2021 Post #4 -- I Don't Like Poetry

 by Matthew Johnson

This morning I was reading introductory letters from my new group of students, and I was struck by how several students, as they always do, went out of their way to tell me the same four words that I’ve heard from scores of students over the course of my career: I don’t like poetry.

In my early years I struggled with how to respond to the inevitable and often vocal poetry critics that come into my classes each year, but a few years ago, I recalled a lesson from my youth that has since helped me to proactively win over a surprising number of these skeptics and detractors.

What I do now is that I, before we dive into our first poems of the year, lean forward and in hushed tones that denote a secret, I tell them my—to borrow a concept from comics—my origin story with poetry. I start by letting them know the truth, which was that when I sat in their position, I was anti-poetry myself. To me, poetry was something akin to a doily. It was nice enough for people who were into that kind of thing, but to me, it seemed frilly, fussy, and essentially useless.

I then jump to my junior year of college, when my professor, likely anticipating some resistant poets in the audience, dropped the Billy Collins’ poem "Introduction to Poetry" on our desks and asked for our thoughts on it. As I say this, I also drop this poem onto their desks and tell them that for some reason this poem grabbed me in that moment like none before. The language was so distinctly not fussy, the images felt crisp and clear, and the subversive tone very much appealed to the 20 year old me.

Lastly, I tell them that in that moment I understood both that I could like poetry and why I’d always disliked it before. Poetry is human existence condensed into, as Langston Hughes calls them, “atomic words.” Like any condensed flavor, if one dislikes the original flavor, the condensed version will be even less appealing, but when one comes across the condensed flavor of something one already loves, the taste can be like Nirvana.

To conclude the lesson, I tell students to go and find that flavor that works for them. Their Nirvana. It can be a slam poet, a pop song, another Billy Collins poem, or even Shel Silverstein. And the result, beyond students bringing a lot of great poems the next class, is that while plenty of beginning of the year letters mention not liking poetry, the ones at the end of the year never do!

Further Reading:

Matthew Johnson is an English teacher from Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is also a husband and father, and over the last decade he has read, thought, and written about how teachers can balance teaching with all of the other important roles they play in their lives. His work has been published by Principal Leadership, Edutopia, ASCD, The National Writing Project, and the National Council of Teachers of English, and his weekly thoughts on how to be a better teacher of writing in less time can be found on his website www.matthewmjohnson.com. When not teaching, reading, or writing, he can often be found in the kitchen, his garden, or out on a run through the gently rolling hills of Southeast Michigan.