A Note Slipped Under the Door: Teaching from Poems We Love

by Nick Flynn, Shirley McPhillips, Philippa Stratton (Editor)

"WHATEVER SHIRLEY OR NICK TELL YOU-BELIEVE THEM."

- Naomi Shihab Nye
How do we read a poem? What can we teach from a poem we love? How can we name what poets do in order to inform our writing, our teaching?

In their staff development work with teachers, Nick Flynn and Shirley McPhillips have often encountered these and similar questions. This book invites preservice and inservice teachers, staff developers - anyone who wants to make a lasting place for poetry in their own and their students' lives - into many of these same primary through middle school classrooms for an up-close look at several thoughtful, rigorous, poetry inquiries.

Each chapter begins with a mentor poem as the centerpiece for discussion, followed by a short narrative of ways the authors view their world through that chapter's particular poetic "lens." The authors then walk the reader into a classroom writer's workshop where, through vignettes, conversations, and carefully designed mini-lessons, that chapter's key element of poetic practice is being studied over time.

Other aspects that will help teachers in designing and conducting inquiry around mentor poems include:


mini-lessons that take students through an inquiry from launch to in-depth extensions;
illustrations of student writing samples in the "try it" stages, successive drafts, and crafted poems;
words, stories, and examples of best-loved poets that inspire and instruct us in our own thinking and teaching;
appendixes that include various types of book lists, charts, conference transcripts, and additional poems.

A Note Slipped Under the Door will show how you might help your student writers let the poems they love teach them what they need to know, and build a writing life that includes finding and crafting their own.

Genres: Poetry, Teaching, Education

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Nick Flynn is an American writer, playwright, and poet.



Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Reviews

[Garrett Zecker · Rating 2 out of 5]

A pedagogical manual about teaching poetry writing to an audience of non-poets. The work within uses mentor poems to break down the specific and important elements of writing poetry from imagery, sound, rhythm, and the other concrete foundations. The book itself was interesting as it was a bit “spacey” and “feely” about the approach to sharing the material with students, and at times lacked a concrete and specific method of approaching the work itself. That is not to say there weren't activities and approaches to the work - there were many - but I think that it was drowned in the exposition of the overall rationale. Additionally, I expected this book to be geared toward all students, and it is marketed in this manner, but many of the anecdotes about using the methodology and its results were mostly geared toward the elementary and middle school levels, while I would be using these techniques in the high school and postsecondary levels.

I did enjoy the work that the authors did, and the use of mentor poems is a very interesting method in general. I had done this to an extent, but did not necessarily surround the work we did around one poem, and rather used myriad sources to illustrate certain techniques. This is something I will definitely be moving forward with. I think that I will be marking this book as “ok” as it did not really match my personal methodology or organizational strategy in approaching the work, and I think that perhaps the book would have been better if there was a further appendix that covered all of the material in the book in a more lesson-by-lesson plan-friendly format, and kept this separate from the “feely” sort of organization the rest of the book has. In other words, keep the material, but have a more objective and concrete section where it is spelled out in more concrete terms. Furthermore, more adult and continuing education examples would have been welcome.

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Using poems as mentor texts. Brilliant book.

[Jason Parkhurst · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Note Slipped Under the Door is a great resource. Not a checklist of boxes and standards or a blueprint of what and when you must perform in your classroom, but an invitation for inquiry and dialogue around poetry, an opportunity for creative teachers and students to interact with and to find mentor texts, poems, and each other (Imagine the discussion that can come from the first chapter's title alone--Watermelons in My Grandmother's Car--which is about image of course).

The way the text uses examples taken from classrooms and shows progressive revisions is helpful, especially for students (and teachers) who crave instant gratification. Sometimes it takes several revisions, and maybe going back to Chapter Four about the sounds of language, before a student (like one I remember) rewrites what were invisible plane passengers so they begin "stowing baggage and sipping green tea." Through this process, when students find poems that speak to them, and they tuck them into folders, it is a rewarding thing to watch. The authors have poetry know-how; A Note is an excellent addition to your mentor catalog.

[Chris Kostenko · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book that spends more time off the shelf and in my hands than any other book on poetry in my collection. For good reasons: It is both practical and beautiful. Practical, because if you're thinking about teaching with this book, you'll find ideas that you can bring into your classroom that are honest, and authentic. Beautiful, because the mentor pieces that begin each chapter have been written by outstanding poets--Charles Simic, Jane Kenyon, William Stafford, and Stanley Kunitz to name just a few.

I would even recommend that you spend some time perusing the appendix in the pursuit of building your own professional library. Shirley runs with the best of them.

ck

[Pam Fisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have just reread portions of the book to teach a poetry unit to freshmen. Wonderful chronicle of how mentor poems were used to help children understand and write poetry.