Making a Place for Poetry

The public library helps me do my job. When I enter the library in my neighborhood, the librarians smile and whisper to one another before deciding who will assist me. Sometimes they team up: one gets the books waiting for me on the “hold” shelf while the other begins to wave a wand over the barcode on the back of each of the books sprawled across the circulation desk. Patrons snicker and stare. Is it the suitcase, or is it the armload of books I force my seven-year-old to carry?

I teach. I have come to the library in search of poetry and it isn’t even April. This is a huge step for me. Though I am an English language arts teacher, I used to avoid teaching poetry to ninth- and tenth-graders. I admit it. I was one of those teachers Melanie Drane described in her AfterWord (2004 Vol. 7 No.3). You know the type? Afraid of the poem as it mockingly stretches across the page, separating itself from prose. What does it mean? How should I read it, and how do I teach it? It seemed the only thing to was to pick it apart with my students, as if we were diagramming sentences, as my teachers had done with me, line by line, until we were all tired from the task. Whew! Glad that’s over, I’d think, patting myself on the back because I’d gotten us all through one more poetry month. But then, while reviewing books for adolescents, I discovered young adult (YA) novels in verse. Suddenly, poetry took on new significance, urging me to share the experience with students.

Novels in verse such as Beowulf and Paradise Lost have been around for centuries, but YA novels in verse are only about a decade old. Typically in YA literature, the protagonist and other main characters are drenched in emotional turmoil as they attempt to make sense of difficult problems and adolescence in general. Ron Koertge’s Shakespeare Bats Cleanup (Candlewick Press) and The Brimstone Journals (Candlewick Press) are excellent examples. The former is the story of a boy’s growing interest in writing poetry as an emotional outlet as he recuperates from mononucleosis. In the latter, a number of high school seniors express anger, fear, disappointment and other emotions in short poems that tell a unified story about weapons in the hands of hurting teens. Boyd has second thoughts as he makes plans to kill classmates on his list of enemies: “bombs / in the backpacks, rifles under / the coats ... I want / to tell Mike to just slow down. / And then I think: too late now / man. We couldn’t stop if we / wanted to.”

Another favorite is Soul Moon Soup (Front Street). Homeless, Phoebe Rose has had a number of disappointments, including the disappearance of her father. Through difficult times she has managed to cling to art, but gradually, drawing becomes less important as survival and self-discovery take center stage.

Marilyn Nelson’s Carver: Life in Poems (Front Street) has become an important work to introduce to students. In more than forty poems about the life of botanist and inventor George Washington Carver, the book makes for interesting interdisciplinary discussions. Nelson’s “Drifter” is a useful template for students writing their own poems about well-known scientists and mathematicians. Poetry becomes a tool for helping students learn across the curriculum.

In English methods courses, I use YA novels in verse as a springboard for conversations intended to teach students to take risks when writing poetry. Verse made it possible for me to return to the stacks for poets such as Rita Dove, Robert Browning, Nikki Giovanni, and a new discovery, Tim Sieble (Buffalo Head Solos, Cleveland State University Poetry Center). Into the classroom they all go. Marveling at the poems as they are, and connecting them to other things we have read, prompts discussions about intertexuality.

We bring in our favorite poems, emphasizing the stanzas and individual lines that have lit the dim passageways in our lives. It is when we confess how difficult it is to choose just one and laugh at those of us who cheat and bring in several, that I am sure my new-found interest in poetry is contagious. Favorites are compiled, creating a folder of great poetry for the future teachers who will make time for it in their classrooms. We decide to forgive ourselves for the close analysis that some of the poems will undergo, though relieved that most such analysis will be used to engage students in pleasurable readings of poetry throughout the school year.

KaaVonia Hinton-Johnson