Today my Humanities 8 class began our unit on poetry … with “anyone lives in a pretty how town,” by E.E. Cummings. I gave it to them with no prelude, no pre-lessons on poetry, no explanation other than, “This is a really difficult poem – it’s one that I did during my first year of university. Figure out what it means.”

Actually, that’s not entirely true: I also reminded them of the work we’ve been doing with visual literacy. In order to close read a poem, you do pretty much the same thing as you would with a visual text.

• What is going on in this poem?
• What do you read that makes you say that?
• What more can you see?

We had a really thoughtful discussion. Figuring out that “anyone” and “noone” were both anyone and no one and actual characters in the poem who fall in love pretty much blew their minds, but they came up with some incredible interpretations. Check out their blogs to read more.