Poems of the Day

April is National Poetry month and it holds a special place in the heart of this former English teacher.  When I was in the classroom, I had so much fun coming up with seven thousand ways to integrate poetry into everything that was happening in my classroom during the month of April.  On a recent trip to the children’s museum, I noticed a really neat poetry display with poems written by students at a local school as part of a poetry project coordinated by the museum.  The poems, especially the poems written by the fifth graders, were done so well!  My heart nearly stopped with longing to step right back into an Language Arts classroom right that very second.  And I decided right there that THIS year I was going to coordinate something special here at home for National Poetry month, no matter how much eyerolling I needed to put up with from my husband, who really does not appreciate poetry.

I decided to start simple, even though I had great aspirations and I am brimming with poetry education ideas in my brain.  Simple is good, because a lot goes on in my house even when nothing is going on, and sometimes big aspirations fail simply because they can’t adequately be implemented.  I took the principle of Poetry 180, a project designed to integrate a poem read aloud every day into schools across America every day of the school year and decided to apply it here at home.  The idea behind Poetry 180 is simple.  You just read a poem.  That’s it.  You don’t do anything with it.  Just read it and if it strikes you, you can dwell on it a bit for the rest of the day.  The power of good poetry is that words can stick around in your brain and fester for a long time.  The more poetry you here, the more you will like it, and it doesn’t have to be intimidating.  There is so much fun poetry in the world.

At the beginning of the month, I splurged on a few new beautifully illustrated poetry books, even though we have lots of children’s poetry books hanging around here, because new books are always fun.  At supper every evening I have been reading a poem.  Or two.  Or three.  Because once you start with poems, how can you stop with just one?????  Every night Dr. Peds rolls his eyes at me and asks me to find the shortest poems, but the kidlets, they always remember to remind me to read the poem of the day, and they are still talking about some of the poems from last week.  Every once in a while, YaYa will say, “I really liked that one!”  One time she said it after a really complex poem, and Dr. Peds, the poetry skeptic asked her WHY she liked it.  “I just liked how the words fit together.”  HOORAY!  Woo hoo!  I wanted to jump up and dance on the supper table.

The other night I read a poem that used a lot of repetition.

Dr. Peds:  OK, I really didn’t like that one.

YaYa:  Me either.

Mr. SP:  There was too much of the same words over and over.

YaYa:  Yeah, too much repeating.

Dr. Peds:  That’s the thing, why would you need to say the same thing over and over.  It’s just not efficient.

Me:  Well, repetition is a poetic device.  There are a lot of ways to effectively use repetition in a poem.   I think you are maybe missing something with this poem just hearing it.  The cleverness is really in the punctuation that you see on the page.

At that point everyone in my family looked over at me and burst out in raucous laughter.  I looked at them over the brim of the poetry book.  Was I missing something?  They were seriously hysterical. Finally Dr. Peds said, between peals of laughter, ” Who says that?  Who says ‘The cleverness is really in the punctuation?'”

And then he told me I was a delightful nerd.