My Eleven-Year-Old Niece Says Poems have to Rhyme
What do you remember about reading poetry as a kid? I’ll tell you, I don’t remember much besides the poems my mother read to me: Nikki Giovanni, William Blake, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson…she skipped right over the kid stuff and shared the grown-up poetry, even when I was as young as five. In school, my fourth grade teacher read Shel Silverstein to the class, and of course, everyone knew Dr. Seuss. But somehow I never had the idea that poetry had to rhyme or that it had to do anything in particular to be a poem (except maybe have line breaks). That’s what I liked about poetry; there were no rules. I came to believe that it could do everything: if a story couldn’t do it, a poem could. That was my thinking. Who knows where this idea came from. But when I went home to Louisiana a few days ago to visit my family and had some time to talk with my niece who loves to read, I shared with her a Tod Marshall poem from the latest Willow Springs, the one about ferrets. I thought she’d get a kick out of it, but all she said was, “That doesn’t sound like a poem to me.” I asked her why not. “My teacher says that poems have to rhyme,” she said. What?! “Poems do NOT have to rhyme,” I told her in the calmest voice I could manage while trying to hold back the vitriol I wanted to spew out about her teacher. What kind of second rate teacher tells kids that mess? “Your teacher is wrong,” was all I could say, and I felt bad about it. Maybe this lady is a good teacher, and maybe my niece likes her. What right do I have to shatter the impression my niece may have that her teacher is all-knowing? But I couldn’t help it. For years, almost ten to be exact, I’ve been working with students to adjust the reputation of poetry. I used to teach poetry to middle school students, and in 2006, NCTE published my book, Living Voices: Multicultural Poetry in the Middle School Classroom, which tries to make poetry fun, relatable, and less scary for kids who somehow have learned that poetry is difficult, confusing, and ultimately not for them. Or maybe it’s that they have been taught that all poetry has to rhyme and sometime around puberty rhyming poetry starts to sound silly and babyish, something a young adult doesn’t want to have anything to do with. If a kid as smart and well read as my niece is being led down the wrong path about poetry, how are these errors in teaching affecting other kids? Does her teacher really not know any better, or does she just think poetry is too complicated to explain and that someone else will teach her students about other types of poetry somewhere down the road when they’re “ready”? But that doesn’t usually happen. After elementary school, I was no longer exposed to poetry in school, and even I, someone who has always liked poetry, can’t remember one poetry book I picked up and read for fun the way I did with novels when I was a kid. Why is that? What if someone had given me a novel in poems like Out of the Dust by Karen Hess or Make Lemonade by Virginia Euwer Wolff? Would that have changed my reading habits? I don’t know, but I sure would have appreciated the opportunity. (I think I just came up with a Christmas present for my niece this year!) So, I’m curious…how many of you read poetry for fun when you were a kid? What poetry do you remember reading, and what impressions did it give you about what poetry is? Does anyone else think that the way poetry is taught to kids is part of what turns them off of it later?
Maybe, but I don’t know. I love poetry. I learned it with rules and mostly rhyme schemes originally, but that didn’t turn me off it at all. When I was growing up, I think that made poetry special. More than just ripping out a few sentences, it had to be worked at. It was much later that I learned prose poetry, and learned to appreciate it fully and love it too. My brother hates poetry though. It was a college teacher that ruined it for him- and I had an undergraduate teacher that damn near did for me too. I’ve tried to undo the damage, I’ve read him poetry over the phone that I thought was really good and that he would appreciate, but it was a no go.
Growing up we had one Dr Seuss book and I never even heard of Shel Silverstein till college. I recall one book of poems that I sought out (a book of story poems), and Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Yeats, Coleridge, Blake, and random poems quoted by scifi fantasy authors.
I’m curious about what ruined poetry for your brother. What did the teacher do/say? And what about your college experience that was negative? Was your teacher too strict about poetry, too married to one way of interpreting poetry, or something else?
I think part of the problem was accessibility and part was my teacher’s taste- I think this was the root of my brother’s issues too. You can beat a poem to death trying to garner more meaning from it than was ever intended. I remember being bored silly with a spider plant poem, not really understanding what the big deal was or what I was supposed to be pulling from its shadow on the wall. I think maybe some teachers forget the fun and pretty in poetry and want to analyze it to death or make it carry the weight of the world. Maybe this is the other side of making poetry nothing more than a jingle or nursery style rhyme. The end result for me was for a few years, I didn’t think I liked contemporary poetry (I still loved classic and formalistic and started a journal of my favorites) – I thought contemporary and free verse was pretentious and overworked. A different type of exposure to contemporary and free verse changed everything for me.
That makes a lot of sense. Sometimes it would be nice if teachers would just read a poem to students and at the end just shut up, just let it sink in. I had a nonfiction professor who used to start every workshop by reading a poem. We never talked about them. She just read them, and then we moved on. It rocked.
When I got the poetry lesson in third grade, it was all about rhyme (which is actually pretty damn hard to teach), and yeah, I feel like that created the expectation for rhyme in the future. That doesn’t have to be the case, of course, but I think that the old standby lesson plan makes things easier for teachers (who generally aren’t contemp. poetry readers).
With that said, there’s all sorts of free verse poetry that is kid-friendly out there, but to be able teach that material, it’s helpful to know it exists.
A short list of fun poets to teach the wee peapickers:
WCW’s “This is Just to Say”
A bunch of E.E. Cummings
Billy Collins
Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish; The Moose”
Some Russell Edson (some of the lighter stuff, perhaps. I don’t know if it’d be cool to have the poems with knockers growing out of the walls.)
Tim Nolan
Sherman Alexie
Todd Boss (rhyme isn’t forbidden, that’s for sure)
Jim Tolan
etc.
Of course, one would have to choose the work carefully, but it can certainly be done. And it’d be fun. Now I have to run.
Nuns!
Thanks for this list, Brett. I’ve used E. E. Cummings in a seventh grade classroom before, and they loved it. I’m fine with teachers focusing on rhyming poetry for younger kids. It’s just the prescriptive rule that all poetry has to rhyme that pissed me off. Not only is it a big fat lie, but it limits kids’ understanding of what poetry can be in all its forms. Anyhow, I think that you’re right, most teachers aren’t readers of contemporary poetry, and so they stick to what they are comfortable with. So maybe we need to start with reteaching teachers.
i have a young son, and i think that the rhyming is an important way for him to develop and expand language skills, and I think later it might help with memorization. but that’s a utilitarian, not artistic, concern.
i think that one reason people learn about rhyme first is because that’s where the history of the form begins, or at least the Western history (isn’t it? perhaps this is completely wrong…) anyway, my idea is that poetry was rhymed and formal for a long time, and then developed past that, and the discarding of rhyme and other formal constraints were ways of advancing or changing. And maybe people think teaching rhyme is like teaching a foundation — like teaching the fundamentals before the experiments? (i have waded in over my head…someone correct me)
i do like some rhymed work, out of the very limited range of poems that I read. I like Larkin, for example, and every time i mention this to someone who really knows poetry, i get a look of surprise or dismay. I always wonder if this is because his style is recherche, or because of his unsavory personal characteristics….
in fact, Brett, as i tried to come up with a baseball team the other night (failing…i could probably field just a pickle team of poets: Larkin, Stevens, Hugo) i spent a lot of time trying to decide what position would require the least physical exertion of Larkin.
Shawn, you’re right on all counts. Poetry did come from a more rhythmic, rhyming tradition. Lyric poetry, for example, comes from the tradition of poetry that was sung and so tended to have easy to remember rhymes, etc. You’re also right about the fact that unrhyming poetry was a modern reaction to the tradition. I should clarify that I have nothing against rhyming poetry. I just have something against teachers who are too ignorant or lazy or whatever to explain to students that poetry doesn’t have to rhyme. It makes a lot of sense that we start kids off with rhyming poetry. I’m totally down with that, but why lie to them about it? That’s my beef. I mean, my niece is eleven, old enough to understand some of the nuances of poetry, I think. Poetry is more than a jingle, which is what it gets reduced to in classrooms that focus solely on the sing-songy stuff like the poem in my illustration above. Sixth graders like my niece are smart enough; they deserve more.
Shawn,
I like Larkin too. Though he is more than a tad depressing. I know a lot of folks who like him. As for a baseball position, I suppose he could play first. You don’t really have to move all that much. Or maybe we could make him a bench coach. Problem solved.
As for the “foundations before the experiments”–that is certainly true if we’re talking about free verse that’s purposely experimental (Stein, Language poetry, etc.), but I think free verse has been around long enough that it can hold its own with rhymed verse–at least to an extent.
When I think about it though, my concern really isn’t with the teaching of form at all. I love form. It’s how it is taught, and especially the rhymed poems that kids are taught–usually the verse is simple, sing-song, and overly sentimental, and it was probably not written by folks who were talented writers. (Exhibit A: http://www.ourkids.ru/English/Poems/foto/Teddybig.jpg)
In my experience at least, this tends to ruin form, and by extension, free verse, which isn’t mentioned. In a perfect world, they deserve to be taught side by side by someone who knows about them and cares about them. That, of course, takes a lot, and practically speaking, might be too much to ask.
[...] to read because their definitions of poetry were broad from a very early age. This reminds me of my post about my niece who thinks poetry has to rhyme. It’s something she learned from her teachers. I wonder if her [...]
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