Introduction to Poetry

Perhaps the best place to start is with a poem by Billy Collins called "Introduction to Poetry." I feel like so many students expect teachers to tell them the "real meaning" of a poem or that it is their job to find symbols in the poem and figure out what they stand for, instead of just enjoying the poem and noticing how it makes them feel.

When I taught poetry during student teaching, I found that it helped the students to talk first about all the different things that we can analyze about poems - it's not just about rhyme or alliteration! There are lots of checklists on the Web (like this one) that you can print out or modify and then give to your students. Part of the final test for one of my poetry units was giving my students a poem and having them comment on each of the elements on the checklist as they applied to the given poem.



It is extremely important for someone to read the poems aloud before you discuss them in class, and one of the most amazing ways I found to do this is to play recordings of the poets we were studying reading their own poems. The book Poetry Speaks has recordings from many different poets from as far back as Tennyson.