Bibliography
Texts For Teachers
Blau, Sheridan D..The literature workshop: teaching texts and their readers. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003.
Koch, Kenneth.Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? Teaching Great Poetry to Children. 1st ed. New York: Random House, 1973.
Roberts, Terry, and Laura Billings.The Paideia Classroom: Teaching for Understanding. Larchmont, N.Y.: Eye on Education, 1999.
For Students: Texts About Cities
Brooks, Gwendolyn.The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks, ed. Elizabeth Alexander. New York: Library of America, 2005. Includes many poems that highlight an urban experience, including "We Real Cool."
Burton, Virginia Lee. The Little House. Boston: Houghton Mifflin co., 1942.
Doolittle, Hilda (H.D.).Collected Poems of H.D. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925. Includes "Cities."
Fisher, Roy. Selected Poems, ed. August Kleinzahler. Chicago: Flood Editions, 2011. Contains the poem "At Night on The Station Platform," a longer free-verse poem about individuals in a city.
Jaco, Ayesha, perf. "Ayesha Says."Food and Liquor II: The Great American Rap Album Part 1. Lupe Fiasco. 2012. MP3. Spoken word poem on a hip-hop album by Jaco's brother Wasalu Muhammad Jaco, a.k.a. "Lupe Fiasco."
McKay, Claude. Complete Poems, ed. William J. Maxwell. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Comprehensive collection of McKay's poetry, including "Subway Wind."
Saenz, Jacob. "Jacob Saenz : The Poetry Foundation." Poetry Foundation. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/jacob-saenz (accessed July 15, 2013). Saenz is a poet and editor from Chicago. While many of his poems might be inappropriate for younger children (due to profanity), they are brilliant portraits of city life. I will use the poems entitled "Sweeping the States," and "Blue Line Incident" with my students.
Sandburg, Carl. Poems of the Midwest: Containing Two Complete Volumes: Chicago Poems, and Cornhuskers. Cleveland: World Pub. Co., 1946. The first half of this text includes portraits of individuals and images of moments in Chicago city life. The accompanying photographs enhance the text and provide context for Sandburg's work.
Wright, Richard. Haiku: This Other World, ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani, and Robert L. Tener. New York: Arcade Pub. 1998. Several of the haiku in this collection call to mind an urban experience—often contrasted with some sort of natural imagery.
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