2 Strategies to Help Students Appreciate Poetry

Even though you already know the answer, you still ask the question. “So, who here reads poetry for fun?” You can almost see the tumbleweed blow through the classroom. Not a single hand goes up. “How about plays?” Now, a scattering of hands. “Well, how about novels?” Lots of hands shoot up. But for poetry? No one.

This is a scenario all too familiar to English teachers. Even though they study it almost every single year, as soon as students leave the English classroom, it’s like poetry ceases to exist. You won’t find many students curling up at night with a good book of poetry.

Part of the reason for this is that many students don’t know how to enjoy poetry. They know how to study poetry, but not how to read it just for the fun of doing so. For many students, poetry reading is inexorably linked to a very particular kind of classroom activity. We pore over its lines, dwelling over every word. In so doing, we risk smothering the hit of emotion that the best poetry provokes. We spend so much time analytically pulling apart a poem that we leave no space simply to feel it. 

In this article, I offer two concrete classroom strategies that will help your students enjoy the poetry that they study even more. Your students will see poetry not as something arduous and deliberate, but as something to take pleasure in. Each strategy—tried and tested in my classroom—inculcates a way of reading poetry that privileges its emotional pull.

Build a Resonance Index 

The word that most captures this style of encounter is resonance. This is a word that, to me, exudes what it means to study literature. It emphasizes that lightning-bolt feeling of reading something that just connects to you, even if you don’t fully know why. It’s the way a word or image tingles, latching itself onto something you’ve felt or experienced before.

In your teaching of poetry, give “resonance” a home. Ask students to dedicate a section of their notebook for jotting down any lines or images that resonate with them. Here, ask them to jot down any lines or images that resonate with them. They don’t need to analyze them, they only to feel them and note their experience. They can do this in their reading of poetry outside of the classroom, too. This practice offers a space for students to reflect on what they’ve just read and notice the kinds of emotional reactions it stirred up.

When using this strategy, I like to give students five minutes to do this immediately after reading a poem for the first time. Have them turn to their resonance index and then jot down anything that moves them: a word, line, or snippet of a phrase; an image that the poem has conjured in their mind or an idea they had. The point is that anything goes: It’s deliberately nondirected. If it resonated, students jot it down.

Next, use these newly formed resonances as the foundation for class discussion. Moving around the room, ask students to share something they’ve just noted, whatever it might be. Ask them to explore why it resonated with them and what they like about it. Invite other students to add their thoughts. Ask if anyone else jotted down something similar—invariably somebody has—and ask them to consider whether they noted it for similar or different reasons.

You can also use the resonance index as a starting point for writing. Ask students to glance back at their initial list and select one thought as a focal point for a short burst of writing. Explain that it doesn’t matter what they select, only that it resonated. Give them 10 minutes to write down whatever comes to mind in relation to what they picked—teasing out and exploring why they think it has resonated.

You could also simply leave the index as it is. Do nothing with it. Ask students to jot down what resonates and then simply move on. The point of this strategy is to encourage students into a new relationship with the poetry they’re reading: seeing it not as something to pick apart, but as something to feel.

Look for the Neon Line

British poet Simon Armitage said that every poem has a “neon line,” which, he explained, is “one line in a poem that seems to be flashing on and off.”

Rather than asking students to over-analyze and over-annotate a poem, start by focusing on its neon line. Get them to the poem and then, operating mostly on gut instinct, highlight its most important line. Give them just a few seconds to do this. Read, pause for breath, highlight their chosen line.

Next, move around the room, asking students to share their neon line, perhaps offering an initial thought as to what attracted them to it. This becomes a great way to access a poem, requiring students to seek out and be attentive to bursts of emotion.

A variation of this strategy is to show students the chosen poem for just a split second. Project it onto the screen and then, 3-2-1, snatch it away again. Now, ask students to consider the words or lines that stayed with them, no matter how blurry. Whatever has caught their attention, even if subconsciously, is bound to be worth exploring.

Likewise, you can just read the poem to students—making sure they don’t have access to a printed copy. Read it once and then ask them to jot down any words or lines they can remember. Move around the room, asking students to share what they wrote. Inevitably, lines will be misheard or words misremembered, but this doesn’t matter. What matters is helping students to connect with the poems they read at an emotional level, getting them to see what parts “flash on and off.”

Both of these strategies cultivate a disposition of pleasurable appreciation. They transform poetry reading from a process of painstaking analysis to what it always has been: an affective and emotive experience in which we privilege not only what we come to intellectually understand, but the way poetry moves us. Helping our students to develop such a disposition in their reading of poetry will also help to unlock how much they enjoy it.