Poet Tea Tuesday

I am very passionate about poetry and its ability to move and connect people. Every year at the library where I work, there is a poetry contest. Children and teens are able to enter their poetry and then they are able to come read their poetry at the event. It is a really amazing event that I got to witness this year. In preparation and leading up to the event, it seemed like a good idea to have some poetry nights with the teens until the poetry contest. This would help them realize that they too can write poetry and have a piece to enter into the contest, and it would make poetry fun and accessible to them. Because of this, Poet Tea Tuesdays came about!

The idea for Poet Tea Tuesday is simple: have hot water, tea,  and hot cocoa and then provide an active or passive type of poetry for the teens to do. This is a great program for colder months, because the teens can show up, write a poem, get something warm to drink and hang out and discuss their poems.

Since I think poetry is awesome at any time, here are some ideas to get a similar program started!

Poetry Cubes: Find a simple paper box template, add images and words, and then have the teens cut them out and assemble the boxes. Roll the box, and whatever image or word appears they have to include it in a poem or write a poem about it.

Post-it note Poetry: I really like this one! Have the teens all write a poem on a post-it note. To keep it interesting, provide different sizes and colors of post-it notes. They can then post the poem on a wall of the library. (Encourage library appropriate language, most teens do this anyway if the idea is already in place. Also, if they are comfortable with you, they will share their poetry work and you can double check that it is appropriate. I did not really worry about this too much, I appreciate expression, and my advice is to put up the library appropriate ones, but if a teen writes something that isn't have them take that one home and write another one for the library. Look at that you just got a teen to write two poems instead of one! Hurrah!)

Last idea, and stay tuned for more: Magnetic poetry! Provide a kit and several metal objects and let the teens create! Think of the largest metal thing that is in the library that you can provide for the teens (book cart, chair, bookshelf, refrigerator maybe not so much) and let them make a poem on that. I had some really amazing poems from this session, from cat poems (yay!) to really deep poetry all from those magnetic word kits. They are more than just magnets!

What is your favorite poem or poet? Leave a comment!
Dawn states: poetry is awesome! dstates@yorklibraries.org