A poetry-analysis card game
Students argue that the aesthetic values in their hand — surrealism, lyrical beauty, true confession — are a match for the poem on the table. Make the case with textual evidence and you win the round. Fail to convince the group, and you lose your turn.
How it works
It's easy to get started, and you can play with any poems. Each player holds cards naming different aesthetic values a poem might embody. On your turn, you play a card and argue that its value is a fit for the poem in front of the group.
Convince the others and you play the card and win a point. But be careful: if you can't back it up — where's your textual evidence? — you lose your turn that round. The whole game runs on the thing English teachers spend years trying to build: the habit of grounding a claim in the text.
Free to download
Everything a teacher needs to run Explicate as a unit, not just a one-off game day. All resources are free.
Download and print the full deck of value cards yourself.
A curated set of poems chosen to work well in game play.
Two versions of the rules, written for students.
Ten days of lessons with Google Slides, teaching the ten key criteria on the cards. Built for high-school juniors, aligned to Common Core, with sample poems, an exam, and Spanish translations for multilingual learners.
Give students feedback using the language on the cards — or have them self-assess after the game.
A note of thanks
Explicate was inspired by Charles Harper Webb's essay "Apples and Orangutans: Competing Values in Contemporary Poetry" in The Writer's Chronicle. The game turns its central question — by what values do we judge a poem? — into something students can hold in their hands.