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By: Ashleigh A. Allen

First established in 1996 south of the border by the Academy of American Poets, National Poetry Month arrived in Canada two years later and there’s been no turning back. Government agencies, school boards, educators, libraries and their librarians are all in on the annual celebration. While it is thrilling to see poetry intentionally folded into educational spaces for one month a year, I wish us educators of all subjects and stripes were always leaning into reading, writing and teaching poetry.

There is a bitter sweetness that comes when April arrives as it is often the one month those of us in educational spaces amp up our poetry game. If educators usually shy away from teaching a poetry unit or even bringing poems into their classrooms, they might plan some activities around poetry reading and writing and frame these as an eccentric treat to the regular ebb and flow of the curriculum. I understand poetry to be not a marginal, optional curricular alternative, but a central, necessary tenant to a life. Poetry is a social necessity. I ask you to consider poetry to literature curriculum (and beyond) as paint is to arts curriculum. Imagine only offering young students the option to paint one month a year or for one activity a year. It sounds not only impractical but also unkind. Just as we need colour to play fully on canvas, I believe we need poetry to play with language, especially in scholarly spaces that value, almost singularly, words. Students are praised with words for the words they write and speak. Words, words, words.

I am not urging educators to work outside of their comfort zone; my suggestion is to start where you are. Be honest with yourself and share poems you enjoy and activities you are comfortable leading and have engaged in yourself. (There are some links below if you’re looking for lesson ideas.) I suppose a good place to begin to think about poetry in your classroom, is to do some self-reflection. Ask yourself: What’s your relationship to poetry? Do you read or write it, and if so, what are the terms in which you engage with it? Once you’ve thought about your own relationship to poetry, you can think through its uses in your classroom: When do you teach poetry, if you do, and why? What does this teaching look like when it happens? Are students invited to write poems when they’re invited to read them and vice versa? As teachers, we have aims with each unit and within each lesson; we have envisioned a place where we want our students to arrive. Is teaching poetry in your classroom about getting students to understand figurative language or the metre of iambic pentameter? Is it about getting them to read and interpret a text on your terms or their terms (or a combination of both)? Are they reading in order to write? Are they writing poems as a way to uncover or understand their own dreaming and understanding of the world?

The Addressing Injustices project has welcomed a few poets to its research team in recent years, and we’ve been able to include poetry lessons and share techniques with students who have gone on to continue to write poems, not for credit but, more importantly to us, for themselves. We have also begun lessons or units with reading a poem or two together to help students think and feel their way through school being a place where they could have (where they really should have) desires (Rich, 1993). Through my work with Addressing Injustices, poetry has played a central role; and it has become increasingly evident that it is a powerful way for students to engage with language.

In her essay “Poetry Is Not A Luxury” about women and the poetry and dreams within them (similarly held within children), Audre Lorde (1984) poignantly states that the act of writing poetry “is not idle fantasy, but a disciplined attention to the true meaning of ‘it feels right to me.’” She says, “We train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before” (p 38).

Poetry allows us to imagine futures alternative to the ones being created by the social political world on our behalf but often against our wishes. Present political action is regularly defended and explained in the name of future generations while it ignores the needs and demands of youths today. If our students are encouraged to read and write poems, who knows what they’ll dream for themselves while engaging in this empowering, ambitious act of creation.

So, Happy National Poetry Month, fellow educators! May you live and teach each month as if it’s April!