(Since I accidentally skipped ahead last week and wrote about chapter three, this week I'll be backtracking and writing about chapter one. My bad.)
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Poetry levels the writing playing field (14). That Christensen chooses to open her chapter, "The Role of Poetry," with such a bold statement caught me off guard. Even though I'm somebody who writes and reads poetry regularly (poems often speaker louder than prose, working their way into the crevices in our lives, digging up emotion once displaced mistakenly or intentionally... try it, it's fun), I've never heard that poetry can build confident writers in ways that the "other areas of literacy education" Christensen references do not. Rather, I've always heard a mixture of too much pretty language, or it's all smart talk -- flies over my head, and of course the this is way too confusing. Why are the lines like this? What the heck is that word doing there? In many cases, poetry has been presented as a solitary art that only people extremely versed in language or loners practice.
Those are stereotypes. And I'm glad Christensen, in speaking about how poetry can help build community, heal old wounds, tell family stories and serve as a mirror of ourselves in juxtaposition with what others may see, addresses the fallacy that poetry is not accessible.
The great thing about poetry is that it, like Christensen points out, allows students (and us) a break from formality -- in writing, in speaking, in thinking. It flows in sound (which her listing exercise is all about) and provides a safe place to speak unspeakable truths. In her experience, Christensen observed that students learned more about each other by writing and sharing poems about their lives together than they may have just simply writing essays, say, about poetry, or another topic. And even adapting an essay topic, like the "I love" essay, for a poem, can help bridge understanding and build up writing skills for students, allowing them to turn over an idea by playing with form. Grammar is fluid, coming more naturally through writing poems and more productive than making students sit and fill out worksheet after worksheet. It's more fun and lively, meaningful.
While I was initially unsure about the "leveling the playing field" statement -- largely because of my own experiences, and what I've heard friends and family say -- I am so glad Christensen went there and challenged those preconceptions, those stereotypes. Poetry really shouldn't just be a small unit during the month of April -- it should be treated like any other type of writing, and poems should be written throughout the year. It's like adding another kaleidoscope to a student's collection. A new way of seeing, in so many different ways as they share and encourage one another to be unafraid, to take ownership of themselves, and to stand and be unashamed of who they are.
Like you, I was really interested to see the way that Christensen described poetry as something that "leveled the writing playing field." Like I talked about in class, I've always been one to dismiss poetry because I never found it to be as easy as prose writing or anything like that. But Christensen really had me considering what it would be like to look at poetry in a whole new light. I really like the way that Christensen points out that poetry gives us a break from the "norm." Really good post!
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