
student in the 90s.
As a middle and high schooler, I felt that poetry was something akin to a doily: a frilly, ornamental, and somewhat useless thing that was cool for people who were into that kind of thing (aka, not me). Whenever a teacher said it was time for poetry, I sighed internally, held my nose, and got through it as quickly as possible.
As an English major in college I had to take a poetry class, and at first my mindset and experience was similar to middle and high school, but then one day the professor brought in a poem called “Root” by a Hungarian poet named Miklos Radnoti (full text at the bottom). Radnoti, who was of Jewish heritage, wrote the poem while on a forced death march towards the end of World War II–a march that would ultimately take his life. The poem “Root” was one of a number of poems that were found on his body after the war and published posthumously.
It has been nearly 20 years since that class, and I remember nothing else about it, but “Root” remains seared into my consciousness. There was something so amazing about Radnoti’s imagery, the raw emotion, and the fact that it went into the ground with him and then came out again to tell his story. I’d read hundreds of poems before, but that latched onto my soul and like the raven it still is sitting there today.
This moment with “Root” was when I realized what poetry really is. Far from a needlessly frilly doily, poetry is humanity reduced into its essence. It is experiences, emotions, ideas, and language compressed into little bite-sized pieces, which makes it, when wielded well, an incredibly powerful tool in the writing classroom. It took me a while to figure out how to use it right (next week’s post is on how I win over the poetry skeptics in my classes), but today I use poetry daily in my writing classes and in a myriad of ways; I simply can’t imagine my classes without it. Here are five of the most impactful ways that using poetry helps me to be a better writing teacher:
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