Margin Notes

Calling all Swiftie teachers! Invisible Strings is a brilliant, engaging poetry anthology that brings together 113 different poets who each respond to the music of Taylor Swift. These poets all allude to the songs they were assigned, without using direct lyrics or titles, making it a fun puzzle that requires close reading to try and solve the mysteries of which poem is related to which song!

Whether you’re a die-hard fan of Taylor Swift or just someone who appreciates powerful writing and musical influence, this collection offers something truly special for your classroom. This book has a plethora of different ways it can support relevant learning & engagement in your literacy classroom. As Frederick-Daugherty states in her introduction, “Swift has taught her fans to read lyrics carefully, attending to syntax, symbol, and sound, just as poets learn to read literature.” (2024). Using these poems, we too, can hone these skills with our students using Taylor Swift’s musical genius, and these insightful poems.

Why you will love it for your classroom:

• Literary Analysis Meets Pop Culture: Use the poems as mentor texts to explore intertextuality, metaphor, tone, and theme. Students can analyze how each poet was inspired by a particular Swift song and then compare it to the original lyrics, making it an instant mentor text goldmine!
• Creative Writing Inspo: Encourage students to write their own response poems to their favorite songs, Taylor’s or otherwise. It’s a fun way to connect music and poetry in a way that feels personal, and relevant.
• Swiftie Scavenger Hunt: Since each song inspiration is not actually revealed in the book, Taylor Swift fans will love the challenge of decoding the easter eggs to figure out the inspiration. Each poem is a puzzle that you can use to challenge your students. This adds a fun and interactive element that builds engagement and encourages close reading and listening skills. If your students aren’t die-hard Swifties, you can pick out which poems correspond with her most popular songs using the cheat sheet linked at the end, to ensure that students will be able to make connections with the easter eggs.
• Discussion-Ready Themes: From heartbreak to empowerment, friendship to fame, this collection covers a wide range of emotions and experiences, perfect for classroom discussion and quickwrite prompts.

Whether you’re teaching middle schoolers looking for creative expression or high school students ready to dive into deeper literary connections, Invisible Strings offers a great entry point. For those of you who need to have the answers (myself included) to see if you got them right, Penguin Random House & Kristie Frederick-Daugherty did publish the list of songs that inspired each poem. You can find that list here. Use it to help you pick poems that correspond with songs that you know your students will have heard before or use it as a scaffold and give them the song right off the bat, so that they can make connections if they aren’t huge Swifties. This collection really is the perfect way to show students that poetry isn’t stuck in the past. It shows them that it’s alive, current, and set to a beat they already know & love.