The Care and Feeding of Poetry

Nurturing poetry is like bringing a wild creature indoors. We need to learn which leaves, fruits, and flowers it can eat, and which will make it sick, or destroy its free spirit. In other words, poetry is an experience, not a genre. Poetry is a form of exploration, with intuitive and natural aspects that are often neglected while poets—or teachers—focus on specific skills. Poetry, like peace, is personal. No two poets interpret a subject in exactly the same way, and each individual poet is likely to interpret her own poem differently on two different days. She might not be able to tell you what her verse means, but she will be able to describe how she felt while leading a wild creature across a bridge of words from her mind to yours.

 

Poetry is interactive. The open spaces between lines and stanzas are filled with echoes like the resonance after ringing a bell. Those spaces hold the poet’s emotions, as well as the reader’s. Poetry, in other words, is music. Rhythm. Melody. Lyrics. Birdsong. Hoofbeats. Heartbeats.

 

When a teacher asks students what a poem means, the joy of hearing music might be lost, and fears of failing to interpret “correctly” can be triggered. Instead of “What does this poem mean?” I suggest asking, “How does the poem make you feel?” Music is a fluctuating, emotional experience, not a rigid formula that always produces identical results.

 

When I was little, I wrote poetry because my mother read poetry to me. I wrote outdoors, my poems moving to the rhythm of my own footsteps, scribbling in my mind rather than on paper. As a teenager, I was allowed to write poetry on the walls of my room. It never occurred to me that poetry could be disdained, until I was placed in a high school honors creative writing class where the teacher said of my sonnet sequence about snails that snails were not a noble enough subject for the form. I disagreed. I loved nature. What could be more heroic than a small, slow creature facing life bravely?

 

For many years after taking that honors class, I kept my poems secret. Fortunately, in graduate school, Tomás Rivera taught me that it’s fine to write from the heart without caring about anyone’s judgment, without worrying about publication, without feeling caged by expectations.

 

So how can we, as adults, help children preserve their natural love of rhythm, rhyme, and other aspects of musical language? We can encourage them to let their words flow. We can offer the three Ps: peaceful surroundings, a pencil (or pen), and paper. If they’re serious about writing, they’ll eventually learn to revise. They’ll read, read, read, simply because they love poems and stories. They’ll practice, practice, practice, just like any other artist, musician, actor, or athlete who would never dream of performing in public without rehearsing, training, learning, and improving.

 

If children end up with awkward rhymes, adults can guide them toward other forms, such as free verse, tanka, and haiku. We can show them how to use internal rhymes, near rhymes, or vowel rhymes, which often sound more natural than end rhymes. When they don’t know what to write about, we can take them outdoors, where nature never fails to work its magic by engaging all five senses.

 

Children and poetry were born to love each other. All we need to do is offer room to grow, so that words can flow freely, like wild creatures returning to their natural habitat.