Inspiring Excitement About Poetry

Several of my teacher friends and others who work with youth have asked me if I have any ideas about how to get young people excited about poetry. I'm always a little surprised by the question. I write poetry. I don't teach poetry. Still, I find the question thought provoking. So I started thinking about what first got me excited about poetry... But, I can't remember. It seems to be poetry was always bubbling inside me. That said, I didn't always enjoy studying poetry, and there are times when I still don't understand the hubbub about one poet or another when I study their work. It happens. It's okay.

The more I thought about it the more I came back to one single thing. Find the poetry in your audience's, aka your class's, life. Show them the poetry in songs, in commercials, in the nursery rhymes of their youth. Show them poetry by contemporary poets before asking them to dissect poems filled with language that feels foreign to them.

While I don't remember what first made me feel excited about poetry, I remember that from an early age I enjoyed song lyrics and I enjoyed reading authors who played with words in creative ways.

One activity I think could be fun would be to have everyone in the class bring in the lyrics to their favorite song, read the lyrics aloud, and discuss how lyrics are poetry. Then have the students play with writing poetry based on what's discussed about the lyrics.

The same could be done with nursery rhymes or even commercials or other places where people use words in creative or poetic ways.

Show the power of poetry to influence thought by demonstrating how the items the class brought in drive home points or provoke thought or emotion. Show how the repetition highlights the important aspects of the message and how rhyming words can make something more memorable. Demonstrate how a play on words can change meanings or show a change in position from beginning to end.

This isn't how you teach poetry for a test, but it just might help students find a way to relate to poetry and see how it still lives in the world around us. Perhaps that will make the classics more accessible to students. Maybe even inspire students to see ways they relate to the classics as well as the contemporary. 

When turning to study the classics, it might help children and teenagers to relate to classical poetry might be to have them rewrite the poem in more modern language in their own interpretation. As a class activity, this could include the teacher reading a line and having the class come up with myriad other ways to say that line based on how they understand it. As a joint activity, the class could rewrite the poem having been primed by the earlier exercise using a modern piece. Or an individual assignment might be to pick a poem from a list and reinterpret it line by line. This would give the student both practice writing and a way to comprehend the poem in a way more interesting to students.

I'm sure there are many other ways to inspire children and teenagers to appreciate poetry enough that their eyes don't gloss over at the mere mention of poetry. We've spent so much time making poetry seem like something that is erudite that we've killed the allure of the poem.

Some people have expressed to me that they just don't get poetry or that they like my poetry because it doesn't feel "flowery" (sometimes it is) or "showy" (again sometimes it is) or "stuffy" (again sometimes it is) or "erudite" (again sometimes it is), but I'm glad that people find my poetry approachable and relate-able. As a poet, my aim is to communicate a point that touches people, makes them think, empowers them, inspires them, or even challenges them. But, if they think poetry isn't for them because all they know of poetry is what they learned to pass a test that made little to no sense to them but a teacher told them was standard bearer for poetry, they'll never see the poetry in the world around them let alone read modern poetry.

I'm a poet who would love to see more love and appreciation for poetry in the world, but I'm not a teacher by trade. I'm simply sharing the thoughts provoked by being asked some variety of the question "How can I get my students excited about learning poetry?" I hate to think you can't, so to me the best option is to make it accessible, to show them that they already love poetry, they just don't think of it as such. Then go from there.