Poems I Read to my Students

I learned to read a poem at the start of class during my time at the Oregon Extension, where this practice initiated each academic morning. It is a way of beginning with a story, of incorporating more conversation partners, adding subtext and context to the primary topic. Opening with poetry layers richness of thought. Here I share the poems that I am reading to my students this semester. They are all linked so that you can partake as well. 

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Marie Rilke
Questionaire by Wendell Berry
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
Museums by Dan Beechy-Quick
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens
Why I Am Not a Painter by Frank O'Hara
The Facts of Life by Pádraig Ó Tuama
Gate A-4 by Naomi Shihab Nye
The Tyger by William Black
Praying by Mary Oliver
Race by Elizabeth Alexander
Photographs by Barbara Guest
Two Photographs by Dannie Abse
Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins
As Kingfishers Catch Fire by Gerard Manley Hopkins
The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams

Dirge Without Music by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Lost by David Wagoner
An Anthology of Rain by Phillis Levin
On Making by Rebecca Morgan Frank
Kintsugi by Nikita Gill
Let Evening Come by Jane Kenyon
Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley
The Return by Ruth L. Schwartz
Because These Failures Are My Job by Alison Luterman
Otherwise by Jane Kenyon
Elegy for Sol LeWitt by Ann Lauterbach
How to be Perfect by Ron Padgett
"There is a gold light in certain old paintings" by Donald Justice
For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet by Joy Harjo
Don't Hesitate by Mary Oliver