firsthand: Naming the World by Nancie Atwell

Naming the World Overview

In Naming the World, 15 groups of poems help students and teachers enter, enjoy, analyze, and learn from the ideas and approaches of outstanding poets, both professional and students.

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Group 1: What Poetry Can Do

Nancie begins the school year with a collection of poems that helps middle schoolers discover poetry's potential to give voice to their experiences and demonstrates that poetry can be about anything and everything. This section also establishes the routines of reading and discussing a poem a day.

Group 2: Your Life

Your Life helps students think about and identify what matters. Twin themes of choice and reconsideration run through these poems, as the poets explore what's important, what's not, and why.

Group 3: The Ideas in Things

This section emphasizes the importance of focusing on concrete specifics-real people, objects, and moments. Students learn how the particulars of a writer's experience involve a reader and create a shared vision and meaning.

Group 4: Games

These poems about sports and other physical activities help students to consider and name the satisfactions and the heartaches of competition, speed, power, and fandom.

Group 5: Dogs and Cats

Adolescents love their pets. Soulmates who listen, love, entertain, comfort, and never judge, pets provide a compelling focus for middle schoolers' strong affections, as well as some of their best writing.

Group 6: The Senses

Poems rich in imagery show how well-chosen words invite readers to see, hear, feel, taste, and smell the physical world in our imaginations. The poetry in this section transcends description to evoke imaginative sights, sounds, textures, tastes, and aromas.

Group 7: Growing Up

These are the poems that speak most keenly to Nancie's students about their identities as adolescents on the cusp of adulthood. This poetry helps lend perspective and hope to the process of growing up.

Group 8: Metaphor

Here, Nancie offers her students an accessible entrée to figurative language-how metaphors, similes, and personifications invite readers to view the world, and their feelings about it, through new prisms.

Group 9: The Natural World

Nancie uses these poems to inspire pop-culture-oriented adolescents to venture outside, to notice and care about nature, and to draw connections between their inner landscapes and the landscapes of the natural world.

Group 10: Madeleines

Inspired by Proust's madeleine, the sugar cookie that triggered intense memories of childhood, these poems live in both the past and the present and help students glimpse the essence of both.

Group 11: Gender

The poems in this section examine what it means to be a boy or a girl in our culture-and what it might mean to become a man or a woman. This is poetry that frames gender-related feelings in ways that both reassure and offer perspective.

Group 12: Some Forms

Here, Nancie introduces her student readers and poets to the expressive potential of more complex poetic forms, from traditional structures like the sonnet and sestina to some appealing inventions of 20th century poets.

Group 13: The Larger World

The poems in this section compel students to look outward, beyond their selves, to connect with the larger world and begin to consider the social and ethical implications of what it means to be human.

Group 14: Reading and Writing

These poems invite students to experience reading and writing through the minds and hearts of poets who are on fire with words and who share and shape their literary experiences as poems.

Group 15: Farewell

The poems in "Farewell" offer an inspiring way to end a school year. They give a teacher and his or her students a last chance to pause, take stock, and celebrate: together, they have named the world.


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