Poetry...

Poetry is one of those things that make most people groan. It can be a beautiful thing, but I think studying it in school can cause students to start to loathe it. I love reading poetry until I had to memorize poems in middle and high school. Jack Prelutskey and Shel Silverstein were some of my favorites. I think poetry can be a fun thing. I liked activities where we could write our own poems because we were free to do what we wanted. I liked reading the poems in the chapter. I liked haikus. We got to create our own in middle school and that was one of my favorite things. When teachers try to make students understand the poem and start getting into iambic pentameter and other aspects, it really devalues the poem. I remember flying through poems by Maya Angelou, Edgar Allan Poe, and Emily Dickinson and not getting anything out of them because I was too busy searching for terms and the pentameter of the poems. I read them by myself later and loved them. I know that's not the intention of most teachers, but it's hard to really appreciate poetry just like it's hard to appreciate good stories if you can't just read them.