Logan Poets

Logan Township is “small and unknown,” says Peyton, but it’s a nice place to live. If you look at a map of New Jersey, we’re in the south, across the Delaware River from Chester, PA, and our school is right at Exit 10 of Interstate 295. The closest town on the map is Swedesboro. People in New Jersey sometimes give their location by what Turnpike exit they’re near, and we’re close to Exit 2. 

Logan Elementary School has about 100 sixth graders. Our school is also a middle school; we’ll stay here until eighth grade, then most of us go on to Kingsway High School. A lot of our township is farmland, and there’s a huge industrial park called Pureland. Most of the kids live in the newer part of the township, which is typical suburban housing developments, shopping centers and fast food joints. We do have our own skateboard park and lots of ball fields, and most of us are into sports.

This class, Mr. Hoh’s morning class, has 21 kids, 8 girls and 13 boys. Mr. Hoh loves to get us reading. He has hundreds and hundreds of books in the room for us to choose. Authors we have been reading include Dan Gutman, Mike Lupica, Rick Wallace, Jerry Spinelli, John Scieszka, Anthony Horowitz, JK Rowling, CS Lewis and Carl Hiassen. Sometimes we read short stories by writers like Ray Bradbury, and we have “Psychotic” Circle discussions about them.

And Mr. Hoh forces us to write essays about those books, and persuasive essays, and personal essays. All the time. Except when we get to solve word puzzles – Wuzzles, we call them. 

And now Mr. Hoh has started us writing poems. Greg said poetry is like torture. “Mr. Hoh might as well put us on one of those stretchy things.” That’s when Mr. Hoh said we need to work on our word choice, too.

Anyhow, we do have some favorite poets already. We like poems especially by Dr. Seuss, Shel Silverstein, Langston Hughes and “that red wheelbarrow guy.” We also like concrete poems where the shape is part of the poem. Mr. Hoh’s favorites are Valerie Worth, Ralph Fletcher and Paul Janeczko.

So, in Nick’s words, “we be representin’” Logan Township with these poems. We hope you enjoy our poems, and we’re looking forward to your comments. Thanks for reading.