What a rapture to rediscover poetry
THIS IS A LETTER FROM ONE OF OUR READERS
4 September 2013
8:59 PM
I’m a teacher and I’m young and I don’t know what I’m doing and I stumbled on your site last fall when I finally decided to damn the standards and the policies and all the “voices who know better” and promised to fill my classroom with poetry. My students don’t know what poetry is: no one has let them discover. They’ve been given Shakespeare and 19th century Americans and told that’s all there is. So I ask them “what is poetry?” And show them there’s no answer in a book. And I give them all the poems and the lyrics and I tell them “this is a poem” and they rank them most poetic for them. And I tell them “yes you’ll memorize one” and they groan and think I’m crazy, old fashioned, outdated, ignorant. What’s the use? What’s the point? How will it help me get into college? How will it help me in a career? And I don’t have an answer except that when they find The Poem then they’ll understand. And you see it, from time to time, eventually the quietest one in the room gets it and then eventually the loudest one in the room gets it. They see they’re not alone and that a hand is reaching out saying “you are feeling what you’re feeling, it is real, and I have felt it too.”
But this idea didn’t originate with me. I didn’t discover this in me and then discover the boundless resource that is you. Originally I taught from a great big book handed down from the State which told me speeches and essays were the cornerstone of any education and that poems (listed as if they weren’t their own kind of speech, their own kind of essay, their own kind of fiction and nonfiction) of any value were few, far between, easily skipped in a modern teenagers education. Then I found your website and I spent three days reading through it. What a rapture to rediscover poetry. To find all these new voices and find a love for them overflowing. I started handwriting the poems that moved me, trying to hold onto that feeling as long as I could. And that’s when I realized I could use this. I could use this to cement the foundation of my career. I could build a life off of poetry teaching poetry and a love for it, a love you rekindled in me.
I lost my job in May. Not because of the poems. No, some English teachers would even whisper to me their love for certain poems like we were plotting a revolution, but like I said I am young. The young get cut first. It’s hard out there for an English teacher in an east coast town. We’re told we’re not special. We’re a dime a dozen. But I’m trying hard as I can, and I’ll do the substitute work, follow someone else’s plan til they give me my classroom again and I’ll start whispering words of poetry, of revolution, again.
That is what you’ve given me. And through me, know, you are giving to the next generation. If I teach for 30 years, If I live that long, if my passion still can burn that long, imagine the thousands of children you will have unknowingly, unwittingly influenced in their education all because one young teacher who doesn’t know any better brought you into a classroom.
Do what you must, but know what you’ve created is invaluable to me.
TR
