How Teaching Living Poets Benefits Students

Teaching contemporary poetry can feel cumbersome or uncertain. Squinting into its bright light to find meaning—Is that what it could mean? Is that what it does mean?—is an act of curious vulnerability. There is a growing movement to stay with this vulnerability, both with ourselves and with our middle school and high school students. The Teach Living Poets movement invites us and our students to sit in the thrill of new poems in order to discover what they reveal about our lives.

Teaching living poets can serve students in several ways:

• It can echo the ideas of the past, inviting students to compare and contrast the ways that writers across generations use language and form to convey shared experiences and ponder ancient questions.
• It can evolve the ideas of the canon, inviting students to analyze how today’s voices stretch and tangle the meanings of the works that have come before them.
• It can explode the past, using innovative modes and structures that allow students to examine the complexity, diversity, and urgency of their lived experiences.

Our values, views, and experiences are shaped by the ways our gender, race, class, location, and many other aspects of our identities interact with the world. Living poets assert these interactions without apology, inviting students to affirm the ways that their multilayered identities influence their experiences. Consider the following contemporary poems for your middle or high school classroom:

• Clint Smith’s “Ode to the Only Black Kid in the Class” and Elizabeth Acevedo’s “Hair” unpack the dynamics of being Black in contexts that consider their Blackness a thing to be tamed or tokenized.
• Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s “Like Totally Whatever” questions the ways in which men control our language and “turn women into question marks.” Consider pairing it with Taylor Mali’s popular “Totally like whatever, you know,”
• Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s “On Listening to Your Teacher Take Attendance” and Idris Goodwin’s “Say My Name” bring courage and humor to the moments when we are made to feel different, inviting students to identify the stories that they return to when they’re feeling vulnerable.
• Chen Chen’s ”I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party” and Ethan Smith’s  “A Letter to the Girl I Used to Be” explore the forgiveness and patience that their LGBTQ identities ask of them.
• Denice Frohman’s “Accents”  and Eloisa Amezcua’s  “Teaching My Mother English Over the Phone” celebrate and struggle with the ways that English might be “too neat” to hold the wonders of their multilingual identities.
• Megan Falley’s ”Fat Girl”  and Shane Koyczan’s ”To This Day” convey the pain of being bullied for the size and shape of their bodies, and the resilience in balancing that pain with beauty.
• Rudy Francisco’s “My Honest Poem” and Clint Smith’s ”Something You Should Know” serve as models that students can use to position themselves in the world through writing their own poems.

The living poet’s workbench of tools has expanded from pen and paper to a broad collection of microphones, keyboards, social media apps, and animations. Their work draws upon the same literacies that students hone each day, allowing students to analyze how tools such as artwork, audio, or the time limits of TikTok videos mediate the meaning of a poet’s words.

• The tradition of spoken word poetry has a natural home on the Internet, a place where performance videos can easily be shared, curated, remixed, and replayed. Jonathan Williams’s “A System Not Meant for Me” and Hiwot Adilow’s ”My Name Is Hiwot” are powerful introductions to the ways in which performers use their bodies to inject emotion and build structure around their words.
• Button Poetry offers a curation of Classroom-Friendly Performance Poetry for your students to explore further.
• Poets such as Rupi Kaur and Nayyirah Waheed draw on the tradition of concrete poetry, using the squares, stickers, and slides of social media to influence the tone and update the form of their words.
• TED-Ed’s There’s a Poem for That series and Jason Reynolds’s ”For Every One” use animation to add a layer of visual storytelling that transforms the experience of the written word.

Allison Green
Boston Tutoring Services