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writing poetry

As I teach poetry, I make my students write some of it as well. Many of them write it anyway and are excited to finally do something that interests them in my class. Others are VERY resistant to it. Knowing that it was the day before Spring Break and they were losing their minds, we wrote some on Friday. For one class, I made them pick a familiar word from the dictionary and write it down. They then had to write down the next 4 entries and compose a poem using those 5 words. The poems ranged from things like "smooch" to "shoplifting." You see where their brains are. They were hilarious!

But I am a hypocrite. I make my students write poetry, but I don't/ won't write it myself. Sure, I might write the 5 dictionary entry kind, but little past that. The nature of poetry is to convey experience and emotion, especially the personal kind. That just screams "Be Vulnerable" to me. And therefore, I do not write poetry. The fear of someone seeing something that expressed my deepest emotions and most special memories and not thinking it was good is too strong. I'm also even afraid to express these thoughts on paper- that makes them more real and that too is scary.

However, for a number of reasons, I have been contemplating the ode of late. Were I to write poetry, I would start with odes. Here are a number of things I have considered writing odes to lately...

• avocados
• Dodge Neons
• spring!
• daylight savings time
• ultimate frisbee
• mexican food
• Atlanta
• JJ Redick

posted by CP @ 9:10 AM 3 thoughts