the author use quotation marks to show when someone is speaking? - Write your own legend—what great feat did someone achieve?
Roethke, Theodore	My Papa’s Waltz*	Family & Childhood	Iambic trimester	Pronoun antecedents Irregular verbs	- Describe an peaceful event or scene as if it were violent, or a violent event as if it were calm. Use verbs to achieve the effect.
Kunitz, Stanley	The Portrait*	Family & Childhood	Metaphor Imagery	Verb tense	- Write about a painful memory and how it makes you feel right now.
Hayden, Robert	Those Winter Sundays*	Family & Childhood	Enjambment	Verbs – irregular verbs, tense, modals	- Find one of each type of pronoun in this poem: personal, interrogative, relative, indefinite - Make a list of things people in your family do that aren’t appreciated.
Brooks, Gwendolyn	We Real Cool: Seven at the Golden Shovel	Family & Childhood	Enjambment Rhyme and rhythm	Personal pronouns: first person plural subjective	- write a poem in which each line ends with the subject of the next.
Hayden, Robert	The Whipping	Family & Childhood	Perspective shift	Pronouns – shift from third person to first person Punctuation: colon and ellipsis	- Describe together something that is happening now, and something that happened in the past. - Should children be spanked? Why or why not?
Flynn, Nick	Cartoon Physics, Part I*	Family & Childhood	Enjambment	Pronoun choice	- What facts about the world did your parents hide from you? - Should parents hide things from children?
Hales, Corinne	Power	Family & Childhood		Pronoun antecedents Verb tense	- Describe a prank you or someone you know played on someone. - “Everything had gone terribly wrong . . . “
Stevenson, Robert Louis	Bed in Summer*	Family & Childhood	Iambic pentameter	Verb infinitives	- find an example of a first, second, and third person pronoun in this poem.
Ondaatje, Michael	Bearhug	Family & Childhood	Enjambment Simile	Questions	- Give an emotion an animal’s name
Nesbitt, Kenn	Brandon Branson’s Backpack	Family & Childhood	Rhyme scheme List poem Doggerel	Pronoun antecedents	- What do you have in your backpack, and why?
Hemans, Felicia	Casabianca*	Family & Childhood	Parody Rhyme scheme	Irregular verbs	- Write a parody of “Casabianca” – “The boy stood on the burning deck . . . “
Walters, Ricky	Children’s Story*	Family & Childhood	Feminine rhyme Rap as poetry Use of slang	Pronoun antecedents	- Tell a story about an event in your life starting, “Once upon a time . .”
Graves, Robert	Warning to Children	Family & Childhood	Recursive structures	Punctuation – ending marks Nouns of address Suffixes	- “I untied the string . . . “ - Write a warning to children.
Duhamel, Denise	When You Forget to Feed Your Gerbil*	Family & Childhood	Similes	Pronouns – reflexive case	- How might a child have to take care of a mother? List the possible ways.
Orr, Gregory	Father’s Song	Family & Childhood		Punctuation – semicolons, colons, periods, commas	- Write a poem about trying to teach someone caution.
Irwin, Mark	My Father’s Hat	Family & Childhood	Compare to “The Whipping” Imagery	Verbs: Tense shift, modals, participles, passive	- Write a poem about someone’s possession so as to describe the person who owned it. Use sensory images.
Hughes, Langston	Mother to Son	Family & Childhood	Voice Metaphor	Spelling, apostrophes	- Write a poem of metaphors, starting with “Life for me ain’t been no . . . “
Kooser, Ted	Student	Family & Childhood	Metaphor Relate to “Brandon Branson’s Backpack” by Nesbitt	Verb tense, personal pronouns	- Make a list of things that a backpack could represent. - Describe some people you know (without using names) as if they were animals.
Merwin, W.S.