Why Teach Poetry?

Confession #1: I do not particularly like a lot of poetry. But when a line or a thought or an image grabs me—whether it’s by the throat or by the hem of my garment—it’s with me forever. In struggle and sorrow it's, Wendell Berry’s “practice resurrection” from “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” that leaps to mind; every fall, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Goldengrove unleaving” from “Spring and Fall”; on a day so beautiful I can’t breathe deeply enough, e.e.cummings’ “leaping greenly spirits of trees” from “I thank You God for most this amazing.” I keep a notebook of the poems I love.

Confession #2: There are not many jobs in poetry. It’s true. 

So why teach poetry? Some of us do it because we have loved the old masters, from Shakespeare and Donne to Auden and T.S. Eliot; some because the passion of spoken word poetry ignites us; some because writing poetry was a lifeline to our former adolescent selves; some because we have to—it’s in the textbook, the curriculum, the standards. But none of these, on their own or together, will sufficiently answer a student’s question “Why do we have to study this?” And I believe I need to embrace that question, answering it before students even ask, and encouraging them to ask it if my answer isn’t working for them. Last week I wrote about 5 strategies for tackling poetry that have worked with my 10th graders—because if you’re convinced you should like poetry but you don’t “get” it, that just breeds insecurity and defensiveness. But a pocketful of strategies runs out without a thick purpose. So here are some of the reasons I think poetry is worth studying.  

Poetry is multipurpose: It can confess, celebrate, lament, protest, unite, enlighten. And generally it does this in a matter of lines rather than pages—whether that is 14, 40, or 400. I call my 10th grade poetry unit “Paying Attention” because language is amazing in all its rich variety—sound, meaning, connotation, rich sensory images, provocative figurative images, rhythms, patterns, repetition, contradiction, paradox—and all literature uses language in surprising ways. However, only in poetry do we really have time to pay attention to all the things it does. It is language in concentrated form, and we can re-read every line, every word several times. 

I have an interview with poet Donald Hall from an old Poetry magazine that I share with students. In it he talks about his craft. He says he goes through about 50 drafts per poem, and sometimes up to 500. He pays attention to sentence variety—simple sentences interspersed with compound, complex, and compound-complex. Students are amazed that revision and attention to sentence variety are not things I ask of students because they’re students, but because they’re writers. 

Poetry was the earliest literature, and is today still omnipresent in the lyrics of songs. It pervades the world’s religious texts (40% of the Old Testament, according to one source). (In my Christian school, I often teach a lesson on Hebrew poetry.) Part of the reason for the ancient forms of poetry is rooted in preliteracy—what makes words easy to remember and pass on if they can’t be written down? Those tricks of language that are like the hooks on burrs to catch the human brain and hitch a ride to new, fertile places—tricks of pattern, tricks of sound, tricks of connection. It's what still gets a line of a song stuck in our heads.

So poetry gives us practice in paying attention—to language, to emotion, to thought, to the world around us. And those are skills that deepen joy, empathy, and communication. Which may actually help students get jobs. However, after delivering this apologetic for poetry, I have been known to whisper aside to a teacher, “And if you still can’t find a poem that grabs you, if you still dread, resent, or dislike every poem you’ve ever met, just skip the unit—you’ll only teach the students to dread, resent, or dislike poetry.”

Which leads to the last question: What poem that has grabbed you? If there isn't one, how can you find one? If there is a poem you love, what is it? How did you find it? How do you find new poems to love and for your students to love? I have a couple of ideas already—but that’s another blog for another day.