Retelling: This book offers concrete tips about how to approach the task of creating poetry. It by recommending that writers keep a journal. Then goes on to deliver tips about poetry structures you might want to try: Acrostic Poems, Synonym Poems, Opposite Poems, Clerihews, List Poems, Persona Poems, and Narrative Poems. The book is rich with published and student examples of each form, and offers writing technique in green boxes in each chapter. You can learn to pay attention to the way words sound, to create images, to choose "the right" words, to use figurative language, and to use line breaks.

Thoughts and Feelings: I was forced to write poetry as a young student and my biggest challenge was finding something worth writing about. It wasn't that I didn't have ideas, I had ideas all the time, just never on the night I was supposed to generate a poem. At some point I said to myself, "Self," I said, "you really ought to start collecting ideas because they're going to keep asking you to come up with new material and you better have something." That's when I started my journal. I still write in it. The funny thing is, after that, no one ever asked me to write poetry anymore, they started asking me to write research papers instead. ( )

I used parts of this book for my lit project. ( )

One of the few books on writing poetry specifically designed for children. It's good, but simple, and seems to dwell on modern forms of poetry. By sixth or seventh grade, I'd probably give them a different book that is more comprehensive, unless they're just beginning to understand and write poetry.