poetry in school

[bronzeage]

if Billy Collins is fer it, I'm agin it.

I like Billy Collins. He gives me hope, I might someday be Former Poet Laureate of the United States.

I like any idea which puts more poetry into lower education. My main objection to the way poetry is taught in elementary and secondary school is the contrast between it an prose. Prose is taught with rigid grammar and structural rules. Complete sentences, verb agreement and never ending a sentence with a prepostition[sentence fragment intended].

Poetry is presented as formless and anarchic. There are no rules and all the student has to do is express feelings. This is fine for theraputic reasons, but it makes for poetry useless for communication.

If I had any influence, I would teach, poets are trying to tell you something. The meaning is not in what is intended, but what is understood by the reader.
I was once asked to comment on a poem written by a college sophmore. It was about a scene in a dance club and used the phrase "euclidian motion" to describe a dancer. I had no idea what this meant and had to ask. She said it was a dancer who twisted back and forth in one spot, forming an angle. I told her, I thought she was working too hard.

Sometimes I think its the natural reaction to Chaucer and Coleridge. The language is strange and obtuse to our unlearned ear and we assume poetry is supposed to be written in arcane or obscure symbolism.