Bonus: Inspiring K-12 Students with Voca

Teaching artists from the Poetry Center’s Writing the Community program offer ideas for using recordings from Voca to inspire K-12 students. Kristen E. Nelson discusses the benefits of using a simple, concrete parameter—such as writing about the moon—for younger students. She shares moon poems by Al Young (“Excerpt from ‘About the 22 Moon Poems’” and “Moon of No Return”) and a student at Miles Exploratory Learning Center. Lisa M. O’Neill discusses the power of using lists and other forms of everyday writing familiar to students as an entry point to help students feel comfortable with writing poetry. She introduces a list poem by US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo (“For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet”) and shares two list poems written by students at the CAPE School that came out of an assignment inspired by Wang Ping’s poem “Things We Carry on the Sea.”Listen to the full recordings of Young and Harjo reading for the Poetry Center on Voca:Al Young (1997) Joy Harjo (2016) Learn more about the Poetry Center’s education programs by visiting the Poetry Center online and clicking on the “Education” tab.

Om Podcasten

Poetry Centered features curated selections from Voca, the University of Arizona Poetry Center’s online audiovisual archive of more than 1,000 recordings of poets reading their work during visits to the Center between 1963 and today. In each episode, a guest poet introduces three poems from Voca, sharing their insights about the remarkable performances recorded in our archive. Each episode concludes with the guest poet reading a poem of their own.