ABSTRACT
Poetry is all around us, we can tell our students; it is in the mass media we see and hear, in the pop music, even in our everyday language. But trying to teach about poetry and its primary component, imagery, is always a challenge. Students, regardless of age, usually consider the analysis of poetry the opposite of enjoying language-like tofu or veggie-burgers: supposedly good for you, but nothing you want to have anything to do with regularly. In response, those teachers and textbooks devoted to stimulating creative writing, and writing poetry in particular, offer many and varied prompts and exercises to engage students’ interests and creativity (see Behn & Twichell, 1992; Dunning & Stafford, 1992; Goldberg, 1986; & Sears, 1986).
