* Poetry Reflection *

My Own Personal Feelings

Reading Poetry

When in school, I resented poetry. There, I said it. I did not enjoy poetry. In school, poetry was always linked to comprehension questions. I also distinctly remember feeling like the questions were trick questions. The poems the questions addressed always had some hidden meaning that I could never quite figure out, and they seemed too philosophical for my taste.

Now that I’m older, I’ve come to appreciate poetry more. I like reading The Sun and Her Flowers by Rupi Kaur. The poems evoke deep emotion and they make me think, but they aren’t tricky, like the poems were in school. Kaur’s poems also aren’t linked to questions, made to “test” my knowledge and interpretation. I think this is how poetry should be. Poetry is art. Art, is open to interpretation. Therefore, by the associative property, poetry is open to interpretation as well. So, there should not be questions to accompany the poems, because they can be interpreted differently by different people.

Additionally, I enjoy reading poetry because it’s quick. With the way books are generally written (in paragraphs) I sometimes find myself having to go back and reread the text. With poetry, I find myself rereading it, but not because I’m lost in the words, but because I want to take another look at the poem. I find that I can read lots of poetry in the same amount of time that it takes me to read a small amount of blocked text, and it makes me feel empowered.

Writing Poetry

I don’t feel confident in my ability to write poetry. I understand that poems can be written in many different ways, and that poetry is subjective. However, I do not like the thought of composing poetry and having others read it. To me, poetry is personal and I’m not necessarily comfortable having other people read about topics that are so close to me.

Teaching Poetry

During student teaching, I “taught” poetry with my cooperating teacher in April. I put the word taught in quotations because I don’t feel that we actually taught it. The students I worked with, at the school I worked in, used the Ready book for reading. The Ready book contains passages and questions and sometimes tables for students to use when ‘interacting’ with the poem. I didn’t feel like there was any freedom when it came to teaching poetry.

Criteria For A Really Good Poem

In my opinion, a really good poem evokes emotion. When a poem makes you feel something, is when you know you’ve read a really good poem. I also find myself rereading really good poems, because I want to experience the poem again.

Poetry Environment

In order to create a poetry environment in the classroom, poems should be read often. Poems could also be incorporated in the day without having some sort of task attached to it. This way, students would be more focussed on the poem itself, and not the assignment that will come after. Additionally, reading your class poems before you start teaching poetry is a good way to create a poetry environment. If you only talk about poetry when it comes time to teach it, children might not feel that poetry is valued by you. They might feel that their teacher is simply teaching it because they have to, like anything else. However, if you talk about poetry more fluidly throughout the year, children will notice your love of poetry.

Children also need to be exposed to different types of poetry. It is a common misconception that poetry must rhyme. I wasn’t shown very many free verse or concrete poems, at least not in elementary school. Anything can be poetry. Showing children this flexible view on poetry may increase their confidence in writing it themselves.

After reading chapters 1-3 of Awakening the Heart by Georgia Heard, I have learned some more approaches to creating a poetry rich environment. One teacher made a bulletin board that was titled, “What we say is poetry”. Whenever a student would say something that sounded like poetry, she would ask them to write it down and then it would be stuck on the bulletin board for everyone to see. After a little while of doing this, students would start catching others saying things that were ‘poetry’. Students became aware of the poetry around them, which is what I think a poetry environment does!