Edutopia – Matthew James Friday
As a lover of both reading and writing poetry, I’ve made it my mission to help teachers and students enjoy accessing this ancient art form. I’ve worked with many colleagues who dislike teaching poetry, having had such poor experiences themselves at school. So often, students struggle with enjoyment of reading poems. They get frustrated searching for hidden meaning in poems and having to decode other mysteries, such as poetic meter and rhyming patterns. In his poem “Introduction to Poetry,” the former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins speaks to this: But all they want to do/ is tie the poem to a chair with rope/ and torture a confession out of it.