Enthusing Kids with Poetry

[abu nuwas]

eventually i came to the realization i was in fact a moron.

I know exactly what you mean. I have had those epiphany/duh moments very recently . . . (sorry off-topic I know)

I like that, Mark: The Feast of the Duh!

Having looked at what you and Billy said, and had a chance to think, I fancy that the most important thing would be, to treat it as you do with other things you like to see kids get into -- swimming, maybe play an instrument, sport, Scouts, and so on. Parents mainly want that the child has one extra thing to enjoy through life, and absolutely hate it when a child refuses even to sample something, with no idea of what it is like (as happens sometimes with food-- 'I don't like bananas' 'You've never had one! Just a bite..')

Most children have nursery rhymes around them. Sometimes they are sing-song, sometimes not. Either way, they give a good lead-in to meter.So, I think that perhaps the trick is to carry on, as nursery rhymes are left behind, with good children's poetry, or perhaps poetry selected for children. As I learnt to read very late, I missed much. The first poem I recall learning was:

Lars Porsena of Clausium, by the nine Gods he swore,
That the great house of Tarquin must suffer wrong no more
By the nine Gods he swore it, and named a trysting day,
And bade his messengers ride forth
East and West and South and North
To summon his array.

(I may have got the line-breaks all wrong).

I think I was then eight, but did not know half of what it meant until told. But once told, it went in easily, like so many things one picks up as a kid. I might have been told about my grandfather making crystal-sets in the morning, Lars Porsena in the afternoon.

After that, I would have been able to work out a good many grown-up poems, especially if they were read aloud, in great rolling rhythms, as many in our anthologies were. Later, when I went to school, we 'did' several Shakespeare plays, and the power of a phrase here or there was enough --'You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things' stuff like that. We also learnt poems which I assumed were by some old dead guy, and only later, realised that I could have bumped into them. I suppose so much of the poetry we had at home was old, I imagined that it all was.

As I write, I am beginning to spot the gap: between 4/5 to , in my case, 8. I would think ballads of one sort or another, and when the time is ripe, Lewis Carroll.

In brief (!) I think children should learn, in much the same way as poetry itself has developed: meter, then creative use of meter and structure, then free verse. Hmmmm.....