Welcome to a Month of Poetry Ponderings by Jennifer Laffin

"And Spring arose on the garden fair,

Like the Spirit of Love felt everywhere;

And each flower and herb on Earth's dark breast

rose from the dreams of its wintry rest."

-  Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Sensitive Plant 

Ahhhh....spring is in the air!

April is the time that Old Man Winter heads back to hibernation and Nature comes back to life.

It's no wonder, then, that April is also Poetry Month. Poetry calls on us to look around and notice the life going on around us. Our senses awaken and start to buzz and we want to find a way to pay tribute to this awakening.

Hence, the poem takes center stage.

Here at the #TeachWrite Chat Blog, we are dedicating this space this April as a place to share the thoughts and words of our teacher-writer community's ponderings about poetry. Some of our writers will share their own poetry with you. Others will write about how poetry inspires their writing life or how they bring their love of poetry into their classrooms and the teaching of writing.

We are excited for this month as we rise from our "dreams of wintry rest" and find inspiration among us!

Happy Spring!

If you would like to write a guest post for our Poetry Ponderings gathering,

please click here for more information.

Jennifer Laffin is a teacher of teachers, the owner of Teach Write LLC, and a co-moderator of the #TeachWrite Twitter Chat. She is committed to helping teachers and their students grow as writers because she has seen how writing can transform you both personally and professionally. You can find her learning with others on Twitter at @laffinteach and @TeachWriteEDU or at www.teachwrite.org.