March 19, 2024 is release day for Georgia Heard’s Awakening the Heart, 2e! The following is an excerpt from the book, accompanied by a video reading from the author.
To introduce poetry writing, you might start by reading my poem “Where Do I Find Poetry?” (2007). Afterward, ask each student to contribute an idea—one specific place where they find poetry—to a chart. Encourage them to be as specific as possible. You might then have your students work independently and write their own list of where they find poetry in their poetry notebook. This list can serve as inspiration for their future poems and can also be transformed into a list poem about where the class finds poetry or individual poems.
Where Do I Find Poetry?
I open my eyes and what do I see?
Poetry spinning all around me!
In small ants trailing over the ground,
bulldozing dry earth into cave and mound.
In a hundred grains of ocean sand
that I cradle in the palm of my hand.
In a lullaby of April rain,
tapping softly on my windowpane.
In trees dancing on a windy day,
when sky is wrinkled and elephant gray.
Poetry, poetry! Can be found
in, out and all around.
But take a look inside your heart,
that’s where a poem truly likes to start.
Listen to Georgia Heard on the Heinemann podcast discuss the new book.
Awakening the Heart, Second Edition releases on March 19th.
Join Georgia and Naomi Shihab Nye for a Free Event celebrating the book's release!
How do we infuse poetry into our classrooms? This new edition of Awakening the Heart stands on the shoulders of the original edition as a roadmap for answering this
question. It aims to keep the heart in teaching poetry and to help us realize that poems are so much more than a genre student or a way to analyze text for a reading test. Throughout the text, Georgia Heard threads the voices of young and well-known poets together to illustrate the power and joy of poetry. It offers useful tools, examples, and stories for teachers and instructors to translate into their own communities.
