"In response to a lack of source works for wide-ranging approaches to teaching poetry, award-winning poet Joshua Marie Wilkinson has gathered ninety-nine micro-essays for poets, critics, and scholars who teach and for students who wish to learn about the many ways poets think about how a poem comes alive from within---and beyond---a classroom. Not narrowly concerned with how to read poetry or how to write poetry, by virtue of their central concern with teaching poetry, the essays in this fresh and innovative volume address both reading and writing and give teachers and students useful tools for the classroom and beyond." ""Here is an astonishingly generous gathering of poetic energies and imaginations aimed toward turning more and more classrooms into scenes of transformative engagement with the prime instrument of our humanity, language. The essential work of exploratory play with words is presented in heartening variety in its necessary wildness, surprising pleasures, gravitas, illumination. This book is a catalogue of invention: visionary, pragmatic, surprising, fun---useful because it's inspiring and vice versa. The poets' essays are themselves an affirmation of the vital presence of poetry in our culture, proof and promise, Q.E.D."---Joan Retallock, coeditor, Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary, and author, The Poethical Wager"--BOOK JACKET.