For 25 years, Terry Wilson, a literature teacher at Coconino High School in Flagstaff, has started each class, each day with what she calls a Gift Poem. She reads it aloud, for the pure pleasure of it…her students don’t have to do anything but listen. On the first day back to school this week, Wilson’s Gift Poem was 'Introduction to Poetry', by former poet laureate Billy Collins. It’s only 30 seconds, but it packs in the metaphor about how teachers and kids look at poetry.
Terry Wilson:
When they become comfortable enough to know that it’s not scary, and it’s not as esoteric as they think, and it belongs to them as well as to creative writing professors in faraway universities who they don’t know, but when kids begin to believe that poetry is actually is for and about them, you can see it on their faces. You can see them relax. You can see them begin to understand what’s actually happening in a poem. And here’s one of my greatest joys: I decided about 15 years ago that no matter what I ever taught, even if it was organic chemistry which would be a complete joke because I don’t know anything about it…BUT, whatever I taught, whatever class it was, whatever age level it was, that I would start every class with what I call a Gift Poem, which is what I do. I write a title of a poem on the board and the poet’s name, and I ask the kids just to listen. They don’t have to do anything with it. They don’t have to talk about it. They don’t have to write about it. They can if they want to, but all they have to do is listen. And at the beginning, they kind of roll their eyes…ok, here comes the poem. And without fail, 2 or 3 months into the year, if I for whatever reason don’t read or forget the Gift Poem – it doesn’t happen very often, but when it does – somebody will say, ‘Hey! Where’s our poem?’ And pretty soon all of them do, and the truth is I have students who graduated 15 years ago who come through town, or come into school, and they sit in the back of the classroom and say, ‘Have you read the Gift Poem yet? I came to listen to the poem’. And I’m telling the absolute truth. This happens every year.
This is the first Gift Poem of the year because I figure somebody like Billy Collins knows better than I do how to introduce poetry. So this is ‘Introduction to Poetry’, by ex-poet laureate Billy Collins.
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means
Poetry Friday is produced by KNAU' s Gillian Ferris. If you have an idea for a segment, you can email Gillian at Gillian.Ferris@nau.edu.
