
These poems each have a set of guided questions, related videos that allow for deeper investigation, and suggested writing activities. We'll be adding more poems here soon!
Blank Sonnet
- What season of the year is the poem set in? How does that shape the mood of the poem?
- “Blank Sonnet” is part of a novel-in-verse set in the 1930s in rural Nova Scotia. What sensual details help you imagine this setting?
- George Elliott Clarke writes in his micro-interview: “But as a black kid growing up in Halifax, NS, it was the African-American poets — available in my local library and leftist bookstores — I took to quickest.” The two central colours represented in the poem are black and white. What...
Dulce et Decorum Est
- This poem is chock full of similes and metaphors. Read the poem and circle every metaphor or simile you see. Which is the most remarkable to you? What makes it stand out?
- How do these metaphors and similes shape your sense of the soldiers’ experience of war? Does it contrast to other famous poems you’ve read about war – “In Flanders Fields,” for instance?
- How might your reading of the poem change if the poet had included some contextual details about World War I – about the enemy or “freedom”...
fluorine
- The near absence of punctuation and capitalization is notable in this poem. What effect does this visual absence have on how you relate to the words? How you read them?
- Consider the speaker’s tone. Where does the speaker use irony to examine “mundane acts” and what Wong refers to in this micro-interview as “the materials in our daily lives?”
- What kind of “poison” is the speaker referring to? Where does the speaker see poison?
- The concluding image of shiny teeth on a “cold crisp...
Modestine
- The title of Crosbie’s poem refers to a donkey named Modestine. This is a literary allusion to Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem, “Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes.” Do you understand the poem, as it is, without having to research the literary allusion? If you think the title isn’t effective, can you suggest another one?
- In her micro-interview, the poet says that “Modestine” is a “poem about a poem.” How does Lynn Crosbie use metaphor to show how the loss of the donkey is parallel to what has been...
niya
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This is a block-shaped or prose poem, with long lines running to the left margin of the page. How does the shape of the poem reflect and reinforce what the poet is saying?
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What are three ways the poet describes heat? How are heat and emotion related?
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Describe the narrator of the poem. What descriptive language is used to show who the narrator is, what the narrator does, and how the narrator feels?
- Can poetry both a contain and release emotions? In this poem, how do emotions connect to...
Opus 75, Sestina in B-flat for the Glockenspiel
1. Why is the girl in an empty classroom early in the morning? Literally, what is she doing?
2. What similes and metaphors are used in the poem? How do they help you understand what sort of person the girl is?
3. The poem uses a fair amount of enjambment, most notably in stanzas one and two. How does this poetic device affect the rhythm of lines? How might it support the poem’s theme?
4. What do we know about the girl’s peers/classmates? How might the repeated images of “...

