Busy today trying to be an exemplary employee of myself. Among my other tasks is inventing a teaching syllabus for a high school workshop tomorrow. Here it is, in case you care to disguise yourself as a 9th grader and try it out.

Quick write: A 6-line draft in 3 minutes. I prompt each line with a word: "The," "Of," "We," "Was," "Asking," "Who" (a fast and fun method of prompting that I learned from the inimitable Charlotte Gordon, one of our visiting poets at the Frost Place teaching conference).

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Read: I read aloud Richard Wilbur's “The Barred Owl.” The students eventually figure out that the first words of RW's first stanza are the first words of their own drafts. This is an interesting way to look at a poem in form--via the first words of the lines. It tends to help readers see that formal poetry isn't all about plugging in the end rhymes.

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Dictate: Line by line, I dictate Robert Francis’s “The Base Stealer,” and the students copy it down.

Longer write: 10 minutes.

1. Choose a physical activity: football, white-water rafting, splitting firewood, dancing, fighting—something you’ve done yourself or watched someone else do.

Now imagine a moment of the action, and freeze that moment in your head, like a stopped instant replay. Hold onto that picture.

Prompt, lines 1 and 2: What are the arms doing? Focus on action, movement, shape, where they are in space. Are the arms working together? Does each arm have a separate action?

Prompt, lines 3 and 4: What are the fingers doing? What are they touching? How are they moving? Does their movement remind you of anything else? What could you compare it to?

Prompt, lines 5 and 6: What are the feet doing? Where are they in space? Do they shift from one space to another? What exactly are they doing at this very moment?

Prompt, line 7: Now unfreeze that picture you've been holding in your head. What does the person’s body do as soon as the video starts rolling?

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On iPads: Students will have copies of Frank O’Hara’s “Poem” [Lana Turner]. Taking turns, they'll read it line by line. Probably we'll hear it at least twice so that all students will get a chance to read aloud.

Free-ish write: 5 minutes

Write a poem. It has to be at least 5 lines long. Here's the rule: it has to be all in one sentence . . . no punctuation, no stopping, hurry hurry hurry

Here’s your first line, gleaned from the current edition of the Weekly World News: "FACEBOOK WILL END ON MARCH 15th, 2012!"

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