Enthusing Kids with Poetry

[Leanne]

I like to teach my kids chemistry experiments, but what do they do when they don't have parents who like to blow stuff up? My husband likes Bob Dylan and the kids know all the words to his (horribly boring) songs, but what do they do when they don't have parents who listen to lots of nasal folk music? Why is poetry any different? The fact is, you can't teach kids something you don't have some kind of passion for yourself, or you run the risk of alienating them from the subject entirely. And we can't do a damned thing about parents who don't care enough about their kids to insist on regular schooling, except increase the vigilance and powers of welfare organisations, which is somewhat outside of our purview here.

But the thing about passion -- well, there are many, many teachers taking classes on poetry who do it only because it's part of the curriculum. They don't understand it themselves, nor do they care for it. They in turn weren't taught by someone with a passion for it, and the trouble with coming to something as an adult is that you either fall into it deeply and desperately, or you write it off as being too hard, too boring, too much effort. We need teachers to fall, not just into poetry but into every subject they teach, so that our children are infused with a desire not to know, but to seek. And we need to keep repeating until it sinks in, that poetry is more than words on a page, it is a record of all that is human, rewritten every time a new reader discovers it.