While I know that April is National Poetry Month, for many of us here in Kentucky our true poetry month is June because that is Lexington Poetry Month (LexPoMo for the insiders). I love everything about the community of writers communicating through poetry over the course of 30 days and my participation over the past decade+ has profoundly impacted me as a human, writer, and teacher. This deep practice of engaging in the reading and writing poetry has impressed upon me that poetry is both creative writing (as advertised) and deeply rhetorical. Rhetoric is the art, practice, and study of human communication and powerful poetry is both art and communication and always human which is why I believe it belongs in the composition classroom.
For more than a decade I have written blog posts about using poetry in my composition classroom. Long before I made poetry a centerpiece by serving as both invitation and craft lesson, I began using praise poetry as a reflective and celebratory way to wrap up our semester and tanka poetry to help students focus their arguments. Then in Fall 2021 I transformed my writing classroom into a writing marathon with poetry at the heart and encouraged my students to write creatively as well as rhetorically which meant lots poetry in addition to our more traditional essays and rhetorical analysis.
So many students highlight this poetry in their reflections about the class and their journey as writers. They are so impacted by these poems because I thoughtfully developed a powerful and deep bench of poetry to inspire my students to think and write about the themes, topics, and lived experience that would lead to strong and well-crafted arguments. I believe that if a student can write both a poem and an essay about a topic then they are a writer ready for whatever rhetorical challenge life throws their way. I give my students essays to serve as mentor texts but for the past decade I have given them far more poems to serve as their writing mentors. See One Poem to Rule Them All, A Poetic Invitation (to the third power), and High Voltage Warning (especially High Voltage Warning), to learn more about my selection of poetic invitations. I stand behind my selections, but also think these choices are highly personal to me and my understanding of my students so your results may vary.
I wrote back in 2021 that poetry makes such a powerful tool for the writing teacher because it is personal, purposeful, and fun and I still believe that is true but poetry has always been a powerful form of communication for humans and as I watch that play out again and again each June I can only hope that more composition teachers will choose to lean more into poetry to help their students discover themselves and share what they learn with others. Poetry is a wonderful tool to help our students become authentic writers and craft messages that matter in the world. There is no textbook or generically crafted curriculum that can match the power of a curated collection of poetry (especially one that leans heavily toward living poets of varied backgrounds and lived experiences). That is a hill I will die on and I doubt most teachers feel that strongly about their curriculum crafted by strangers.
Artwork: My collection of LexPoMo anthologies! Note: 2025 not there yet but I’m told it will be in my hands soon.
