English teachers often dread instructing the poetry unit. They may not read poetry themselves and thus be uncomfortable approaching the genre. Or they may have negative memories associated with learning poetry in high school. Teaching poetry, by remembering a few simple guidelines, can be enjoyable and rewarding. Teenagers are drawn to music, language and forms of self-expression. Teaching poetry can appeal to these traits in them, instilling a lifelong connection to the art of words.
Dissecting the Frog: Things to Avoid in Poetry Class
Poetry is not a machine, a dead animal or a mysterious puzzle that you have to supply the solution for. As the American poet, Donald Hall wrote: “Poetry is first of all sounds.” Approach the poem as an art form constructed out of words, and the poet as a word-musician. The poem, if well-written, is a fusion of form, language and the content best expressed by this shapely, singing container. There is not a “message” buried obscurely in the poem that the teacher must dig out.
Try to avoid parsing the poem for its meaning, as if it existed separately from the form and language of the poem itself. Telling students to go line by line through a poem, listing “what the poet is trying to say” and “the literary devices the poets have used,” as if poets are clumsy orators or strange mechanics, is not usually the best approach to a poem. Don't bore the students or make them think that the poem is a wrapping they can discard once they've found the little treat of meaning inside it.
Being an Awakener: What to Try in Poetry Class
So how does one present poetry to these restless or bewildered students? If poetry is a kind of music on the page, then the first thing to attempt would be to revive the poem's orality. Recite the poem, get students to take turns reading lines, challenge them to recite it in different voices or bring in a recording of the poet reading the poem themselves. Connect contemporary poetry to rap, to rock , to folk songs.Let the students hear the alliteration, consonance, assonance and other sound devices rather than teaching them in an abstract fashion. Introduce them to a range of poetic forms like the sonnet, the ghazal and the villanelle by showing how they emerged from a culture and a history. Allow students to try to write these forms as a group, noisily. Create concrete poems; compose sound poems.
Bring in diverse objects when discussing imagery and make metaphor, simile and personification tangible through these objects, demonstrating how poets leap between disconnected entities. Discuss poems in thematic groupings: poems of loss, of political import, of love. The students will begin to explore poetry as “an act of mischief...explosive active language” in Theodore Roethke's words. Encourage them to read along the vast spectrum of poetry, to memorize their favorite pieces. To express themselves in their own poetic endeavors. The results will truly be exciting for both the educator and the awakened students.
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