Dive In

1. Roads and highways are often used as a metaphor for life’s journey. If that’s the case, where on the “road of life” do you sense this speaker is? How do they feel about their situation? What do they care about? What clues does the poet leave for you to discover this information?
2. This poem gets a lot of energy from its verbs. List all the verbs, and try to replace them with others to see how the poem might change.
3. You might know Dennis Lee’s writing for children, including Alligator Pie and Jelly Belly. The tone here is very different, but...

1. This poem seems to be about the speaker’s deepening love of stone. What does the speaker say about that love? How is she affected by it? How has she been changed?
2. You might notice the poem charting a passage of time and the progression of this love. Take note of the first line of each stanza. What are those first lines doing to help move us through time and through the poem?
3. After reading Pat Lowther’s biography, and especially about the way she died, does your reading of this poem change? How do you understand the speaker’s love of stone?
4. You...

1. The word “peace” is used twice in the first stanza. What other words or images throughout the poem feel restful to you?
2. What does the speaker say the craftsman has come to do? Who do you think the craftsman is – a literal person or something else?
3. Dr. Afua Cooper is well known for educating and evaluating the historical context of enslaved Africans in her poems. How does the theme of liberation show up in the poem? Think creatively, socially, financially, emotionally, spiritually, etc.
4. What is the overall tone of the poem? Is it hopeful? Excited...

1. Drums and bugles were an important way for armies in the nineteenth century to send signals in the middle of battle. How does Whitman evoke the rhythm of these instruments in his poem?
2. This poem was written at the beginning of the American Civil War, when many on both sides assumed the conflict would be over quickly. How does Whitman express that confidence and bombast?
3. The poem wants all normal business to stop – no bargainers, no sleeping, no talking. But of course not everyone will be a soldier. What should the rest of the population be doing while the...

1. What season of the year is the poem set in? How does that shape the mood of the poem?
2. “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?
3. 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...

1. For a poem that’s about not being able to find a word, Partridge certainly uses a rich vocabulary! Collect all the ways she describes the sensation of being unable to find a word. Think about which senses each comparison evokes – some are more visual, others more tactile, etc. Which description most fully evokes how you feel when you can’t find the word you’re looking for?
2. Note how the form varies from short, one-word lines to more sprawling, prosey language. How might that reflect the speaker’s own stop-and-start efforts to locate her word? Can you think of another...

1. What kind of “magic” is happening in this poem?
2. This poem has many vivid similes (a comparison using "like" or "as") and metaphors (a comparison that doesn't use "like" or "as"). Is there one that stands out to you? Why that one?
3. The poet chose to use the second person in this poem. What effect does that have on your reading of the poem? How would your experience of the poem change if it were written in the third person?
4. Who is the speaker in this poem? What do we know about them? Do you think they're...

1. This poem is from Atwood’s book The Journals of Susanna Moodie, which loosely follows the life of the 19th century author of Roughing it in the Bush. But the voice of the poem is also very modern in its diction and imagery. Who is the speaker? Moodie? Some version of Atwood? Or is the speaker a stand-in for any mother who has lost a son? What are we to think of her?
2. This poem uses the image of a river in a lot of different ways. In the first stanza, it’s “the dangerous river of his own birth,” and then later it’s the literal river in which the son has...

1. This is a funny poem, but some of the jokes won’t land if you don’t catch the references. For example, what does “emeritus” mean? And how does that word work alongside titles like  “Ingenue” or “Good Samaritan”? If any of the terms are unfamiliar, look them up!
2. What’s the tone of this poem? Where are there hints that there are some dark shadows behind the laughs? Do you read it as snide or sad? Or both?
3. This poem uses a lot of multi-syllabic words — how does this affect the rhythm and feel of the poem?
4. “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” is a famous poem...

1. What is the mood of the speaker?
2. What does the word echolalia mean? How might this relate to the poem?
3. Repetition with variation is an important technique in music and poetry, but it is also a powerful tool in advertising. The speaker of the poem is very persuasive — are you persuaded?
4. This poem is taken from Ian Williams’ book Personals, which plays with the form of personal ads. Do you think the voice of this poem is speaking from a position of vulnerability or strength?
...

1. The action of the poem is mysterious, but the atmosphere of expectation and mythic possibility is strong. What is the speaker saying about the tension between the natural world and the human world of consumerism and waste?
2. In the first stanza, the speaker invokes something to be born and a sense of motion is initiated, moving up from the ocean floor. How does this set the tone for the poem?
3. The final stanza describes an equinox ritual where people write things they want to release onto paper and burn the paper in a fire. Does this feel like a contemporary...

1. This poem is rich with complicated emotions. How does the "fear of snakes" of the title transform into another feeling about snakes?
2. What is the main metaphor in this poem? How is it used to describe the speaker’s experience?
3. There are many references to duality in the poem, where experiences and descriptions can have at least two different qualities. Can you list these examples of "twinning"?
4. What does the poet do to make this memory feel present?
5. There are some long lines in this short poem! In reciting it, pauses, building, and...

1. How does the shape of each stanza recall a postcard?
2. The first two “postcards” are addressed to personified abstractions (Regret, Time), but then the following three arrive without an address, as if it doesn’t matter who receives them, only that they are sent out. What does this say about the speaker of the poem?
3. What do associate with postcards? What does this suggest about the speaker in the poem?
4. What are the poems reporting?
5. If you were going to recite this poem, how would you handle the rich, rhythmic language? Where would you...

1. This excerpt is from a book-length poem called Eunoia that has five chapters, each one corresponding to a single vowel. (Eunoia is the shortest word in the English language that contains all five vowels.) What does “eunoia” mean? What do you think the relationship is between the word eunoia and the experiment of this book?
2. Note that all of the words in this excerpt feature words that only contain the vowel I. What is the effect of hearing the same vowel sound repeated over and over? Do you feel that the vowel has a kind of personality of its own? If so how...

1. What do we know about the two people having a conversation in this poem?
2. What do we know about the person they are describing?
3. How would you characterize the relationship of the two people talking? Close? Strained? Loving? Guarded?
4. What tone do you feel in the poem? Does it change?
5. If you were going to recite this poem, how would you indicate the shifts back and forth between two voices?
6. Write a poem that is a dialogue between two people that runs together so that the reader...

1. This poem captures memories of a friendship evoked by a photograph. Which memory stood out to you the most? Why is that one so remarkable to you? Can you relate to it?
2. “Gayatri” is written in the second person (“you”) instead of third person (“she”). What effect does that create for you? Try reading the poem replacing each instance of “you” with “she.”
3. Souvankham Thammavongsa says in her micro-interview with Poetry In Voice that she found this photograph in a shoebox, then wrote the poem to show how “this photograph with no one in it actually had everything...

3) Throughout the poem, the speaker describes the history of grass and what it’s capable of, before switching tactics in the last line. The speaker instructs the reader to step on the grass because “it deserves it”. What effect does that shift have on the mood and rhythm of the poem...

1. What is happening in this poem? Who or what is saying "Hello"?
2. The poet has created striking snapshots throughout the poem with his choices of imagery and language. Which one is most striking to you? Why?
3. What does the poem's title, "Hail," make you think of?
4. How would you describe the mood of the poem? Does that mood shift anywhere?
5. If you were reciting this poem, how would you handle its short lines, commas, and periods? Where and how long would you pause?
6. Consider a complex issue, like climate change, fast fashion, or...

1. What special powers does this poem attribute to the onion?
2. Imagine how an onion looks, feels, smells, tastes, and sounds. Which of your senses does the poem awaken? Which does it leave out?
3. In what ways might fog sustain the earth?
4. This piece is part of a bilingual (Galician and English) series called “Homages to Water” that includes “Homage to the Mineral of Cabbage” and “Homage to the Force of the Potato,” which are all ingredients in borscht, the national soup of Ukraine. How does the picture of people sharing their country’s soup with the...

1. Who is the speaker in this poem? What do we know about them?
2. What does the refrain make you think of: “paint the picture in your hand / nd roll on home.”?
3. What rhyming pattern has the poet created? How does that shape your reading of the poem?
4. How would you describe the mood of this poem?
5. If you were reciting this poem, how would you handle its rhythm and rhyme? (It would be very easy to fall into a sing-song delivery.)
6. Write a poem that includes a refrain. As a variation, use the refrain or two other lines from “howlin at...

1. In our Q&A with Leanne Simpson, she explains that she wrote this poem because, “I was watching the closing of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and I felt angry, not reconciled”  How do you feel the poem transforms that anger?
2. How is the image of graffiti used in this poem?
3. How does the poem suggest resilience and survival in the face of attempted erasure?
4. How does the poet use repetition to suggest a continual re-emergence of the self?
5. Do you feel that the mood of the poem is the...

1. What’s the mood of the speaker? Does it shift before the poem ends? Where?
2. How does sound appear throughout the poem? What are your associations with drums? What about bells?
3. There are different interpretations of what is happening in this poem — what’s your take? Do you think the experience the speaker describes sounds terrible or exciting?
4. In what ways is this poem about a connection to something mysterious? In what ways does it seem to be about the rupture of connection?
5. Do you think this poem says more about death or life?
...

1. This poem unfolds like a dream. At what point do you know that it is not set in the real world?
2. The poem’s tone is funny, unnerving, and even sad. What images make you feel sympathy for the speaker? What images make you laugh? What images make you feel uncomfortable?
3. The speaker uses the second person (you) to directly address readers. How does this point of view affect your relationship to the speaker? What about the speaker’s use of conversational language instead of overtly ‘poetic’ language?
4. In the closing line, the speaker asks, “have I told...

1. Who are the speakers of the poem, the “we” who appear in line 6?  What do they want us to know about themselves? What information do they withhold from us?
2. The poem follows a consistent 4-beat line (with the exception of the lines with the “In Flanders fields” refrain). This is called tetrameter – (In Greek, tetra=four and meter=a measure or stride). But McCrae varies where the stresses of the lines appear. Read the poem and circle every stressed syllable. See if you can find places where McCrae deliberately speeds up, or slows down the line.
...

1. The poem mixes Cree words and their translations with descriptions of ceremonies “that cannot be translated.” What do you think gets lost in the translation from one language to another?
2. How does the poet use repetition in this poem? What’s the effect?
3. How does the speaker use natural imagery to celebrate his love?
4. In what ways does the poet invoke sensual imagery in the poem?
5. If you were going to recite this poem, what kind of pause would you place between the words in Cree and their translations? Would you use another tone of voice...

1. What does the French title mean in English?
2. In keeping with the ballad tradition, Keats doesn’t directly identify the speaker of the poem. What clues does the poem offer about the speaker? Who do you imagine the speaker to be?
3. “La Belle Dame sans Merci” begins with a series of questions that animate the knight’s story. What answers does the poem provide?
4. This poem is full of double entendres. Underline or copy down phrases that might have more than one meaning.
5. The poem opens with two stanzas of questions. Who do you think is asking...

1. What does the speaker say happens to the letters he throws away? 
2. Whose letters do you imagine the speaker is referring to?
3. How does the poem play on the double meaning of the word “letters”?
4. What is it you imagine the poet would “want back again?” What did he see?
5. “Letters” strikes an intriguing blend of matter-of-fact statement and metaphysical fantasy. How do these two modes influence the tone of poem? How could that be represented in a recitation?
6. Write a poem about throwing away something that was given to you....

4....

1. How does the structure of a mixed tape work to tell this poem’s story?
2. How does “side a” differ in tone from “side b”?
3. What images does the poet use to capture the cold atmosphere following the brother’s disappearance?
4. How are the relationships among the family members described?
5. If you were going to recite this poem, how would you voice its short lines? Where and for how long would you pause?
6. Write a poem using song titles to tell a story.

Useful Links...