This paper describes how adolescent students responded to a poetry workshop in an English classroom where the content was derived from their knowledge from their various life experiences and understanding of world events. Informed by theories of New Literacy Studies, ethnographic methods of participant-observation were used to document an eighth grade urban public school classroom where a community member implemented a weekly program using music lyrics and poetry for an entire school year. Findings demonstrate how poetry, facilitated learning by attending to students' emotions and background knowledge, encouraging social collaboration, and providing an authentic purpose for students to communicate through their writing. A community-based poetry workshop provided students with powerful ways of using language to communicate led to important learning opportunities at school.