Excerpts from "poemcrazy"

A teacher of creative writing, Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge explains in a collection of essays why she's "poemcrazy" and gives suggestions to students on "freeing your life with words."

Here are all the word lists to support the reading of Grade 9 Unit 4's texts from SpringBoard's Common Core ELA series: Poetry, poemcrazy, Nikki-Rosa, We Real Cool, Fast Break, Identity, Ego Tripping, Hanging Fire, odes, Sonnet 18, In Response to Executive Order 9066, Young, Poetry Cafe, poems by Nikki Giovanni
10 words 34 learners

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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. portable
    easily or conveniently transported
    Words are lightweight, unbreakable, portable, and they're everywhere.
  2. trigger
    put in motion or move to act
    A word can trigger or inspire a poem, and words in a stack or thin list can make up poems.
  3. laborious
    characterized by effort to the point of exhaustion
    Words taken out of the laborious structures (like this sentence) where we normally place them take on a spinning life of their own.
  4. irreverent
    showing lack of due respect or veneration
    In high school I idolized e. e. cummings because he was irreverent and made me feel free.
  5. profound
    showing intellectual penetration or emotional depth
    His poems are both goofy and profound, soft and sharp at the same time, tender and fierce.
  6. swagger
    walk with a lofty proud gait
    cummings reminds me to allow poems to swagger, soar or tiptoe in unexpectedly.
  7. image
    a visual representation produced on a surface
    Image is the root word of imagination.
  8. transform
    change or alter in appearance or nature
    Images we create in our poem can not only help us discover our feelings, but can help us begin to transform them.
  9. gesture
    motion of hands or body to emphasize a thought or feeling
    Look closely at your painting and find a detail that seems to express your feeling, perhaps one color or the gesture of someone's arm.
  10. farfetched
    highly imaginative but unlikely
    Let yourself go for the farfetched and the ridiculous when you make comparisons.
Created on Wed Sep 24 15:33:53 EDT 2014 (updated Fri Sep 26 16:44:35 EDT 2014)

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