Often, we don’t appreciate certain things until we acquire a little maturity. That’s certainly true of me and poetry. When I was a kid, like brussel sprouts, poetry was foreign to me. It had a suspicious odor about it, and I instinctively knew that I wanted no part of it.
For many years when I was teaching in my ELA classrooms, Valentines’ Day week seemed the perfect timing for a unit on poetry. There were lots of practical reasons, pedagogical ones, but the timing was too good to ignore: my freshmen were about to read Romeo and Juliet.
And to make them most successful with this drama which can be the ultimate bust or one of the highlights of their early high school literature experiences, I knew they would have to have the skills I lacked as a high schooler.
In a respectful gesture to my students— and to procure ammunition if needed— I always started with them making a list of their attitudes about the genre. We carved out time to acknowledge their stances.
Then I shocked them by sharing why I hated poetry so much as a kid. Kids always think teachers love all literature, right? Wrong. So wrong!
I’ve narrowed down my youthful distaste for poetry to four reasons:
That’s the term used to define when a poetic thought runs from one line onto another before the end punctuation is inserted.
As a kid, I thought that when you read poetry, you had to stop at the end of each line. After all, it often rhymed there, and that was the way the teachers frequently read it to us, often in a sing-songy, lilting voice, regardless of its topic or message.
No wonder I couldn’t make sense of what the poet was trying to say.
2. It didn’t make sense to me.
a. See number one.
b. No one taught me about rhythm or scansion. Knowing the concept that lines had specific numbers of syllables with specific stress patterns might have helped me understand why some words were used in place of others. That knowledge would also have helped me smile, rather than scowl perplexedly at syntactical shifts.
Now, I like to imagine myself as a kid scoffing at a line, knowing its bewildering word order was simply created to form a spondee instead of an iamb. I would’ve held the power, not the poem.
3. I didn’t read the footnotes.
Were there even footnotes in our literature textbooks back then? If I had, I might have understood how a teacher could infer so much about the “true meaning” of a poem, while I was derailed by an archaic word or an allusion, much less the entire jumble of words called a poem.
4. I didn’t know about the tremendous impact Walt Whitman had on the world of verse.
Did I even know who Whitman was? I’m sure I missed his name in my American History class. It must’ve been drowned out by the droning of the canonballs and battle names in the daily lectures.
I didn’t know that one of the challenges in reading more contemporary poetry is that Whitman, the Father of Free Verse, asserted that all language is poetic. That human speech is poetry. Toss in a few onomatopoeia, a metaphor and some ploysyndeton and POOF! You have a poem.
The result: there’s a lot of gobbledygook that purports to be poetry today.
While my students read and wrote more poetry, you can bet we talked about enjambment, rhythm, and archaic words and allusions. I know many of my students came away being more appreciative of the beauty and inspiration poetry can offer than I was at fourteen.
And several even tried composing a little poetry for their dear ones in honor of Valentine’s Day.
As for me, I love the crispy, tender texture and buttery taste of a plateful of roasted Brussels sprouts.
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