Given the recent Poetry Out Loud performances, and the end of January as poetry month, it is fitting to review the highlights of poetry month through the lens of Upper School English department chair and Upper School English teacher, Mrs. Young. Hopefully, now that there is some distance from poetry in the classroom, you can reflect back on it and appreciate what you have learned.
Young states that poetry matters “because words matter.” Words have an impact on everyone’s lives and poetry uses the most precise and the most concise words, while still maintaining a significant impact.
Poetry also provides a challenge. Young believes “it’s important to expose ourselves to the types of words and the experience of words. That can be the most difficult.” For high school students, poetry tends to be a difficult medium. It’s a challenge because poetry is the form with which students are the least familiar, and “it is important to study difficult things.”
Young also points out that poetry is important to experience, and the classroom provides an environment where that experience is “forced” but also encouraged. Certain texts simply belong in the classroom, and poetry is no exception.
Much of the struggle with poetry comes from its concise form. Young argues that kids can appreciate poetry, but not teenagers. She states, “One of the reasons teenagers do not [appreciate poetry] is because intellectually they are more developed than kids. There is this belief that the shorter something is, the harder it must be and the more you should get something out of it.”
Teenagers have been taught to dive deeper and extract meaning from everything, so they tend to overcomplicate poetry. In its essence, “poetry is inherently playful,” and, sometimes, it should just be treated as such. Young reinforces this idea when she talks about how teenagers “should be able to pick [poetry] up and love it and put it down, but intellectually [they] are at this phase where [they] have to draw meaning” out of everything.
Young balances the enjoyment of poetry with the study of poetry in her classes by giving her students a poem to read, purely for fun, at the beginning of each class. Later, they read more difficult, intensive poems, from which meaning is meant to be extracted.
Because of this tricky balance and her personal love for poetry, Young jokes, “it is my absolute favorite month to teach English, and it is also the month I hate teaching English the most.”
Obviously, it is hard for students to get through all of Poetry Out Loud month at TGS, so Young says her number one tip is to “always read a poem for its literal meaning.” She explains that one of her sophomores picked a poem that is “literally about a card table: It’s about the legs of a card table, it’s about the folding of the card table and it’s about slapping our hands down on the top of the card table when we play games. It’s really tempting to think this is a poem about discrimination, human abuse, or empathy. No, it’s not. It’s just about a card table.”
Her second tip is to walk through a poem “idea by idea.” Sometimes the literary devices of a poem will invite students to draw meaning, but sometimes not. First and foremost, just focus on the main and literal ideas of the poem.
January also means there are Poetry Out Loud competitions. These first take place in each English classroom and then culminate into an all-school performance recited by the class winners. Though Young has been at TGS for a while, she has few memories of past performances. However, she praises her lack of memory because it means she can be more dedicated to her current students.
She does vaguely remember one student who delivered a performance that carried her to the national level in Washington D.C. Her name was Stephie McNerry, and she was the first person, that Young can remember reciting a bilingual poem. Though Young doesn’t speak Spanish, she was “still able to appreciate the music and sound in the Spanish language.”
“I think it was a really savvy selection” Young continued. The state of Arizona was in the midst of turmoil with border policies and immigration, and McNerry’s poem highlighted this debate, which was definitely a smart choice for the state competition. Arizona needed someone who represented their beliefs and problems in the form of poetry, and McNerry personified that voice.
Though it is nice to reminisce about past poetry months, Young still has expectations for her students. She hopes that students, especially seniors, who may have recited the same poem for the last three years, dive out of their comfort zone, and find “another poem that might mean something more to them.”
Young believes that this month is the perfect time for students to “find words that are actually worth memorizing, not just for the sake of busywork, but because they want to carry those words around for the rest of their lives.”
Written by Sheela Gowrisankaran and Kira McNeill, Editor and Chief and Lead Copy Editor