I don’t recall people in school ever liking poetry. I can most vividly remember middle school and high school experiences with it.
In middle school, we studied all types of poems, and had to recreate each type with one of our own. By the end of the unit, each of us had a binder full of poems. I remember the project being long and time-consuming, but I liked being able to write whatever I wanted to, as long as it fit the guidelines provided.
In high school, we read a lot of Shakespeare. This was a slightly less-enjoyable experience for me because I felt like I was constantly translating, deciphering, and deciding what was going on, rather than soaking in the words and searching for meaning. I remember spending the majority of my time translating it into plain English, and the beauty of it just disappeared.
Maybe this was you. Maybe you love poetry, and maybe you hate it.
One of the biggest influences poetry has had on my life was with my reading. As a kid, I always had a book in hand. I tore through my library at home, so my parents took me to the public library almost every weekend to get something new to read. I’d spend countless rainy afternoons in the children’s section in Barnes and Nobel, sprawled out on the floor, reading whatever I could get my hands on. I loved to read. The only problem was, I could only read silently.
Truth be told, I had a pretty bad stutter every time I read out loud in class. My teachers and all my friends knew I could read, and I could well, but when it came to reading out loud, something took over me, made me shake and stutter, and the words never came out the way they were supposed to.
It was frustrating. I was embarrassed, and I often asked to be passed over when we had to round-robin read in class.
I finally told my mom how much this bothered me after school one day. Her solution? She made me read out loud with her. This was different, though. She was my mom. I wasn’t worried about her laughing at me or not sitting by me at lunch. She was patient, and she helped me when I needed it, without judgement.
She made me read Shel Silverstein poems when I read out loud. I had never read poetry before, but I loved all of his books. I started off slow, and I hated it. I sounded stupid, and I would stop in the middle of my poem and cry. My mom made me keep going, and it really did help me.
Poetry helped me overcome something, so I feel like I have a real soft spot for it, especially Shel Silverstein.
On a completely different note, my Reading 5715 class actually read some poetry the other night. Our professor, Devery Ward, showed us two poems- one by Mary Oliver and the other by Thomas Lux.
Thomas Lux:
We focused greatly on the schema that this poem creates as you read it. In the stanzas where he writes about a barn, we talked about how all of us have a different picture in our heads when we think of “barn”. I thought of my Aunt Lori’s horse farm and riding with her every summer, my friend thought of the farm near her house, and another girl thought of the summer camp arts and crafts station in a barn. We all have a different picture of barn, solely about the word barn, without having any verbs or subjects attached to it, which was absolutely wild to us.
We also talked about the voice you hear as you read. In this poem, Lux writes about how you are reading the writer’s words, but when you read them, you’re reading with YOUR voice. Listen to yourself as you read what I’m writing. You don’t hear my voice when you read my words, do you? Maybe you do now, and in that case, I’m glad you know me well enough to know what my voice sounds like. But we all read in our own voices because our phonological processing takes over in our heads and breaks the sounds of the words up, and creates something in our heads that makes us hear our own voices. Truly mind-boggling stuff.
Mary Oliver:
For this poem, we talked about the picture in our heads that we drew. Some of us saw ourselves on a path hearing voices of other people, and walking on until the voices fade. Some of us didn’t imagine it quite literally- we took her words and remembered something in our life that related to what she was saying. We were inspired.
We talked a lot about how it seems Mary Oliver is writing directly about us. It seemed like she knew exactly what memory or event we have overcome, or that we are struggling to win over, and she is writing about us. It seemed like she was saying, “Hey Alyssa. You matter. You can do this. Just keep going”, and this was crazy to us, as well.
Maybe you aren’t the biggest fan of poetry, but I hope your mind is changed as we read more and explore poetry more through this class. I can’t make you feel what I feel, but I hope that I’ve shed a little light on how poetry has changed me and continues to inspire me.