A review of over 1,000 student poems reveals the wide variety of forms taken by concrete poetry. Although not exhaustive, the list includes (1) figured verse, which uses poetry or poetic language to shape images; (2) letter/word images, created by the arrangement of letters of words in nonsentence form; (3) letter/word compounds, in which words…

When the English teacher understands his "place" as being an "office" that he holds in relation to his students and the lives they live with their language, he will abandon the abstract and often irrelevant "domains" of English and avoid repeating in the classroom what culture has already done for the students. As he intervenes in their education,…

To discover in explicit, definable terms just what characteristics distinguish the writing of older writers from that of younger ones would give teachers a better chance of teaching young children more successfully--of helping them mature. A passage was presented to hundreds of students in grades 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12. Fifty papers were chosen from…