Writing Poetry: Putting Chaos into Perspective

As National Poetry Month approaches, I have to make a confession. Though I find it rewarding and enjoyable to read poetry with students and deepen their appreciation of poetry through response and analysis, I never asked students to write their own poetry. Never.

There are a number of ways I can rationalize this pedagogical choice. Chief among those reasons is the far greater curricular pressure in high school to develop students’ ability to write about poetry rather than to create poems themselves. But, in truth, I was succumbing to a stimulus even more powerful than anything so logical: I was afraid.

I don’t write poetry. I have no formal training in how to teach students to write a poem. And, most significantly, I have no sense of how to respond to student poetry. With apologies to Edna St. Vincent Millay, adolescent chaos in fourteen lines was not something I felt equipped to face. I’m not even going to bring into the discussion the idea of evaluation (or, worse yet, grading). The entire process seemed beyond my grasp.

Then I participated in the Summer Institute of a the local Writing Project site and did what you’re supposed to do there: I took a risk as a writer. Given the freedom in morning writing time to ponder, compose, and revise—and with the knowledge that I could share this piece with a community of supportive and invested readers, or keep it private, or throw it away and never mention that I tried—I did it. I wrote a poem.

I’m confident that even this single creative act is enough to embolden me to offer students the chance to write poetry in my class. I certainly don’t have the answers to all the conundrums I posed—how to teach poetry writing, how to respond to student poetry, how to evaluate it—at least not yet.

But with apologies to another poet, now I’m willing to travel down that road that I’d chosen not to take before.