Lessons in Poetry

April is National Poetry Month, meaning that we get to celebrate the joy, expressiveness, and pure delight of poetry for 30 whole days. Be sure to check out our poetry unit in our teacher pay teacher store. It is one of our favorite units of study that we teach with our students.

A poem is a small but powerful thing. It is the history of the human heart. It has the power to reach inside of you, to ignite something in you, and to change you in ways you never imagined. There is a feeling of connection when we read a poem that articulates our deepest feelings. Poems can inspire us to write our own journeys, to find our own voices.

For the more rational minded, poets are persuaders because poetry represents maximum efficiency of expression and communication. Poetry is the oldest form of verbal expression. Poetry predates prose fiction by thousands of years. At the same time, poetry is sudden occurrence. A poem that takes up a few inches of space on a page can have the power to open readers’ hearts and maybe even blow their minds.

Every poem has a shape and a heartbeat. In poems, every word counts; even the spaces you leave on the page are part of what a poem delivers. The blank space on a page, the edge and between the lines is silence. A poem is a displacement of that silence. Prose, on the other hand, is a continuation of that noise.

A poet sees exactly what you and I see, but the poet goes a step further and packages that insight into an expression that momentarily washes away the clouds in front of our eyes. Poetry writing can be daunting for many students. I don’t teach poetry in the conventional way it is often taught. I did not enjoy learning or writing poetry when I was in school. I was that student who dreaded the poetry unit. The rigid rules of writing the different poems just did not work for my creative process. So, I’ve created an unconventional unit of study of poetry for students who don’t like to write or appreciate poetry. I hope that it can add to your poetry unit to make your lesson uniquely your own and reach more students in the process because poetry is life.