Teaching poetry offers both challenges and promises for student engagement and response. Because of the ways many students interact with poems in school settings--with an emphasis on the technical elements of poems, rather than on the emotional resonances they evoke--for many learners, poetry can often seem elusive and uncommonly difficult. This article describes an initiative, the "Transpoemation Project," in which a group of ninth graders in an urban high school interacted with poetry in unexpected ways, employing 21st-century literacies that challenged the students to become "active constructors of meaning" (Gainer and Lapp 63). The multi-phased assignment culminated with the creation of "digital shorts"--compact "films" that combine text, images, and music. The films later became part of a "premiere" event, during which each student introduced his or her poetry project to classmates and invited guests. The premiere offered the students an authentic audience for their work as well as the opportunity to make an oral presentation. To negotiate the requirements of the project, the students engaged in a range of literacy activities. They read, interpreted, discussed, translated, imagined, revised, visualized, analyzed, synthesized, evaluated, and created--skills that are prized in any classroom and that play a leading role in the standards that appear in language arts curricula.