Teaching High School Students the Wildness of Poetry

In this monthly column for Lit Hub, I’ve been sharing the experiences of high school English teachers across the country—the joys, the struggles, what keeps us coming back to the classroom—trying to get to the heart of what Andre Dubus would write on his chalkboard at the first meeting of his classes: “Art is always affirmative, because it shows us that we can endure being mortal.” This column is an affirmation that teaching is eccentric, wild, and sometimes beautiful.

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Poetry, for high school students, can be both mystery and magnet. They communicate in epigrammatic bursts—digitally, in the hallways, in swift mouthings across the classroom—so they understand the spirit of poetry. Yet teachers know that to quantify that experience in class—to write or, God forbid, to analyze poetry—is to court skepticism.

We still give poems to kids, though. Not merely because of the curriculum; because we believe that poetry is a way to slow down the mess of life. Poetry is both calm and storm.

How do we get high school students to be open to poetry? It’s a perennial question that requires both energy and effort. Teaching poetry is real work.

One way to bring poetry to students is to join them. To be vulnerable with them. Like students, teachers should write poems, too.

Kerrin McCadden is a wonderful poet. Her book, Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes, which won the 2015 Vermont Book Award, is full of lines like those from “Laika”:

How do you tell your children it was never easy.
That the boards you planed to build their house

were contracts. The nails you dropped were pleas.
How do you tell them the bushes you planted

to build the yard never got the boundaries right.

McCadden has taught high school English for 28 years. I spoke with her about the interplay between teaching and writing; how both actions live through the same breaths.

She writes in class with her students. “If they are writing poems for class,” she says, “I am too, which helps to build community.” Students trust process laid bare: the hands-on, practical wisdom of drafting, crossing-out, moving words around. We can acknowledge that poetry is a beautiful mystery at the same time that we illuminate the curves and corners of that mystery.

McCadden acknowledges that “my writing life is also complicated by my teaching life—I could never claim otherwise. A teacher’s work is never finished, ever. The job entails a regular swamp of work, but when I can strike a balance, the whole thing hums—teaching and writing informing each other.”

I can attest to that synthesis. Writing and teaching can sustain each other. Teachers should make creative space for themselves; it is both an act of personal affirmation, as well as self-preservation. If we value creativity for our students, we should also value it for ourselves.

McCadden teaches sections of English Seminar, a core course for sophomores, and Creative Writing, an elective for juniors and seniors at Montpelier High School in Vermont. “Most of my students in English Seminar come through my door for the first time knowing very little about contemporary poetry,” she says. “They imagine poems should be very formal and stuffy. Since they assume poems are formulaic, I teach poets whose work breaks these molds completely so they can learn what poems are doing in our time.”

I like her approach: “There’s nothing like teaching a poem I love but hardly know—teaching in the space where I am still also learning.” This is essential—the raw and real experience of watching the poem unfurl in the room. “I’ve had great luck recently with poems by Claudia Rankine (Citizen), Ross Gay (‘Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude’ was a big hit), Joy Ladin, Stephanie Burt, TC Tolbert, Nico Amador, Danez Smith, Matthew Lippman, Paige Ackerson-Kiely, Mary Ruefle (including her essays), Kaveh Akbar, Major Jackson, Kamilah Aisha Moon—this list could go on and on. The one poem I teach every single year is Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s ‘Iskandariya’—which ends up being a defining text.”

A range of poets reveals to students that poetry is itself is rangy, teeming with wildness. “So much of the writing high school students are asked to do is procedural in nature,” McCadden explains, “do this, then do this, and make sure your whatever is in this order. The adolescent years are a great time to teach students how to organize their thoughts, for sure, but when that’s all we do, we lose a tremendous opportunity to teach wild-mindedness, which is a way to respect the human mind itself. Adolescents are vulnerable creatures. Teaching a way into their own minds, as they are—wild, half-broken, stumbling, sorting—through writing poetry and other creative work, can save lives.”

Poetry writing in the classroom, then, requires not rules but tools. “I give my students many different ways in to a piece of writing. Sometimes this means a pile of weird scaffolds they can climb up on. Sometimes it means a mess of choices. It always means a discussion about the kind of writing we are working on learning.” McCadden has “landed on the notion that students need room and they need constraints—both, just like practicing poets do.”

McCadden says “maybe the best set of poems I ever collected from a creative writing class was in response to Joyelle McSweeney’s poem ‘Simon the Good’ from Poem-a-Day—a wild poem that students enjoyed trying to mimic. High school students can be remarkable poets when they know what poems can do.”

I’ll turn that statement back on us: high school teachers can teach poetry best when we know what poems can do. When we feel what it is like to labor over a line. When the perfect word or image comes to us like a vision. Poetry, like good teaching, requires us to be open to strange and beautiful surprises. Let’s write poems with our students. Let’s discover, or remember again, that sense of wonder.