Teaching Poetry

I don't remember liking poetry when I was a teenager. I loved Shel Silverstein when I was a kid, and I wrote some witty, rhyming verse of my own in homage to his genius. But by the time I got to high school, poetry seemed old-fashioned and dense.


In contrast, prose was fun. It told stories! With characters and a plot and dialogue. Some of the other kids in my class wrote poetry. I thought they were insufferable literary posers. I wrote short stories. My writing was real fiction; their writing was basically a glorified diary entry.


Yeah, I was a pill.

The funny thing is now that I'm becoming a teacher, I actually look forward to teaching poetry, precisely because it works in ways that prose doesn't. As a result, I think poetry connects with students who aren't excited about prose. I realize now that students often like poetry - reading it, writing it, discussing it in class - because a 4 line stanza feels more manageable to them than a 300-page novel.  As a teacher, I see the benefit in using materials that are both sophisticated and succinct. Language exercises that might take days with a novel can be conducted in half a class period with a poem.

I also see the benefit of using poetry as the basis for writing exercises. For instance, whenever we talking about low-stakes writing, I immediately think of poetry. 

I think low-stakes writing seems ideally suited to poetry, because form lends itself to in-class composition, which gives students a chance to write freely, for a short period of time - and still produce a piece of writing substantial enough to revise. Poetry's focus on language provides an excellent foundation for beginning editors to hone their craft. Rather than reading and responding to a lengthy essay, they can read and comment on a few lines of poetry.


Poetry also taps into the personal in a way that essays don't for many students. I have never felt as strong a connection to poetry (as an adult I have a soft spot for Dorothy Parker...sort of the grown-up version of Shel Silverstein) but I get that for many teens poetry is writing they can connect with.


I have been building my poetry resources lately. Mary Elizabeth's Painless Poetry is a lot of fun, and I enjoy multi-voice poems. I also love Poetry Comics, and I can see using them in the classroom. Overall, I think I have accepted that I need to try a variety of approaches, not just those that I prefer.