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These haiku not only reflect the strong relationship my students have with their natural world but also show their ability to poetically translate that experience, adhering both to the form and intention of traditional haiku. Writing poetry is just one of many ways that I have found to connect my Inupiaq Eskimo students of northwestern Alaska to the language arts curriculum in my classroom. Thirteen years ago, when I first stepped off the plane in Shishmaref, I had no idea what living or teaching in a rural Alaskan village would be like. Arriving from a rural town in southwestern Iowa, I doubt if anything could have adequately prepared me for my first sight of Shishmaref. From the air, the village appeared to be sitting on the edge of the world on a huge sandbar. It seemed as if someone had flown over it and ran

would take to poetry writing like it was free pizza day in the cafeteria, and others who would rather study algebra in a foreign language, so I had adopted what Cicero referred to as the indirect approach until I saw which way the wind was blowing. Usually the wind blew from all over the place, so I had developed a mixed bag of strategies. There was the song gambit in which I worked my way through popular song lyrics to poems. There was the exercise gambit in which we worked with simple forms such as concrete poetry and haiku, moving eventually to ballads, or even sonnets. There was the free verse gambit, where we started with poetically inspired scenarios like childhood memories or lost relationships. All of these approaches worked to a certain degree, but I always felt uneasy when I used them. Sometimes I even felt I was doing something almost underhanded. Not that I was above pulling a fast one or two in order to get my students to move in a useful direction, but this feeling was different, nagging. I couldn't quite put my finger on it until I remembered something the playwright Christopher Fry wrote about poetry being the language in which man explores his own amazement. I wasn't dealing with exploration. I was moving through territory that had been well mapped out, settled, and developed. I knew when I wrote a poem that I didn't start with a form, or even a memory in some cases. Sometimes I didn't even know what I was writing about until I was pretty far into it. Fry was right. Poetry was a language by which I explored, and the poem became a representation of the journey. Was I selling my students a bill of goods about poetry, inadvertently leading them to think it was something I knew it really wasn't? I didn't know how to answer that question. At first this niggling doubt didn't stop me from opening the unit in the way I always had, and it didn't stop the students from writing poems that ran the gamut. Every year I would have students whose poems could make the class stop breathing until the last syllable had flown up and out of the room like the barn swallows one student wrote

Tweedie, a professor of writing at Rowan University, asked students in his introductory creative writing course about their experiences with haiku in middle and high school, the responses criticized precisely those characteristics that ought to make haiku appealing. One student said, "I don't like haiku. I think no matter how hard you try to make it good, it still sounds corny. Plus, I'm not into the nature thing." Others complained, "Haiku is definitely limiting. There is a structure you have to follow," and "Haiku is okay. It doesn't really express anything." Another observed, "Haiku is limiting because it's basically trying to tell an in-depth story in three lines." Finally, this student seemed to suffer from haiku overload: "I don't like them because I have written them in

On Saturday morning this last spring, listening only lazily to an interview on National Public Radio, I heard spoken tongue-in-cheek a Chinese proverb: A fish rots from the head down. Worth at least a nod of recognition, it epitomized the dilemma at the heart of my attempts to build a poetry class for high-school seniors of the sort I would have wished for myself. For four years, I have offered a course, "Poetry as Power," which is chiefly an introductory study of American modernist poetry. We begin with a base of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, then read Langston Hughes--especially his "I, Too, Sing America" which contains Whitmanian allusions students happily recognize-and Gwendolyn Brooks; then, but briefly, we read Rupert Brooks and Isaac Rosenberg as a thematic preface to T. S. Eliot's "Hollow Men," and Ezra Pound, H. D., William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens blend into the postmoderns and contemporary voices such as Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore, Anne Sexton, Theodore Roethke, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Alice Walker, Marc Kaminsky, James Wright, the prison haiku of Etheridge Knight, and whoever else might be noticed by students as the semester progresses. Modernist poetry, especially, was wrought of a fierce aesthetic, one fist in tradition, the other yearning to "make it new," that imagist phrase echoed by H. D., Pound, and Williams.

THAT you expect of your students determines, to a considerable degree, what you will get. If you expect your "slow" students to be very dull and unteachable, you will undoubtedly find them "dull and unteachable." If, on the other hand, you expect to be able to help them learn, you will find them surprisingly teachable. In the September 1968 issue of Psychology Today, Robert Rosenthal explores many areas in which self-fulfilling prophecies operate. His article is an eye-opener for all teachers and supervisors. As he points out, "One prophesies an event, and the expectation of the event then changes the behavior of the prophet in such a way as to make the prophesied event more likely." When a teacher really expects his students to achieve, he conveys that belief with every gesture, both conscious and unconscious. The students

S we review disquisitions on poetry, we become increasingly aware of how closely critics examine the words, figures, symbols, and sounds, and certainly this close criticism has given us insights into not only contemporary poetry but also the poetry of previous generations that we generally take for granted. Despite this intense scrutiny, there is an area in poetry that is terra incognita, for it is rarely explored, if at all, and that is the role of stanzaic form in