Ever hear the phrase, those who can’t do, teach?

I’m chuckling to think of it because in this particular instance, I both do and teach. But I’m not sure if I’m really doing both of those things at once in this case, or at least not all that well.

I received a letter about a national poetry writing contest at school; my fourth and fifth graders are really excited about it. They’re working on their poems in class that they want to submit. Many of them are writing lighthearted work about space, or frogs, or ice cream. But one of my fifth graders came up to me and said she was having a hard time deciding on a topic and getting started, because she wanted to write something important, something that, as she put it, “means something.” She asked me how to write poetry that doesn’t really rhyme, without making it sound like just plain old writing.

I told her that she was looking to write free verse poetry, which I happen to write all the time. She said eagerly, how do you do that?

And y’all…I DON’T KNOW.

I don’t know how I do it, the words just flow out of me that way! I got stuck trying to explain it to her. I felt like an idiot, because I’m an ELA teacher, teaching her how to use words is literally my job for heaven’s sake. But I’ve never really given much thought to my own process, and poetry in itself is also a delicate, often intangible concept to execute.

Poetry isn’t just about rhyme and rhythm. Poetry is about feelings; it’s about both expressing emotions and evoking them. It isn’t just about using words, but about using the right words in the right places. It’s about saying more, with less. I think that’s why it’s become a preferred medium for me at times. There’s less pressure to capture all the words to describe what often feels indescribable. Instead I can channel that feeling into an offering that focuses on the gist.

I’ve come to realize in overthinking all of this that poetry is almost notoriously difficult to teach to elementary school students at that higher level. They don’t have the vocabulary, maturity, or life experience to give that valuable weight to their poetry. I can give my students a lesson in the structure of poetry, or lack thereof if we’re talking about free verse. But I cannot give them profundity. They have to grow into that, or at very least, they have to find it for themselves. I’m not saying fifth graders cannot write profound poetry; they can, and some of my students absolutely are doing so. But there’s fifth grade profundity, and there’s the profundity with which I write at twentyish or more years their senior. Even the poetry I wrote in high school, which would be at five to eight years above their level now, has a different depth to it than what they’re writing. Attempts to share my recent and current work with them as examples are perhaps less effective because it’s largely too far away from their level.

What I needed to slap myself with is the reminder that this differentiation is neither here nor there. It’s comparing apples and oranges, and all this poetry writing is not a contest.

Well, actually, it is literally a contest! However, it is not a contest in which my ability to teach elementary students how to write gloriously meaningful poems will be judged so scrupulously. That’s not the point. The point is that they take this as an opportunity to explore a new way to express themselves, and to make of it whatever they wish. So far, so good.

We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, “O me! O life!… of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless… of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?” Answer. That you are here – that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play *goes on* and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be? —Robin Williams as John Keating, Dead Poets Society