Thank you to our friend and fellow English teacher Brett Vogelsinger for sharing his poetry wisdom with us this week. You can learn more about him and his book Poetry Pauses (highly recommend) at the end of this post.
Poetry calls us to pause and notice things differently, both the words on the page and the world around us. During National Poetry Month, we can emphasize four specific things it provides as we read and write poetry with our classes:
1. A call back to our ancient literary roots
Poetry is the oldest genre in literature. It predates the novels, the short stories, and the plays that get the spotlight in most high school English classes. And it certainly predates the reading of passages to answer multiple choice questions!
Because this genre is so deep in our DNA, even very old poems can resonate with students.
Reading poems by Rumi, a 13th century poet from what is now Afghanistan invites students to think about what matters most in life, and they’ll love knowing that Beyonce and Jay Z’s daughter, Rumi Carter, is named after this poet.
Haiku is a popular entry point for studying poems, but in high school, stay away from the elementary-school-style haiku, cute and comfortable. Instead, dig up classics from the Japanese masters of centuries ago, Basho and Buson and Issa. Talk about the coy turns and ironies this genre delivers, often between lines two and three, like this one, translated by Robert Hass:
Spotlight the fact that haiku is more than just counting syllables. Take a look at how Grant Snider’s “Haikomics” bends and blends genres to explore classics and create originals. (These Poetry Comics series published by Chronicle
Of course all civilizations have their ancient poetic forms. Read and write ghazals from ancient Arabia and Persia, pantoums from Malaysia, or poetry of the Dinka tribe in Africa.
2. A reminder that poetry is alive and well and we, like poetry, are resilient
Twenty-first century poems from living poets speak to twenty-first century readers in a way that feels especially relevant.
Ada Limon’s poem “Instructions on Not Giving Up” calls on us to appreciate and internalize the resilience of nature each spring using April imagery.
Suzanne Cleary’s poem “Mercury” recently published in Poem-a-day from Poets.org (if you’re not a subscriber, you should be!) reminds us that in a world filled with tragedy, some stories do not have a tragic ending. We read so much literature in school that explores the dark, heavy elements of the human experience, and our present world provides plenty of examples of this too. Contemporary poetry does not shy away from these truths, but it also offers potent antidotes and calls us to remember the gentle and joyful aspects of being part of “The Human Family.”
3. A spark for writing our own poetry
Gerard Manley Hopkins begins his poem “Spring” with the line, “Nothing is so beautiful as spring–/When weeds in wheels shoot long and lovely and lush.” It’s a mellifluous line that runs through my head every spring since I’ve first read this poem and reminds me of the abundance this season offers to us as poets. There is color again, movement, fickle weather, overflow, and ephemerality.
It’s the perfect time to open our notebooks and write with students. This week, my creative writing class and I took ten minutes outside in a grassy courtyard on our high school campus to simply collect imagery and figurative language from our observations. In my notebook, I wrote about “a honeybee excavating a dandelion for its golden ore” and “a sparrow perched like a bud on the branch’s tip” and “a lawn woven with clover.” We crafted our observations into odes to spring when we got back to the classroom.
4. A reminder that poetry helps us write more than poems
Whenever we want to compliment the verve and cadence of a writer’s work, what is our go-to adjective? Poetic! We say scenes in novels and fiery exposes and deep-dive profiles are poetically written to say that the use of language is precise and artistic and resonant.
National Poetry Month reminds us that all year, we can use poetry to call students’ attention to the sound and substance of their writing. Read “A Small Needful Fact” by Ross Gay to study how to emphasize evidence in an argument. Use “The Red Wing Church” by Ted Kooser to study punctuation like hyphens and colons. Practice creating momentum with parallel structure by writing alongside “Daily” by Naomi Shihab Nye.
I write extensively about this in my book Poetry Pauses, which is packed with ready-to-use lessons (for grades 6-12) that transfer skills from poetry to all of the other writing our curriculum requires. It has long lists of poems to support each step of the writing process and each genre of writing students study in English class.
There is a chapter about integrating poetry in a study of narrative writing, one about informative and research writing, one about argument. There are chapters for stages of the writing process too: How can poetry help us learn to brainstorm, revise, or edit our work in all genres? The book comes with an online link library with over 100 recommended poems you can put to use in your own classroom; you can find the just-right fit for your students.
In truth, I love National Poetry Month for the attention it brings to the genre. I also don’t love National Poetry Month because in some classrooms, it is the only time students read a poem. Woven through our students’ reading and writing experience, poetry becomes a powerhouse genre that feeds everything we want students to learn. It helps them learn to be poetic in their use of words, no matter the genre.
An English teacher with over two decades of experience in a middle and high school in a public school district, Brett Vogelsinger lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania with his family and can often be found in his garden when he isn’t teaching, reading, or writing. His current work focuses on embedding poetry into instruction, integrating AI in thoughtful and transparent ways, strengthening students’ essential ELA skills, nurturing independent reading lives, and using writer’s notebooks to support practice and growth. He also serves as a keynote speaker and workshop presenter, sharing his expertise with educators beyond his own classroom. His work has been featured in Edutopia, The New York Times Learning Network, NCTE’s blog, and NPR’s MindShift podcast.
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