Poetry is NOT the easiest of literary genres to teach, but I always challenge myself and my students to make it as fun and relevant to today’s world as possible. That’s why I always start with music. I know, the older generations don’t think what kids listen to today is music, especially rap, right? Well, that too contains many of the poetic devices we teach in poetry and even though I myself don’t care much about this particular music genre (sorry rap lovers!) I capitalize on the fact that this is what kids like. After analyzing the poetic devices in this genre students realize that there is more to poetry than meets the eye (or should we say the ear?) Precisely to obtain more resources to teach poetry, specifically Asian poetry I set on the quest to find sites that can supplement my teaching of this literary genre through visuals and additional sources. While this appeared to be a mission impossible given the tons of junk one has to sort through in the internet to get to real useful stuff I finally found a website that makes the task of teaching Asian poetry less taxing and intimidating for both, teacher and students as it provides links to contemporary and classic writers of South and South East Asia. Check it out and hope people out there find it as helpful and I did.
http://www.asiawrites.org
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