“I Don’t Like Poetry”

One thing that always made me wonder about poetry is why we were never taught modern poetry in school.  My only real exposure to poetry throughout both elementary and high school was much older.  Shakespeare, Dickinson, Poe, Frost, and Whitman were the only poets I ever really learned about in English class.  I often think that’s why so many people I went to school with dislike poetry – these structured poems bored many of my classmates and must have turned them off from the whole poetry experience.  If there were more modern styled poems taught in classes, maybe it would help students find a style of poetry they like.

I tried to figure out why some people don’t like poetry by asking my sister (two years younger than me) what she thought.

“What do you think about poetry?” I texted her.

“I think it’s dumb.” She responded, two hours later.  No further explanation was given.

 

So, my experiment failed. I guess what I’m trying to say is that maybe, if schools taught more varied styles of poetry, more people would find a style that they like. Modern poetry seems lost in classes before college levels, and I really think that’s a shame.  Sure, plenty of the people I know do like poetry, but I feel like more people would enjoy it if they found a style they really liked.

(I apologize if there are any major typos in this post. My ‘m’ key and my spacebar are both breaking down on me.)

4 Replies to ““I Don’t Like Poetry””

  1. I’ve thought about the whole “how do we get people to like poetry” issue before, and it has always puzzled me that literary poetry isn’t more popular. I think part of the problem is the fact that poetry in general isn’t portrayed as central to the study of English. In high school there’s a lot of stress on learning to read and analyze prose, but the only poetry at which we really looked closely in high school was Shakespeare. I did get to enjoy a sampling of some modern poets thanks to my AP Lit teacher who went out of her way to show us poems on Fridays. Shakespeare is great, but I think it’s pretty shameful that in all of the literature classes I took, we didn’t cover Pound or Williams or Heaney etc etc.

    The quick gloss over poetry in high school made it seem like a dead discipline, and the poets we did discuss (poets like Dickinson and Poe) were decontextualized and felt antiquated to us because of their language and form. It’s not just the form, it’s the lack of context we get regarding each poet and poetry as a whole. I just thought that’s what poetry was: older language put into verse – no wider picture or new iterations. Now I can look at poets like Frost and Yeats and view them within the wider field of poetry – both new and old.

  2. I think the reason why so many high school English classes focus on older writers, especially prose writers, is because that’s what is being tested by states. The way high school English is run is a travesty in most schools. In fact I hated my English classes up until 11th grade because for the first time, I had a teacher who was willing to teach us both contemporary and traditional writers of both poetry and prose. I was 16 years old and I was finally exposed to writers like Williams and Sexton and prose writers like Martel and Hosseini. But we had flexibility in our curriculum because it was an honors class.

    I think censorship is another reason why contemporary poets and writers aren’t usually taught in classrooms. Most of the time, high school classrooms censor bawdy material or gloss over taboo topics (ie. Shakespeare and his many country jokes). Because the language is far more removed from today’s vernacular, a teacher can easily skip a sexual joke. But in contemporary poetry, when poets attempt “risque” things, these teenagers are going to understand the slang because they’re living it; the teacher can’t hide it. And bringing up topics about sex, mutilation, or something else unpleasant in the classroom is controversial and often causes parental complaints.

    Therefore I think a combination of constraints (testing and censorship) cause omission of contemporary poetry in the classroom. It’s a shame though because once I was exposed to more, I finally fell in love with English as a discipline. It just took me a long time to get there.

  3. I completely agree that different types of poetry should be taught in high school, and believe that this would cause more interest in students. There are so many different forms and types of poetry out there, that can appeal to all sorts of people. Shakespeare is kind of intimidating and makes poetry appear to be very structured and in turn kind of stressful. This can be discouraging, but little do high school kids know that they too could be poets. Every person is capable of writing a poem, and I bet a lot of students would be proud of their work if they had cool examples to follow, or inspire them. Poems that are relevant to their lives, or play around with structure and such, could really spark and inspire them.

  4. This is so true. I definitely think teaching contemporary poets in high school English classes will lead to more students reading poetry by their own volition post-high school. Personally, I was in a smiliar situation to Juliana (and probably most public school students) in high school–I only really remember reading Shakespeare’s sonnets, and perhaps a Whitman poem or two, in my English classes. Which is really sad. There’s such a diverse range of poetry in the world, and high school students are only being exposed to such a small sampling in their educations. As a prose writer myself who is new to poetry, I definitely feel like I would be more comortable reading other people’s poetry and writing my own in class this semester if I’d been more exposed to contemporary poets in high school. It’s sad to think that so many students write off poetry as something “stupid” or not worth reading, just because Shakespearan sonnets or other forms of classic poetry didn’t appeal to them.

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