The Gift of Poetry

I first published the following post last April, but in last year’s shift from Blogger to WordPress, I lost many of the great comments. So here it is again for round two. (The only change is that I’m no longer out of work, as the first line says. Rather, I’m drowning in student papers. That’s…um…a good thing?)

April is National Poetry Month, and I’m an English teacher out of work.

I’m okay with that, though. With two kids of my own, I’m appreciating the simplicity of short children whining and crying opposed to much taller, hormonal ones.

But I do miss teaching poetry, because it seems like that was the only time I actually read it.

In college, when I was opening myself up to the world, poetry seemed to flock to me. In the coffee shop of a bookstore, I found a love poem written on a napkin in a man’s blunt handwriting: “I was in flames when I met you…,” it began. In the same bookstore, I perused a biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay only to find a letter written on Four Seasons stationery (no doubt the product of an illicit affair), the writer expressing his (or her) excitement about their weekend together, and looking forward to the next, and the next after that.

It’s possible that poetry found me, but it’s more likely that I sought it out, that I looked for poetry on my walks through campus, at an old wooden desk in the library, while I sat beneath trees and listened to music on my Discman. I wrote poetry whenever I was inspired, and I was inspired often.

Unfortunately, as I matured, I only let poetry in when I was teaching it. I brought in poems daily for students to read as part of Billy Collins’–former poet laureate–project, Poetry 180. We read, we talked wistfully, we breathed the poetry in. We sat in circles and snapped our fingers when the poem was complete. We wrote haiku, metaphor and synecdoche, villanelles and free verse; we asked for writerly advice from our peers and submitted pieces to contests. I encouraged (okay, forced) my sophomores to choose and memorize an entire William Shakespeare sonnet, and in the process, began reciting them all to myself.

Poetry is a gift, a meditation. One cannot help be a poet when she is reading poetry, because poetry is not just words written with a certain form or rhyme on a piece of paper, in the folds of a worn book. It is a way of seeing. A poet, even on her darker days, starts to look at the world as though every aspect is more privileged, more divine, more awkwardly and torturously beautiful. The fruited branches of trees are mothers’ or brothers’ arms, looking for solace after a harsh winter. The roar of a car is a message from another time. A baby’s cry reminds her of an apartment complex in Brooklyn where her great-grandmother hung cloth diapers from the fire escape.

April is the perfect month for poetry, and for me, not–as T.S. Eliot says–the cruelest month. It is perfect because we are all–flies, tulips, children’s laughter, sun, robins–alive again, born anew to be embraced by soft breezes and gentle, flower-scented rain.

I am vowing to seek out poetry, and, I, like William Wordsworth, “Wish my days to be bound each to each / by natural piety.”

With that, I’ll leave you with one of my favorite poems. I was introduced to this poem by a student of mine, Jenn, an eighth grader at the time, who was assigned along with her classmates to find a poem she liked and share it with the class. I used it to begin poetry units thereafter, whether I was teaching eighth grade or college.

“Some Like Poetry”
by Wislawa Syszmborska (translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak)


Some -
that means not all.
Not even the majority of all but the minority.
Not counting school, where one must,
and poets themselves,
there will be perhaps two in a thousand.


Like -
but one also likes chicken-noodle soup,
one likes compliments and the color blue,
one likes an old scarf,
one likes to prove one’s point,
one likes to pet a dog.


Poetry -
but what sort of thing is poetry?
More than one shaky answer
has been given to this question.
But I do not know and do not know and clutch on to it,
as to a saving bannister.

I love the repetition of “I do not know and do not know.” Poetry reminds me of what I do not know, and yet makes me feel as wise as the earth is old.

What is your favorite poem? If possible, provide a link, or copy the poem in the comment section. Let’s celebrate poetry!


Sign up for a poem a day this month from Poets.org.

Image: “Collection of Poetry” by vintagecat *will be moving* via Flickr using a Creative Commons license.

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Tagged as: my attitude, National Poetry Month