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.