Books for a young writer, and books about the practice
Books
Poetry books for teenagers fall into 2 shelves that do completely different jobs: books a young writer might actually finish, and books that help the adult run the room, and buying from the wrong shelf is the commonest way a department wastes its poetry budget.
Everything below is described from public information. Nothing is sold, hosted or reproduced here, no poem is printed on this site, and the fastest route to any of it is a library rather than a search result. Where to read, watch and listen sets out the rest of this record.
Shelf one, books a teenager might finish
A teenager finishes a poetry book when the poems are short, the voice is recognisable and nothing on the cover suggests homework. That rules out a great deal of what gets given as a prize and rules in 3 kinds of book: single poet collections with a strong speaking voice, anthologies that move quickly, and verse novels, which are stories that happen to be made of poems and are the single most reliable way into the form for a reluctant reader.
Collection. Langston Hughes. First published in the 1930s.
Poems Hughes selected himself for younger readers, short, plain spoken and built on the rhythms of blues and jazz. The most reliable single poet book on this shelf, and the reason his name appears in nearly every search for poetry for young people.
Collection. Benjamin Zephaniah. 1994.
Poems written for young readers by a poet who wrote everything for the ear, which is why they survive being read aloud badly by somebody who did not want to be picked. Funny before it is serious, which is the right order for a room that has decided it hates poetry.
Anthology. Edited by Kevin Coval, Quraysh Ali Lansana and Nate Marshall. 2015.
An anthology of poets writing out of hip hop, and the clearest single demonstration that the form a student hears online has a literature behind it. Contains adult language throughout, so it is a book for a sixth form shelf or a teacher's own reading rather than for a set of 30.
Verse novel. Jason Reynolds. 2017.
A whole novel told in short poems across the 60 seconds a lift takes to reach the ground, which is why it gets finished by readers who have never finished a poetry book. The story is a boy deciding whether to avenge his brother's shooting, so it needs the same content decision as anything else here, and what a class takes from it is compression and how much a line break can hold.
Two more belong here for honesty rather than for the syllabus. Gold from the Stone, the selected poems of Lemn Sissay, gives a room a poet who is a working performer and a published writer at once. And the book teenagers actually bring in is usually a short lined, heavily shared collection of the kind Rupi Kaur made enormously popular, which began as self publishing and outsold most of the poetry world combined. Dismissing it in front of a class is a mistake. Reading one page of it aloud and asking what the line breaks are doing is a better lesson than anything a teacher could have planned.
How to write a poem, in book form
Books about how to write a poem are worth less to a beginner than 6 blank pages and a deadline, and are worth a great deal to somebody who has already written 20 poems and wants to know why 3 of them work. Two are dependable. The Ode Less Travelled by Stephen Fry teaches metre and form as a practical skill with exercises, for a student who wants rules rather than encouragement. The Poetry Home Repair Manual by Ted Kooser is written for the beginner who is already writing, and is unusually good on why a poem fails.
What none of them teaches is delivery, because that is not a page skill. Listening to the form covers how a young writer learns that, which is by hearing a great deal of it and working out what is being done to the sentence, and Documentaries covers the films that show poems being made rather than performed.
Shelf two, books about running the room
Books about running the room are a shorter shelf than the marketing suggests, and 3 books and a companion volume cover almost everything an adult needs. They are old, which is not a defect: the problem of getting a group of young people to write something true has not changed since they were written.
Handbook. Kenneth Koch. 1970.
An account of teaching poetry writing to children in a New York school, with the prompts he used and what the class did with them. The companion volume, Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?, does the same for teaching from great poems. Both are aimed younger than a secondary class and both scale up better than anything written since.
Exercise anthology. Edited by Robin Behn and Chase Twichell. 1992.
Writing exercises contributed by poets who teach, each with the reasoning behind it. Written for university workshops, and roughly a third of it transfers straight to a room of 15 year olds without adaptation.
Handbook. Nancie Atwell. First published in 1987.
The workshop as a way of teaching writing to adolescents, from the teacher who did most to establish the format in middle schools. Not a poetry book, and the structural chapters on conferring and on protected writing time are the ones worth reading.
Alongside those, the organisation worth knowing is Teachers and Writers Collaborative in New York, founded in the 1960s to put working writers into classrooms, which has published handbooks of exercises for decades. In the United Kingdom, The Poetry Society publishes education resources and runs Young Poets Network, and the National Association of Writers in Education publishes guidance for writers working in schools.
Choosing from a shelf you cannot read first
Choosing a poetry book for a teenager without reading it first is a real constraint, and 5 checks catch most bad purchases. Apply them in a bookshop in about 4 minutes.
- Open at 3 poems at random and read them aloud under your breath. If 2 of the 3 lose you, the book will lose a 15 year old faster.
- Check the length of the poems, not the length of the book: a 200 page collection of 1 page poems is easier than a 60 page book of long ones.
- Look at who it was written for against who it is marketed to, since a book of adult poems with a teenager on the cover is still a book of adult poems.
- Read the contents page for titles that name situations rather than abstractions, which is the fastest signal of poems a room can enter.
- Check for the language before it appears in a lesson, and decide in the shop rather than in front of the class.
What this list is not
This is a record of other people's books and it is not a shop, a ranking or a set text list. No poem is reproduced on this site, in whole or in part, and no book here is endorsed beyond the description given. Spoken word poetry is a form that lives mainly in performance, and the books above exist to send a young writer back to it with a wider idea of what a poem is allowed to do.
One practical note for anybody spending public money. A school library, a public library service and an interlibrary loan will supply nearly everything named here without a purchase, and a poet visiting a school will usually bring their own books to sell at their own price, which is worth arranging in advance rather than discovering on the day.
Plainly stated
What this site is, and what it is not
Page to Mic is a new, independent, non commercial reference on young people writing and performing spoken word poetry. Nothing is sold here, nothing is sponsored, and no poem written by a young writer is reproduced anywhere on this site.
This address was used in the past by a documentary film about a poetry workshop. Page to Mic is not that film, is not published by its makers, and is not connected to the To Be Heard Foundation, to Power Writers or to Power Poetry. It claims no continuity with any previous owner of this address and uses no former name. The film is described at Documentaries in the third person, as somebody else's work, and this site does not host, sell, embed or link a copy of it. A reader who came looking for the film should go to the To Be Heard Foundation, which publishes at tobeheardfoundation.org.