Why Poem(ing) Matters—in the Classroom and Abroad

Listen, every kid who comes into my classroom knows something about poems. “Oh, poetry,”
say many of my new students when I announce how we will begin, “yeah, I don’t get that.”

In this response, my students are betraying the power of repetition. Poetry is difficult, the
dominant culture has told them all their lives, elitist, pretentious and yet somehow also an
unserious pursuit. Poetry is hard to follow; its meanings are hidden behind tangles of syntax and allusion; 

​its pathways are overgrown with all the knowledge you have to have already acquired
just to figure out in which direction the road goes. You can get lost in Poetry. And, in fact,
Poetry is designed to lose you. As Marianne Moore—the famously thorny and difficult poet of
American Modernism—says in her poem “Poetry,”: “I too, dislike it: there are things that are
important beyond all this fiddle.” Poetry, says the dominant culture all of our students have
grown up in, is not for you. Or: Poetry is not for you. It’s hard to tell which is worse.

Even the students who think they might be poets are suspicious of the word Poetry. “I just like
to write what I feel,” they say. They shrug. They dismiss Poetry in favor of…what?...not the
poem (they haven’t met the poem, yet) but maybe the act of writing. Of making the shape of the
word that gets the feeling out of their body and onto the page. Many students when they first
come into my class tell me that writing a poem is a kind of therapy for them. “I take everything
I’m feeling and put it on the page,” they say. “Ok, yeah,” I answer, “and then, just like in
therapy, all your feelings make more sense, right?” They blink at me at this point, because the
answer to that question is no, of course. After art, we do not feel better so much as we feel
more.

Ok, but so, here’s the point: as Marianne Moore (who was also famously tongue-in-cheek, was a
huge baseball fan, wore unironic tri-cornered hats and suggested naming the new Ford Edsel the
Utopian Turtletop, The Anticipator, The Intelligent Whale) goes on to say in “Poetry”— “if you
demand on the one hand, in defiance of their opinion—/the raw material of poetry in/ all its
rawness, and/ that which is on the other hand,/ genuine, then you are interested in poetry.” The
they Moore refers to here—the “half poets,” “autocrats,” and “literalists of the
imagination”—are everyone who would tell you what Poetry is, rather than just show you a
poem. So, that’s where we start; I show my students a poem. Usually a short poem. Something
concrete about bats or geese or getting lost and then seeing the moon. Sometimes the poem
even rhymes, but most of the time it doesn’t. Rhymes don’t matter when you can speak rhythm
out loud. That’s what we do. We read it out loud.

“Oh,” they say, “yeah, I know what that is, my teacher in third grade, or my mother at bedtime,
or my granddad when he can’t get the car started and we have to wait for the tow truck, used to
say something like that to me.” And that’s it. What they recognize is something they used to do
to while away the time after recess or before bed when there was nothing more to accomplish
than the practice of being human. They recognize something that came to them when they were
most themselves and made them more. The antidote to Poetry is the poem.

A child knows a poem with their knees and elbows. They know a poem with their earlobes and
with the way it makes them wiggle or want to look out the window and see if they can spot
some more. Our job as educators is to help them recognize what it is they already see and give
them the vocabulary to describe it. Look, there! A wild poem—let us observe its habits; let us
speak about its dappled skin. What does it eat? How does it go? When it lies down to sleep what
dreams fill its head and why are they so very much like our own?

A real toad in an imaginary garden, as Marianne Moore would call it. Let’s all spill out into the
sunshine and see if we can mimic how it hops.