Poetry as an Antidote: Reflecting on National Poetry Month
- Megan Griffin
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
It now seems like destiny that the Artemis II crew launched their 10-day flight around the moon and back on April 1, the first day of National Poetry Month; they returned not just as space heroes but also as our world’s newest poetic ambassadors. Victor Glover’s impromptu Easter Day message. Christina Koch’s ongoing litany of inspirational phrases–”We will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other.” Jeremy Hansen’s Moon pendants engraved with “Moon and back” and his mission patch that integrated the wisdom of Canada’s Indigenous peoples. The entire crew huddled around Reid Wiseman in poetic silence after moving past Carroll Crater.
I, like so many I know, couldn’t get enough of this crew, marveling at how they so effortlessly reminded all of us that science and poetry are not–and should not be–mutually exclusive disciplines. Caught up in the excitement of their journey, I shared with my juniors a couple of poems that further exemplify this intersection: U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón’s ”Dead Stars” and “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa.” The first poem builds from the premise that we are literally creatures made from stardust, while the second was etched into the side of NASA’s Europa Clipper–a spacecraft on a five-year journey towards Jupiter’s water moon, never to return, the message from humankind one that will eternally exist in space.
The final lines of “In Praise of Mystery” are stunning: “We, too, are made of wonders, of great / and ordinary loves, of small invisible words, / of a need to call out through the dark.” So stunning, in fact, that when I read them now I can’t believe that I once thought poetry was pretty boring stuff.
It is true: until I re-met Emily Dickinson in grad school, I don’t think I actually liked poetry all that much.
When I was a child, Shel Silverstein’s and Robert Frost’s poetry collections were frequent bedtime companions, and my younger sister and I were so captivated by Anne Shirley’s recitation of Alfred Noyes’s “Highwayman” that we memorized it together, frequently performing it for each other and our stuffed animals. Silverstein, Frost, and Noyes, though, were three of only a handful of poets I knew by the time I entered college, and even after completing an English undergraduate degree, I better appreciated poetry, but I don’t think I could say I liked it.
My smart colleague Rachel Davies once noted that saying one doesn’t like poetry is about as ridiculous as saying one doesn’t like music; there are so many kinds of poems out there–you just need to find what you like.
For me, finding “my kind of poems”--and thus an inlet into the world of poetry–didn’t really happen until Dr. Sharon Harris’s Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Lit class. The trick was, I think, that we read lots of poetry in that class, and for the first time, I had someone share with me that poetry, yes, was technical and beautiful…but also that it was a source of joy and play and resistance—and we didn’t have to be so serious (read: pretentious) when we discuss it.
Now, as a high school English teacher, I better understand the why behind my early lack of poetic love. In high school English curriculums, poetry often gets the short end of the stick: we need time to read multiple novels and short stories, teach grammar, play with style, learn new vocabulary, practice discussion skills, and engage in writing workshops. At the end of the day, there often isn’t much space for poetry—there is little time to analyze it and even less time to write it. (Despite what many students try to tell me, great poetry just doesn’t “flow out of us” in one quick sitting. It is hard. And time consuming.) And we often teach poetry in a way that can make it feel like a rigid test to master, not an art form to marvel at.
And yet, poetry can be part of the remedy for many of the issues we have discussed here at Her Voice at the Table, including but not limited to: our and our students’ shortening attention spans, a desire to slow down and be more present in a word that is always moving, the need for playful and joyous classroom rigor, our students’ ongoing struggle with well-being, and the ever-present temptation of generative AI. Journalist Charley Locke captures her own experience of poetry as an antidote to modern life in her New York Times article “The Morning Ritual that Helps Me Resist the Algorithm,” reflecting on how years of grabbing a poem instead of her phone first thing in the morning has reset her mind and life for the better.
As English writer Yrsa Daley-Ward has noted, “Mate, every time you slow down to write or read a poem, you’re choosing presence. This is how your brain heals.”
All of this seems like a pretty heavy lift for poetry, but for an art form that has survived since at least 2100 BCE in written form (and for about a thousand years before that in oral form), I think it’s up to the task.
So, as National Poetry Month comes to a close, I would love to share a few quick highlights of how students celebrated this month, highlights that remind me that poetry is not, as Audre Lorde proclaims, a luxury but rather “a vital necessity of our existence.” Elsewhere on Her Voice we have documented more formalized poetry units. Today, though, is about showcasing some of the small, intentional, and playful ways we invite our students to experience poetry. One of the hopes is to help them see how poetry can exist beyond the classroom as part of their lived reality–that it can just be something we love and is not always an assignment. But really, my truest hope is that at least a few of these students are won over by poetry in a way that took me far too long to discover.
National Poetry Month Celebrations
For at least the past ten years, I have asked my students to engage in some kind of informal poetry activity during the month of April, usually as extra credit. But a few years ago, with the support of my colleague Kate, we formalized many of these previous activities into a grab bag menu of poetic options for our sophomores, and this year, I bulldozed the junior team into joining me. While the students are still given a variety of choices in how they participate, participation is no longer optional but required–and they have all month to complete them.
The American Academy of Poets hosts at least two events during this month, and students select one to participate in: Dear Poet or Poem in a Pocket Day. Dear Poet offers students a chance to write a letter to one of six living poets who read one of their poems in a video on the Academy’s website. While all students will receive some kind of letter in response, a selected few will be sent a personalized response from the poet, modeling how poetry can indeed be a conversation. My juniors and I, for example, all watched poet Richard Blanco read “Como Tú / Like Me / Like You,” a poem dedicated to DACA Dreamers and our nation’s immigrants more broadly, as an extension of our argumentative research unit. I encouraged those students who wrote about immigration for their research essay in particular to seriously consider writing Blanco a letter not just reflecting on what the poem means to them but also sharing their own extensive work on similar kinds of questions. In many ways, Blanco’s poem is the poetic version of their research; juxtaposed, the two offer different pathways into how we communicate our beliefs on social justice issues.
If students decide not to write a letter, I invite them to spend the last day of April carrying around a poem of their choice for Poem in a Pocket Day. Because poetry “is meant to travel,” as the American Academy of Poets website notes, this is a day dedicated to facilitating in-person conversations about poetry: pass the poem to a friend, read it aloud at lunch, hand out additional copies throughout the day, etc. However, when I launched this option many moons ago, I added a caveat: students must also turn over their phones for the day. The idea is that instead of mindlessly reaching for their phones during the day, they instead grab their poem. These moments then (ideally) become chances for students to refamiliarize themselves with their poem, to maybe see the words in a new light, to internalize a line or two, to read deeply instead of scrolling superficially. On the back of this poem, they reflect on how their day went–and students more often than not realize that going without their phone wasn’t actually that bad.
Beyond these two officially sanctioned events, we offer students a range of quick hits to choose from. Pop-up Poetry, for example, asks students to record themselves reading a poem to an (unsuspecting) audience. Last year, this activity happened to align with the sophomores’ Sadie Hawkins dance, so I received countless delightful videos of poetry readings popping up in the middle of a high school dance. For the introverts or quieter souls, though, we also offer the option of reading to a favorite tree or pet or simply just reading next to one’s (open) window. Students also have the option to participate in guerilla poetry: writing a favorite poem on one of our school’s many whiteboards, jotting a poem down on an index card and leaving it for someone else, or recording favorite lines from a poem across a span of Post-Its and scattering them across campus. There is nothing more delightful than stumbling upon the words of Mary Oliver alongside those of Emily Dickinson squeezed between someone’s timeline of the Civil Rights movement and a physics review.
Last week, the New York Times offered a poetry challenge of their own: a weeklong opportunity to memorize a poem with them, in this case W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One.” On day three, the article offers a couple quick movie clips where characters recite lines from some of Auden’s poems during critical moments in their lives: a loved one’s funeral and that moment when one realizes they are falling in love. While the whole NYT week is actually pretty fun–and I highly recommend you check it out–this day is my favorite. In watching these characters from Four Weddings and a Funeral and Before Sunrise draw upon Auden to express something deeply internal, I was reminded that yes–writing is hard. Really hard. And sometimes we really just cannot find the right words to communicate our anger or joy or confusion on our own. But you know who can? (No, not AI.) Poets. Why not spend more time with them?