High school students write Dorothea Lasky poems

Poet Dorothea Lasky was interviewed, biographized, and imitated by a group of Ryan Gallagher’s Malden High School AP Literature students, and the results are pretty impressive! The students display a sophisticated relationship to reading poetry (for example, they keep pointing out the poems’ narrators are not the same as the author, which is more than most bloggers can do, zing!) and a ton of enthusiasm. For example, Renee Santo writes,

Though they may seem to be, Lasky’s poems are not “exactly personal” (Lasky, personal communication, 23 Jan. 2011), although some of the things she writes about in her poems are things that have happened to her. The ability to breed a multitude of meanings is a skill that Lasky has inhabited by becoming so familiar with the techniques of Sylvia Plath, Bernadette Mayer, Kanye West and Notorious B.I.G. “The best poems can be read in an infinite amount of ways by an infinite amount of people.”

The best part, however, are the students’ imitation Lasky poems. Not only do they catch on to Lasky’s persona, they catch on to her syntax and lines. Nice work, Laskies.