2021 Post #17 -- A Poem a Day (The Same Poem a Day)

by Janet Wong and Sylvia Vardell

A year ago, at the start of the pandemic in the U.S., we wrote a guest post entitled “In This Together,” celebrating the teachers and administrators who have risen to do heroic things on a daily basis to help families in their learning communities. We praised families, too, for stepping up to comfort and educate children and lamented over the jumbled mix of emotions that we all were feeling over the COVID-19 situation. We urged readers to seek relief in poetry for several reasons, such as the way poems often point to the good things in life, especially the small good things, bringing us slivers of hope and joy when we are lost.

Fully a year later, we feel the same way about the ability of poetry to provide relief, but we’ll admit that the message of optimism might be wearing thin—especially for students. How many times can they hear “things will be better” before they tune us out?

More than we might think. A few years ago the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research released a study that shared the following: people often replay a favorite song hundreds of times. The study’s authors called this “extreme re-listening” and suggested that people do not tire of listening to songs that they choose voluntarily. We think it’s time to apply this concept to the sharing of poetry, especially with poems that incorporate movement and can provide a quick “brain break.” One exemplary poem for this purpose is “Everyday Use” by Zetta Elliot from HOP TO IT: Poems to Get You Moving, our latest anthology (featuring 100 poems by 90 poets). You can read the text of the poem here, but we hope you’ll also play the video of Zetta Elliott reading her poem. It takes less than a minute, so you can even play it daily for a week, or several times in a day—and then give the link to it to your students for them to play (when they feel like it) at home.

You might even want to give students a homework assignment simply to listen to a favorite poem—any poem—three times in a day. You can provide them with a list of audio or video links gathered from Poets.org, PoetryFoundation.org, PoetryMinute.org, or in the Poetry Video Library at No Water River; you can also find many poetry readings at our Pomelo Books Vimeo site. To give you a start, here are links to several additional poems from HOP TO IT, read by the poets themselves, that will lend themselves well to some extreme re-listening (and brain breaks) at home.


“Any Weather” by Rebecca Balcárcel https://vimeo.com/477187936

“At the Eye” by Padma Venkatraman: https://vimeo.com/477200215

“Chair Dancing” by Xelena González: https://vimeo.com/476495197

“Clear, Cool Blue” by Jacqueline Jules: https://vimeo.com/477197161

“I Smile with My Eyes” by David McMullin: https://vimeo.com/476499247

“The Artist” by Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie: https://vimeo.com/504939468

As we said last year, if any of these poems resonates especially strongly with your students, please spread the word. We are still #inthistogether.



Further Reading:



Sylvia Vardell is Professor in the School of Library and Information Studies at Texas Woman’s University; her current work focuses on poetry for children, including the nationally recognized blog, Poetry for Children. Janet Wong is the author of more than thirty books for children and teens on a wide variety of subjects, including identity (A Suitcase of Seaweed & MORE). Together, Vardell and Wong are the forces behind the Poetry Friday books published by Pomelo Books.