My 5th grade teacher introduced us to poetry every chance she got. When it was time for practicing our penmanship, she wrote short poems on the blackboard for us to copy. To my knowledge, that was the first time I’d been exposed to poetry beyond the odd tidbit my mother would recite, and I loved it.
(Shout out to “There Was a Little Turtle”...the first poem my mom memorized. She was five, and made sure everyone she came across on the way home from school that day knew the poem, too!)
After copying, we’d talk about the poems. How did they make us feel? What did we think the author was trying to say? Did s/he succeed? At the end of the year, we each bound all those copies into books. I think I still have mine somewhere.
Somewhere along the way, though, poetry became a chore. Whenever the inevitable “Poetry Unit” popped up in high school, I’d groan just as loudly as my classmates. We’d have to read a poem, analyze every bit of beauty out of it, and then go on to the next. It robbed us of the chance to relax and simply enjoy the music of poetry without worrying about symbolism and metaphor and rhyme scheme. I learned a lot of “poetry understanding” but almost no “poetry appreciation.”
Things got worse when we had to write poetry. Write a sonnet. Use iambic pentameter and the proper rhyme scheme. Write a haiku. Count your syllables. Write a villanelle. Watch your stanzas. Write a sestina. Choose your six words with care.
(Okay, I actually enjoyed the challenge of a sestina. Not that I admitted it to my teacher.)
College wasn’t much better. In my “American Authors” class we each had to memorize a poem and recite it to the rest of the class. Up until then, I’d managed to escape such a task. There’d been memorization before, of course (hello, Sonnet 116), but this was the first time I was expected to spit it back out. I went back to the dorm and whined about the assignment to pretty much anyone who’d listen. And then I recited my chosen poem to anyone who would listen.
(Little did I know that both the sonnet and my eventual memorization of Robert Frost’s Acquainted with the Night would stick with me and become party tricks. I once won a chocolate bar at work for being able to recite a poem at the drop of a hat.)
Yeah, poetry and I were not friends…until I started at the library. We used to run an annual poetry contest, and my English Major background pretty much ensured I got to be one of the judges. For the first time in decades I got to read poetry without analyzing it to death. And some of those entries were really good. I looked forward to it every year…right up until one of the participants started repeatedly hounding staff in an effort to find out who the judges were so they could ask us what comprised a “winning poem.” I suspect their ulterior motive was to design a poem that would win. This person is one of the reasons we no longer have a poetry contest.
I could go on and on about poetry. It’s never too late to learn to enjoy it, even if you’ve only been taught to pick it apart rather than actually like it.
For years at the library, at the first fall of snow,
I’d write a poem to my coworker, just to let her know.
I don’t remember when it started
But she entered my game whole-hearted
We’ve exchanged doggerel verses for years
Sometimes laughing ourselves to tears
She retired probably ten years ago
But we still exchange poems, even so.
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