Logan Poets 2

You can’t find Logan Township on a map of New Jersey. If you look carefully in the southern section of the state, just across the Delaware River from Chester, PA, you might find Bridgeport, which is a tiny town where a few of us live. Most of us live a few miles south, off Exit 10 of Interstate 295. Next to us is a town called Swedesboro, which is another tiny town, but not quite as tiny.  

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 don’t have a movie theater or a bowling alley, but we do have our own skateboard park and lots of ball fields, and most of us are into sports, especially softball, soccer, baseball, and basketball.

This class, Mr. Hoh’s afternoon class, has 18 kids, 7 girls and 11 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 Mike Lupica, Rick Wallace, Anthony Horowitz, Darren Shan (Cirque du Freak), JK Rowling, and Wendolyn van Draanen. 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 at lunch once a week, some of us skip the cafeteria and play chess in our room. Mr. Hoh always wins. (We think he cheats.)

Anyhow, we do have some favorite poets already, among them Dr. Seuss, Shel Silverstein, Paul Janeczko, Walter Dean Myers, and Robert Frost. 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.

We’re proud of our poems, and, like Steph and Hannah said, we plan to “rock people’s soxx off their feet.” We hope you enjoy our poems, and we’re looking forward to your comments. Thanks for reading.