Why Poetry?

by GABRIELLE LENSCH PLASTRIK

I belong to the AP English list serve.  Several times a year, teachers write in at their wits end because their students just don’t “get” poetry or because their students seem hesitant, scared, and reluctant.  I resist replying to these list serve entries mostly because I don’t want to offend the teachers.

All students have the capacity to love poetry. The key, it seems, is actually writing poetry.  There is a great course in poetry from a group that works with homeless and runaway teens in Florida called Runaway with Poetry.  Anyone who is at a complete loss for how to teach poetry might start there.

Teachers’ desires to have their students create masterpieces that fit in standard rhythm and rhyme and to only read poetry that makes sense on the seventh read through with footnotes seems to hinder students’ love of poetry.  Previous negative experiences or harsh criticisms from previous teachers tend to color students’ idea of what “poetry” and writing poetry means.  Few students will openly welcome the study of poetry without past positive experiences.  Why would they behave otherwise?  It is our job as teachers to create those positive experiences.

My summer school students (if you read my last post, you’d know that they were not a particularly academically minded bunch) groaned when I told them that we would be studying poetry.  By the end of our two week unit, they were disappointed to be done with it.  Perhaps my most reluctant student, I’ll call him Jerry, had a difficult life.  His family moved so often that he did not have an address he could give me.  His P.O. visited my class once a week to make sure that he was attending summer school.  He lived and traveled in the roughest areas and circles of Madison.  More importantly, to me, he had a hard time writing complete sentences.  He was, nevertheless, able to write personal and powerful poetry.  He seemed to most enjoy sharing his poems with the class, and when he spoke, the class was respectful, attentive, and rapt.

After the poetry unit was over, students were working on persuasive letters to aldermen about things that could be fixed in their neighborhoods.  Jerry chose to focus on racial profiling, as he was frequently picked up and/or harassed by the police when he was just walking down the street.  He stared at his blank computer screen for over an hour.  Eventually he typed the date and his alderman’s name.  I asked him what the matter was.  He explained that he did not know how to express the shame and anger he felt in the structure of a formal letter.  He asked if he could write a poem.

Within minutes, he had begun one of the most beautiful poems a student of mine has ever written.  He strung images together to create a picture of how he felt living his life always a suspect.  It was powerful, to the point, and much more compelling than a letter.  Unfortunately, he refused to send it because he did not want to elicit further attention from the government, but I did encourage him to seek publication somewhere.  On the last day of class, Jerry told me that poetry would help him, and he thanked me for showing him how.

Poetry can help anyone who opens themselves up to it.  Poems do not have to be “good,” but students need to have the opportunity to write them.  They need to know that a poem is a place to be free with language—to test the boundaries of language as it exists—so that they relax into themselves as poets.  They need to share with each other. Only after they have the chance to become poets, can most students truly develop an interest in reading poetry.  To study poetry is to fall in love with language, with our language.  It is a connection between the writer’s soul and the reader’s soul.  Poetry pulls at our heartstrings or makes us laugh.  It is magical.

When we shove it down kids throats or ask them to read “The Wasteland” when they are not ready for it, we do our students and the poems a huge disservice.  The NCTE has instilling the love of literature as a part of one of its standards.  Perhaps a shift from the rigor of AP and State standards toward this less quantifiable goal would guide teachers toward poetry more often for it is a place where students can find themselves and fall in love with the magic of language well used.

Gabrielle teaches English and Drama at a school for gifted students in Madison, WI.