However, I learned something. I thought that if the young person, the student, has poetry in him or her, to offer them help is like offering a propeller to a bird.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.
In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
Even though I was a reluctant reader in junior high and high school, I found myself writing poems in the back of class.
For a lot of people, well-meaning teaching has made poetry seem arcane, difficult, a kind of brown-knotting medicine that might be good for you but doesn't taste so good. So I tried to make a collection of poetry that would be fun. And that would bring out poetry as an art, rather than the challenge to say smart things.
Teach you children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.
Most people who write and publish poetry teach or do something else.
When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can't teach poetry. This is ridiculous.
An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.
I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry.
Well you can't teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.