For Christina, making the tone bottle reminded her of kindergarten – in a good way. “It makes it honestly a little bit more fun,” she said. “When you notice the colors and you’re able to point out more techniques and, like, the smaller details of a poem, especially when we’re looking for certain lines and certain words, rather than just ‘Oh, what’s the theme? What’s the tone?’ You’re looking for more specifics.”
According to Smith and former students, teaching and studying living poets not only makes poetry more fun; it also makes it more accessible and relevant to current generations and empowers them to find themselves as readers and writers.
Opening up the canon
Aaliyah Farmer, a former student of Smith’s and recent college graduate, remembers loving poetry as a kid – when her classes read whimsical poetry by Shel Silverstein. “In elementary school and middle school, we’re so used to reading poetry like that. And then whenever we got to, like, ninth grade, 10th grade, 11th grade, it was immediately like, oh, you’re reading Shakespeare or like Shakespeare-esque poets from previous, before, like, way before we could even think about.”
Farmer said that when she read centuries-old poetry, the language and the themes felt disconnected from her life. But things changed when she took Smith’s AP literature class at Lake Norman Charter High School. Reading books by contemporary poets, like Clint Smith and Aimee Nezhukumatathil, reminded Farmer of her early love for the form. “18-year-old, 17-year-old Aaliyah, reading Clint Smith and Aimee, I’m so excited to read it because I just understand it better than other poets I had read before,” she said.
For Farmer, Clint Smith’s writing did something the classics did not: It reflected the world she was growing up in. “For me and I would say my other friends that I had the class with that were also African-American, we had a pride in what he was saying in the book,” she explained. “If he was talking about, like his father or his grandfather or influential people in his life, we all have like that same person in our lives, so we were just able to build that pride and then also … how there’s also duality between slavery, but also everything that everything else that we’ve overcome, we were able to connect. And I think the pride for me came out in that sense as well.”
Giving students a chance to see themselves in the literary canon is one of the biggest benefits of teaching living poets, according to Smith. She has a lot of stories about her students finding personal connections to living poets. Like when she gave a blog writing assignment and two transgender students chose to write about the trans poet H. Melt. With permission from her students, Smith shared the blog posts with H. Melt, who in turn sent signed book copies to the students.
One of Kaveh Akbar’s poems about addiction resonated with another student. “One of my students’ father was struggling with alcoholism, and the way that the poem hit her was very different than how I took in the poem,” Smith said. “Hers was just more raw and emotional and personal, and really beautiful, actually, in the way that she processed it, and tied it to her own experiences with her family.”
A Latina student told Melissa that her class was the first time in her entire schooling she’d been assigned a book by a Latino writer. “And she’s a senior. So it’s moments like that that make all of this – the Teach Living Poets hashtag, movement, website, all the things happening in the classroom – worth it,” Smith said.
Farmer said Clint Smith’s Counting Descent has stuck with her. “A lot of the books from high school, I’m not going to lie, I did not keep. But that one I did keep.”
Empowering young writers
Another powerful effect of teaching living poets, according to Smith, is empowering students as writers. Every spring, she organizes a big workshop where guest poets visit in person to give readings and discuss their craft with her students.
“It was probably one of my favorite days of high school. It was like a full day and we had lunch with them,” said Jenna Johnson, another of Melissa’s former students. “I sat at a table with R.A. Villaneuva and I was just, like, freaked out the whole time, like kind of starstruck.”
Johnson started writing poetry around age 15. “It felt important in the moment. But looking back, it’s like reading your embarrassing diary. Like a lot of just melodramatic high school love poems, breakup poems, all that stuff,” she said.
Early in high school, Johnson planned to become a nurse. But when she didn’t like AP bio and loved AP lit, she started rethinking her path. “One of the big things that I didn’t realize until I read contemporary poets is kind of like the lawlessness of poetry. You don’t have to adhere to strict forms or rhyme schemes or – kind of knowing that you can literally just write a poem and there’s so many different forms, you can do literally anything with it. That was a huge thing to me that felt like that made it something I could do,” she said.
The workshop in Smith’s class was Johnson’s first time hearing poets read their work live. “That just changes how you can approach someone’s work completely. Kind of hearing the tone and the voice that they intend for it to be read.”
Johnson is now in a creative writing master’s program at New York University. She wants to continue writing poetry and become a professor. This fall, she’s teaching a writing class for undergraduates. Heading into the semester, Smith’s influence was still present.
“I felt like I had a really good education in poetry because of her. And I felt really well prepared going into undergrad and grad school that I knew of these contemporary poets,” Johnson said. “So when I was writing my syllabus, I was thinking a lot about it, and including as many living poets as possible that I felt like my students will be able to feel close to and feel like they can relate to a lot more.”
Embracing joy and rigor
Villanueva – the writer whose poem Christina analyzed and who Johnson met during the workshop – is not only a living poet. He’s also a middle school English teacher and a professor at Sarah Lawrence College. He met Smith on Twitter, around the time she started the #teachlivingpoets hashtag. He said it was inspiring to see that conversation spread among teachers.
“Melissa’s pedagogy really continues to vivify and bring to life over and over again, the fact that poetry is not some ancient, antiquated form for us to to be archeologists and dig around in. But it’s that and something else. It’s something contemporary, it’s something modern. It’s something that people do because they love and are frustrated by language,” he said.
Villanueva is a recurring guest at Melissa’s poetry workshop. He said her classroom is special because of the way she challenges students academically while also centering joy. He thinks teachers are too often told that joy and rigor can’t co-exist.
“What if rigor is not just pain?” He asked. “What if … what you’re actually trying to say is there’s a certain intensity? But intensity can also be imagination. And that’s what her classroom feels like. … There are skills that are being tested, muscles that are being stretched. But it’s not done only through trauma or grief or like rote memorization and then regurgitation. It’s something else. It’s something weirder. And I think that is what we should allow teachers to have space to try.”
Smith said teaching living poets has transformed not only what she teaches, but how she teaches. “It has re-sparked my passion for teaching in general. I have loosened up my sense of the need for control over the lesson and the learning and giving some of that control over to my students,” she said. “I have come to realize for me in my classroom that the best learning happens when I actually don’t say a thing, right? Where I allow my students to have a conversation, to collaborate and to explore a poem together, and then to share it with me.”
Episode Transcript
Shel Silverstein: “I cannot go to school today!” / Said little Peggy Ann McKay / “I have the measles and the mumps / A gash, a rash, and purple bumps / My mouth…
Kara Newhouse: That’s the voice of Shel Silverstein, who’s been one of the most popular poets for elementary schoolers – for multiple generations now. Recent college graduate Aaliyah Farmer remembers loving Silverstein’s poems when she was young.
Aaliyah Farmer: In elementary school and like middle school, we’re so used to reading poetry like that. And then whenever we got to, like, ninth grade, 10th grade, 11th grade, it was immediately like, oh, you’re reading Shakespeare or like Shakespeare-esque poets from previous, before, like way before we could even think about.
Kara Newhouse: Aaliyah says that when she read poetry from several centuries ago, the language and the themes felt disconnected from her life. But things changed during her senior year of high school. That’s when Aaliyah took AP literature, and her teacher assigned books by contemporary poets, like Clint Smith and Aimee Nezhukumatathil.
Aaliyah Farmer: That was like a comparable experience, like five-year-old or six year old Aaliyah reading Shel Silverstein, like, I was so excited to read poetry. 18-year-old, 17-year-old Aaliyah, reading Clint Smith and Aimee, like, I’m so excited to read it because I just understand it better than other poets I had read before.
Kara Newhouse: For Aaliyah, Clint Smith’s writing did something older poetry did not: It reflected the world she was growing up in. Here’s an excerpt from Smith’s poetry collection, Counting Descent, which explores themes of lineage, tradition and Black humanity.
Clint Smith: My grandfather is a quarter century / older than his right to vote & two / decades younger than the president / who signed the paper that made it so. / He married my grandmother when they / Were four years younger than I am now / & were twice as sure about each other / As I’ve ever been about most things.
[Music]
Aaliyah Farmer: For me and I would say my other friends that I had the class with that were like also African American, we like, had a pride in what he was saying in the book. If he was talking about, like his father, or his grandfather, or influential people in his life, we all have like that same person in our lives, like so we were just able to build that pride and then also, like, how there’s, like, also duality between slavery, but also everything that everything else that we’ve overcome, um, we were able to connect. And I think the pride for me came out in that sense as well.
Kara Newhouse: Aaliyah says Counting Descent has stuck with her.
Aaliyah Farmer: A lot of the books from high school, I’m not going to lie, I did not keep. But that one I did keep.
Kara Newhouse: This is MindShift, where we explore the future of learning and how we raise our kids. I’m Kara Newhouse.
[Music]
Kara Newhouse: Aaliyah Farmer read Clint Smith’s book in a class at Lake Norman Charter High School in North Carolina. Her teacher, Melissa Smith, has made it her mission to bring vibrant contemporary poetry into her classroom. She encourages other teachers to do this too – through the social media hashtag #teachinglivingpoets. She’s written a book and created a website with the same name.
Melissa Smith: When I say teach living poets, I don’t mean to completely cut off those traditional canonical poets. To discover how they’re in conversation with poets today is actually really brilliant and amazing. It’s just we need to open the door wider to let more voices into our classrooms and who we’re teaching in our poetry curriculum.
Kara Newhouse: Melissa first observed the power of teaching living poets about eight years ago.
That’s when she found out that Pulitzer Prize finalist Morri Creech taught at a university not far from her school. She invited him to visit her classes.
Melissa Smith: He was like, here, sitting in front of us and having conversation with us about his poems. And I distinctly remember one of my boys, he was decked out in his soccer uniform because he had a game later that day, and at the end of that class he said, ‘Miss Smith, that was the coolest class I ever had.’ And I was like, by golly, I’ve unlocked some sort of secret, right? I was like, I need to do this more and more.
[Music]
Kara Newhouse: So she reached out to poets who were active online. She invited them to speak with her students in person and on Skype.
Melissa Smith: I saw just the energy change in my classroom. I saw their eyes light up. I saw them actually being interested.
Kara Newhouse: When some of Melissa’s students wanted to borrow her poetry books over spring break, she was thrilled. She tweeted about it, and tagged the poets.
Melissa Smith: And Kaveh Akbar, one of my favorite, most favorite poets ever retweeted and said, ‘Thank you for teaching living poets.’ And I was like, huh, that has a real ring to it, doesn’t it? And so that’s how the hashtag was born, was out of his, retweet, ‘Thank you for teaching living poets.’ And so every time I would share then, anything I was doing in my classroom regarding living poets, I included that hashtag with it, and teachers were liking it, they were sharing it, they were replying to it. They were eating it up.
Kara Newhouse: As the #teachlivingpoets hashtag grew, Melissa realized there weren’t a lot of materials for teaching contemporary poetry in high school English.
Melissa Smith: You can easily find a curriculum guide for Robert Frost’s work or for Shakespeare’s sonnets, right? But if you’re going to teach a poem that was just published a month ago, there’s no SparkNotes for that. Right? And so I think a lot of teachers are – I don’t want to use the word fearful, but for lack of a better word, nervous or uncomfortable with teaching contemporary poetry, because it’s, they feel like they have to have all the answers. And that’s really not the case.
Kara Newhouse: Melissa created the Teach Living Poets website to fill the gap. She and other English teachers share free lesson plans there.
Melissa Smith: Sometimes as a teacher it can be a very isolating job, especially in our current climate, with teachers being attacked by angry parents and, you know, trying to ban books at school board meetings and whatnot. To have a community that you feel supported by and included in can be a game changer for some teachers.
[Music]
Kara Newhouse: One activity Melissa’s students enjoy is a March Madness Poetry Bracket. It’s like the March Madness basketball tournaments. But instead of athletes competing, it’s poetry.
Melissa Smith: So first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to watch the poems one last time.
Kara Newhouse: Each day Melissa’s classes watch two poetry videos. Students decide which poem they think is best and try to persuade their classmates in an informal debate. Then they vote.
Melissa tallies the votes across all periods. The winners from one week go head-to-head the next week, and so on. Until only two remain for the final round.
That’s where things stand today. The students are going to vote for the big winner.
Melissa Smith: OMG. A true battle of champions.
Kara Newhouse: The first contender is “My Honest Poem” by Rudy Francisco. It’s an exploration of his fears and flaws. Here’s an excerpt.
Rudy Francisco: I’m still learning how to whisper /
I’m often loud in places where I should be quiet, / I’m often quiet in places where I should be loud. / I was born feet first and I’ve been backwards ever since.
Kara Newhouse: The other finalist in today’s showdown is called “Touchscreen” by Marshall Davis Jones. It’s about how technology is reshaping our lives.
Marshall Davis Jones: Introducing the new Apple iPerson / complete with multitouch and volume control / doesn’t it feel good to touch? / doesn’t it feel good to touch? / doesn’t it feel good to touch? / my world is so digital / that I have forgotten what that feels like
Kara Newhouse: Some of Melissa’s students take notes at desks around the edge of the room. Others lounge on comfy chairs in the middle, using lap pads to write on. When the second poem finishes playing, they dive into discussion.
Xuting: There’s this one line where he says, ‘We used to be in the trees. We swung down, and then someone slipped a disc, and now we’re hunched over touchscreens.’ Right. And if you think of that image of, like, the human evolution, right. What is hunched over is the ape, the primates. And what is standing up is the human. And if we’re hunched over again, then, I mean, does that mean we’re going backwards?
Kara Newhouse: They debate how well each poem conveys its message.
Collin: Some of the quotes, for example, ‘I wonder what my bedsheets say when I’m not around.’ I feel like that’s kind of one of those things when you don’t know your own identity. So it’s kind of a broader message that Rudy is speaking, and I feel like that makes it where it’s easier to relate to.
Kara Newhouse: And they reflect on bigger issues raised by the poets.
Emma: I, I think that, um, the fact that technology is such a prevalent problem, like everybody knows. You are constantly told not to be on your phone, to limit your screen time, over and over and over. What isn’t talked about is how all of us face our own, like internal issues. That’s and I think that’s what makes, like ‘My Honest Poem’ more impactful because nobody really talks about that.
Sam: I’d like to say that I think a lot of these internal issues, at least in modern society, are being intensified by the technology talked about in ‘Touchscreen.’
Kara Newhouse: These high school seniors are identifying literary devices, citing evidence to support their arguments, and connecting what they’ve heard to their own lives. These are all the things English teachers want to hear in class. They’re also laughing and being playful with each other. Melissa says that’s typical.
Melissa Smith: At first, the kids are like, oh, yeah, this is fine. This is cool. But once we get down to, like, the Final Four and especially the last two poems, they start arguing. They start getting really, you know, invested in the poem that they like better. They, they try to convince their neighbor like, ‘no man, vote for the other one.’
Kara Newhouse: After 15 minutes of discussion, it’s time to pick a winner.
Melissa Smith: All right. Heads down. Secret vote. Raise your hand if you want to vote for Rudy Francisco, ‘My Honest Poem.’ Raise your hand if you want to vote for Marshall Jones, ‘Touchscreen.’
Kara Newhouse: The students won’t hear the winner until the next day, but when Melissa counts votes across all her classes, “Touchscreen,” the poem about technology, comes out on top.
[Music]
Kara Newhouse: After the vote, they move on to an activity called tone bottles.
Melissa Smith: And so, one of your glitter choices is going to represent the tone before the shift.
Kara Newhouse: This lesson plan was created by another teacher, Valerie A. Person. She shared it on Melissa’s Teach Living Poets website. It’s meant to help students capture the tone of a poem.
Melissa Smith: Right, so what is the author’s attitude towards his subject before the shift? And then the other type of glitter you’re adding into your bottle is the tone after the shift, right?
Kara Newhouse: Each student has picked a poem to analyze. They fill a 16-ounce bottle with hot water and glue. Then add food dye, glitter and sequins.
Melissa Smith: You can mix colors if you want, just use one, whatever you think represents the theme of your poem.
Kara Newhouse: When they’re finished, Melissa adds mineral oil and hand soap to the bottles to create viscosity. Students shake up their bottles to see the glitter and sequins swirl around. They also write a paragraph on an index card, explaining how their tone bottle reflects their poem.
Kara Newhouse: A student named Dean based his bottle on “Looking for the Golf Motel” by Richard Blanco.
Melissa Smith: And why did you pick orange for your liquid?
Dean: Because it reminds me of, like, the sunset that he was describing.
Melissa Smith: And what what glitter do you have in there?
Dean: I have, like, a mixture of red and yellow to go, like, counteract the orange. But then I also like black describing his feelings when he couldn’t find it.
Melissa Smith: Aw, that’s really good.
Dean: Yeah.
Melissa Smith: Nice job, Dean.
Kara Newhouse: Another student, Christina, chose a poem called, “Like When Passing Graveyards” by R.A. Villanueva. In it, the poet recalls holding his breath when riding past cemeteries as a child.
Christina: So the sparkles are for nostalgia and your childhood, but then also the dark color is the whole point of the poem is like it’s about a childhood fear. So I wanted to do something that shows, like, the darkness of a graveyard and the fear behind it. But it’s also like the nostalgia of growing up with your siblings and, like, having these connections and these little fears that you like, create off each other.
Kara Newhouse: Christina says she enjoys this approach to analyzing a poem.
Christina: I feel like it makes it honestly a little bit more fun. It’s like kindergarten, but also it makes it more visual, because a lot of the time when you’re just writing what you feel from a poem or what you imagine, it’s when you notice, like, the colors and, like, you’re able to point out more techniques and, like, the smaller details of a poem, especially when we’re looking for certain lines and certain words, rather than just oh, what’s the theme? What’s the tone? Like, you’re looking for more specifics.
[Music]
Kara Newhouse: With these activities, students are practicing the same academic skills as when they study any other piece of literature. But Melissa says focusing on living poets does two things that studying dead poets does not.
The first is that it diversifies the literary canon. We heard a little about that from Aaliyah, the former student who identified with Clint Smith’s poems about his experiences as an African American.
Melissa has a lot of stories about her students finding personal connections to living poets. Like when she gave a blog writing assignment and two transgender students chose to write about the trans poet H. Melt. Here’s an excerpt from H. Melt.
H. Melt: When they say “we are all trapped in the wrong body” / Imposter, impossible / No. / We are on the bus next to you / In the cubicle next to you…
Kara Newhouse: H. Melt sent signed book copies to Melissa’s two students after she shared their blogs.
Melissa Smith: And it was really special that now they have this signed copy of a, of a poet that they studied in class and, and just fell in love with and felt that common bond with because that’s like part of their identity.
Kara Newhouse: Kaveh Akbar’s poem about addiction resonated with another student.
Kaveh Akbar: In Fort Wayne I drank the seniors / Old Milwaukee Old Crow / in Indianapolis I stopped / now I regret / every drink I never took
Melissa Smith: One of my students’ father was struggling with alcoholism, and the way that the poem hit her was very different than how I took in the poem. Hers was just more raw and emotional and personal, and really beautiful, actually, in the way that she processed it and tied it to her own experiences with her family.
Kara Newhouse: A Latina student told Melissa that her class was the first time in her entire schooling she’d been assigned a book by a Latino writer.
Melissa Smith: And she’s a senior. So it’s moments like that that are – make all of this, the Teach Living Poets hashtag, movement, website, all the things happening in the classroom, worth it.
[Music]
Kara Newhouse: The second big thing Melissa says teaching living poets can do is empower students as writers. Every spring, she organizes a big workshop where guest poets visit in person to give readings and discuss their craft with her students.
Jenna Johnson: It was probably one of my favorite days of high school. I sat at a table with R.A. Villaneuva and I was just, like, freaked out the whole time, like kind of starstruck.
Kara Newhouse: This is Jenna Johnson, another of Melissa’s former students.
Jenna Johnson: I started writing when I was about 15. And, like, it felt important in the moment. But looking back, it’s like reading your embarrassing, like, diary. Like a lot of just, like, melodramatic, like high school love poems, breakup poems, all that stuff.
Kara Newhouse: The workshop was her first time hearing poets read their work live.
Jenna Johnson: That just, like, changes how you can approach someone’s work completely. Hearing, like, the tone and like the voice that they intend for it to be read.
Kara Newhouse: Early in high school, Jenna planned to become a nurse. But when she didn’t like AP bio and loved AP lit, she started rethinking her path.
Jenna Johnson: One of the big things that, like I didn’t realize until I read contemporary poets is kind of like the lawlessness of poetry. Like, you don’t have to like, um, adhere to, like, strict forms or rhyme schemes or – kind of knowing that you can literally just write a poem and there’s so many different forms, you can do literally anything with it. That was a huge thing to me that felt like that made it something I could do.
Kara Newhouse: Jenna is now in a creative writing master’s program at New York University. She wants to continue writing poetry and become a professor. This fall, she’s teaching a writing class for undergraduates.
Jenna Johnson: I’ve been thinking a lot about Miss Smith, because I know that, like, I felt like I had a really good education in poetry because of her. And like, I felt really well prepared going into undergrad and grad school that I knew of these contemporary poets and stuff. So when I was writing my syllabus I was thinking a lot about it. And like including as many living poets as possible, that I felt like my students could or will be able to, like, feel close to and feel like they can relate to a lot more.
[Music]
Kara Newhouse: Remember how Jenna said she felt starstruck sitting next to a guest writer at the poetry workshop?
Kara Newhouse: I spoke with that poet – R.A. Villanueva, whose first name is Ron.
Ron Villanueva: We open class with still images where / by the thousands above Costa Brava / starlings flock and tumble, swirl in answer / to some unseen danger, their looping dark / against that bonfire sky, shifting
Kara Newhouse: Ron is not only a living poet. He’s also a middle school English teacher and a professor at Sarah Lawrence College. He met Melissa on Twitter, around the time she started the #teachlivingpoets hashtag. He says it was inspiring to see that conversation spread among teachers.
Ron Villanueva: Melissa’s pedagogy really continues to vivify and bring to life over and over again, the fact that poetry is not some ancient, antiquated form for us to to be archeologists and dig around in. But it’s it’s that and something else. It’s something contemporary, it’s something modern. It’s something that people do because they love and are frustrated by language.
Kara Newhouse: Ron is a recurring guest at Melissa’s poetry workshop. He says her classroom is special because of the way she challenges students academically while also centering joy. He thinks, too often, teachers are told that joy and rigor can’t co-exist.
Ron Villanueva: What if rigor is not just pain? And like, what if rigor is what you’re actually trying to say is like – there’s a certain intensity. But intensity can also be imagination. And that’s what her classroom feels like. There are skills that are being tested, muscles that are being stretched. Um, but it’s not done only through trauma or grief or like rote memorization and then regurgitation. It’s something else. It’s something weirder. And I think that is what we should allow teachers to have space to, to try.
[Music]
Kara Newhouse: Melissa says teaching living poets has transformed not only what she teaches, but how she teaches.
Melissa Smith: It has re-sparked my passion for teaching in general. I have loosened up my sense of the need for control over the lesson and the learning and giving some of that control over to my students. I have come to realize for me in my classroom that the best learning happens when I actually don’t say a thing. Right? Where I allow my students to have a conversation, to collaborate and to explore a poem together, and then to share it with me.
Kara Newhouse: The contemporary poetry scene is full of innovative and diverse writers. By inviting those voices into their classrooms, teachers can open doors for students to connect with the rhythms and rhymes of poetry. And that can help them grow as readers, writers, and people.
Kara Newhouse: This episode would not have been possible without Melissa Smith. To learn more, you can read the book she wrote with Lindsay Illich. It’s called Teach Living Poets.
The students you heard in this episode were: Xuting, Collin, Emma, Sam, Dean and Christina.
Thanks also to Aaliyah Farmer, Jenna Johnson and Ron Villanueva.
I’m Kara Newhouse.
The rest of the MindShift team includes Ki Sung, Marlena Jackson-Retondo, Nimah Gobir and Jennifer Ng.
Our editor is Chris Hambrick. Seth Samuel is our sound designer.
Additional support from Jen Chien, Katie Sprenger, Maha Sanad and Holly Kernan.
David Boraks provided field recording.
MindShift is supported in part by the generosity of the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation and members of KQED.
If you love MindShift, and enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend. We really appreciate it. You can also read more or subscribe to our newsletter at K-Q-E-D-dot-org-slash-MindShift.
Thank you for listening to Season 9 of the MindShift podcast. That’s it for these deep dive episodes. MindShift will be back soon with new episodes featuring conversations about big ideas in education. Be sure to follow the show so you don’t miss a thing.
