Most Popular Posts On Putting Pizzazz Into Poetry 2025

Here are five of the most popular Poetry posts for 2025. Thank you visitors and followers for your continuing support and interest in teaching poetry and all it entails.

Here's a second chance to connect with poetic ideas. Ideas you can easily carry forward into 2026. Just click the link...

UK Poet, Peter Dixon

This post highlighting the poetry of Peter Dixon proved extremely popular with readers. Peter Dixon was not just a poet. He was a performer, educationalist and artist. I share his famous tea-bag poem.

Viator Poems

In this post I presented yet another recently invented poetry form! I looked closely at the Viator poetic form, first created by author, Robin Skelton. My post proved popular...

First Line Index Poems Concerning School Life

First Line Index Poem connected to the theme of school life proved popular with readers... Short and sweet renditions of this poetry form, courtesy of UK Poets, Alan Ahlberg and Michael Rosen.

A Poem to Celebrate The International Day of Light

The International Day of Light prompted this post to celebrate light and its role in science culture, art, education and development. Light is critical to our survival on earth and the survival of animals, plants and smaller organisms. The very meaning of life is inextricably connected to shining light into dark places, for it is a sanitizer. And so I tried enlightenment with a poem to celebrate this special day.

When In Doubt, Sandra Cisneros

I listened to Padraig O'Tuamo's podcast, 'Poetry Unbound' and undertook some focused listening and fortuitously landed on an episode highlighting the poem 'When In Doubt' by Sandra Cisneros. The very moment I heard Padraigh read Sandra Cisneros's words I felt a compelling need to share the poem. It presents as a roadmap for living. It further enhances my view of the writer and poet. Check it out.

Thanks

Alan j Wright

https://www.alanjwrightauthorpoet.com/

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Poetry Inspired by Images and Objects

There are many ways pictures and photographs can be conscripted to support the writing of poetry. Allow me to share a few ideas with you: Old photographs are a great source of inspiration. Cynthia Rylant explored this idea with great success in her book 'Something Permanent' where she employed the Depression era photographs of Walker Evans to add a new voice to the starkness to the lives of people experienced under extreme circumstances. I have used this strategy to spark many individual poems. In ' I Bet There's No Broccoli On The Moon,' I used a photo I had taken in 2004 while living in New York to inspire a poem. The poem was based on a story related by a friend who grew up in New York. I regularly combined poetry and pictures in my writer's notebook, drawing on inspiration from the photograph and my personal memories. We can also utilize existing cartoons and illustrations to create ekphrastic poems. I frequently use the illustrations of Jim Pavlidis to co...

Peter Dixon -Teabag Poem

Today I'm highlighting the poetry of Peter Dixon. Peter Dixon was not just a poet. He was a performer, educationalist and artist. He grew up in London during WW2, and as a boy his schooling was far from successful. He struggled with spelling and the understanding of word, form and grammar, so he tended to write secretly at home, drawing and writing of things largely ignored by schools. Despite this difficult phase of his life, Peter eventually became a school teacher and then a senior lecturer in education. It often mystified him as to how all of this came to pass. As a teacher, he strived to be unbiased and did not neglect the children who experienced learning challenges. Peter Dixon became a full time children’s writer and educational consultant. His first book was published in 1978. Whilst living in Winchester, Hampshire, with his family, he contributed to over 100 poetry anthologies and had seven collections of his own work published including Grow Your O...

Poetry Friday 'Storm On The Island' Seamus Heaney

Given the fact that we recently celebrated St Patrick's Day, it seems appropriate that I take this opportunity to continue the Irish focus and recognize one of Ireland's leading literary figures... Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland in 1939 and died in 2013. He became a multi award winning poet. His first collection of poems, 'Death of a Naturalist' appeared in 1966 and helped to establish Heaney as one of the major poets of the 20th century. From that first anthology, I have chosen 'Storm On The Island.' This poem tells us about the stoic resistance of people and structures to an incoming storm. The island is not named. Poetic scholars believe this is a poem that can be taken literally, as a monologue on the life and attitude of island people facing a storm, or it can be understood as a metaphor of political struggle on the island of Ireland. Heaney knew both worlds. The poems of this first collection are grounded in the soil...

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