The Making of a Poetry Program

Abstract

An essential and, I'm afraid, often neglected part of a secondary English curriculum is an effective program in writing and reading poetry. Done the right way, such a program teaches students to be natural and disciplined in their use of language; it teaches the process of creativity and stresses the importance of words and voice in self expression; it blends the skills of writing, thinking, and listening; and, what's more, it costs practically nothing and yields measurable results almost immediately. However, developing a poetry program also requires careful and intelligent preparation before teachers do anything in class. In our school system, the English Department agreed in the spring of 1982 that improving our teaching of poetry would be a priority for the following year. Despite many of us having masters' degrees or more in English, we knew less than we should about teaching the reading of poetry and still less about the writing of it. We used anthologies that included sections on poetry, organizing the use of similes and metaphors, some illustrated images, some could be used to teach tone, voice, point of view, and so forth. Yet, even when these poems represented thoughtful and teachable selections and when editors had obviously tried to create worthwhile class activities, the groupings seemed mechanical to us and the approach lacking in the essentials of what we had defined as an effective program in poetry. To our students, these units seemed too much like stereotypical English-an academic hurdle to surmount by detouring from their real lives and getting over the codes and jargon of the literature class to complete a required subject. This was college English adapted to a secondary school level, and for the majority of our students, it wasn't working. Balancing this academic approach to studying poetry was our creative approach, an attempt to help students experience the excitement of creative expression. Anything Goes could have been the theme of our creative writing exercises; our message to students was that anything they did was fine, because it was theirs. We were tentative in offering criticism, because we didn't want to discourage anyone, and we hadn't come up with a convincing answer to students who told us that in suggesting revisions we were trying to legislate their feelings and thoughts. So we placed a premium on freedom of expression. Sloppy thinking, half-baked ideas, quick production of spontaneous drivel with obligatory rhyming were often the result. We were uncomfortable with what we