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5.
AOTW: Do you feel our schools do an adequate job of exposing children to poetry? How would you teach kids to love poetry?
Mary Ann Hoberman: In my experience many schools today are doing better in encouraging children both to read and to write poetry than they did a decade or two ago. But it still depends on the individual teacher --- without enthusiasm and conviction and a genuine love of language, she/he will not infuse the child with a true appreciation for the wonder of words. When I go into the schools, I recite my poems and immediately get the children to recite them with me. I repeat a poem several times, each time encouraging the children to participate more fully. We talk about the way the poem is made, clapping out the rhythm, picking out the rhymes, including internal ones, and suggesting other rhyming possibilities, repeating the refrain if there is one, noticing instances of alliteration and assonance, discovering puns, observing how the poem is placed on the page, etc. I move from funny poems to serious ones and back again. If I have time, I talk to the children about poems I loved when I was their age and encourage them to memorize the poems that they love. I would like to see each day begin with a poem in every classroom across America.
Sonya Sones: I think our schools succeed in exposing our children to poetry, but they often fail to instill a love of poetry in them. I think this is because students are asked to spend their time memorizing poems rather than writing them. They're asked to analyze poems, and extract their "inner meanings," instead of just being asked to enjoy them, to feel them. There's a funny poem by Billy Collins called "Introduction to Poetry," in which he talks about tying a poem to chair and trying to beat a confession out of it. Teachers should be doing just the opposite with their students if they want to succeed in turning them on to poetry. They should be reading them great poems --- and by this I mean poems that kids would define as great --- and helping the children figure out what it is that makes them great.
Paul B. Janeczko: I think most schools do a good job of sharing poetry with kids up until grade 7 or 8. Up until that grade, poetry, for the most part, is alive and well in the classrooms. But in junior high things get more "serious" and there is no longer place in the curriculum for creative writing because we are spending too much valuable time preparing kids to take host of standardized tests. Nor is there time for much reading and talking about contemporary poetry. I agree with Billy Collins who said that high school is the place where poetry goes to die.
I'm not sure we can teach a kid to love poetry, any more than I can teach someone to love baseball or the smell of a baby. But what we can do is give kids every chance to read and write poetry, and if the poems are chosen well and the experience has a chance to grow...who knows what could happen.
Marilyn Singer: I don't know whether or not schools do a good job. I think a lot of teachers tend to use the same poems over and over. I'd like to see them seek out other poems and poets out there. I used to teach, and I read poems I loved, truly loved, to my classes. Real love has weight. I'd read "Fern Hill" and cry. The classes couldn't help but be affected, or at least curious, about what moved their daffy teacher so much. I also encouraged observation. You can't write well unless you use your senses. I would like to see teachers incorporate fun sensory exercises and read and write poems that reflect those. Also, I would NOT grade poems!
Alan Katz: I think we can do a better job of making poetry more accessible. My 10-year-old and 7-year-old enjoy silly poems (mine, Jack Prelutsky's and others), and if that's their ticket to the joys of poetry, I'm glad to see it. Also, many kids who hear my songs say they're going to write their own. I strongly encourage that.
Betsy Franco: I think the "Poets in the Schools Program" is the best thing going. I also wrote a book with Maria Damon called The Secret Life of Words (Teaching Resource Center, 2000) which teaches poetry writing. It includes poets students don't normally encounter. It has a playful approach to poetry and presents innovative poetry ideas; that is, it doesn't teach poetry through the traditional poetic forms.
X. J. Kennedy: I really don't know the answer to question one. It's like trying to guess whether most couples are adequate in bed. But I've met dozens of teachers who love poetry, want to push it on kids, and are undoubtedly doing a swell job. How to encourage kids to love poetry is a big topic, which my wife and sometime co-author Dorothy M. Kennedy and I have gone into in some detail in the back of a book called Knock at a Star: A Child's Introduction To Poetry (revised edition, Little, Brown, 2000).
Robin Hirsch: Exposing kids to poetry --- I doubt it. Loving poetry is not hard. Begin young. It's tactile. Just getting your mouth around succulent phrases is a perfect way of weaning a baby from the bottle. Kids can be enchanted by rhythm, pace, the physical taste of words. It can begin anywhere --- a phrase from the paper, the radio, TV. Play with it. Don't make it holy. Try things on for size --- realize how bloody hard it is to write one halfway decent sentence. Look at great sentences. Look at tiny poems (Randall Jarrell's "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner"). Play music. Read lyrics. Read one line, one couplet, finally one sonnet by Shakespeare, etc.
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