April is National Poetry Month. Why do you read poetry?

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Ari Meermans

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It never fails. Every year as National Poetry Month comes around, I begin thinking of poetry's role across writing disciplines. All of my favorite fiction writers deploy poetic language and this is true regardless of genre: science fiction, fantasy, mystery, memoir, all of them really.

I love language. Always have. I love the ebb and flow of well-crafted sentences: the way the words chosen strike an emotional chord, the way the (vital) arrangement of those words conveys the meaning of a passage or of a single sentence (and how reordering the arrangement of those same words can change a sentence's meaning), and how the selection of one word over another of the same meaning instills nuance.

I read poetry to learn these (and other) techniques. Why do you read poetry?
 

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I rarely read poetry.

However, a few months ago, while teaching a vocabulary lesson for 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade small groups, using Robert Marzano's Teaching Basic and Advanced Vocabulary, one of the modals in the book listed poetry terms, and it made me stop and notice. The word 'limerick' sort of jumped out at me, and I took a side trip and read several (clean) limericks to the students.

That lead me to spending two weeks teaching the students to write limericks. I wrote a dozen or more myself during this time, even submitting several sets to various publications. Most of the kids enjoyed the exercise, and many of them produced funny and correct forms of the short poetry.

Several students told me they were so inspired, they went to the library to check out books of poetry.

The whole thing made me realize that while I had been an avid poetry reader as a kid, I had forgotten the power of this form of writing.

I especially like the limerick form of poetry because I enjoy the humor and the rhyme and meter pattern.
 
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