English Tutoring: This Poetry Stuff is Tuff!

From grade school through high school there are those English teachers who assign their kids to write poems.

Students always dread this. This must be because when kids think of poetry, they think of rhyming. They think of all the rhyming poems they heard when they were little that seem so lame now that they’ve got cell phones. They’re busy texting their Bff Josh, amirite?

Poetry stopped being that rhyming crud to me sometime in high school. Sure, there were still Shakespeare’s sonnets which never got to me (did they get to you?).

Maybe poetry became a lot more interesting to me upon reading Bukowski’s poetry for the first time. It was honest, fun, sometimes vulgar… and it never rhymed. This weekend, there was a review of a new book of Bukowski’s poems. They said the tone of it all blended together, the book without order or theme. I think it’s that the poems were meant to be read by Bukowski himself instead of printed in a thick volume. Maybe I can eventually convey to a few of my kids that poetry doesn’t have to suck… unless, of course, it rhymes.