The Death of a Poetic Era

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As an English major, I am struggling to find the perfect link to sustain the nourishing feeling English provides in the teaching of it to students with an abbreviated speech lifestyle. I feel that everything is too fast nowadays due to this verbal and textual abbreviation - life, our emotions and our very experiences are too abbreviated. And it is becoming all too common, all too fast.

As part of my placement experience at a high school, I have been assigned by my university to bring forth a project which I see as beneficial to the school and its students, particularly one that harnesses my majors. So I decided to focus on English and its very art, in particular, poetry. I decided this because I wanted to give a voice to the outsiders, to those who feel that they cannot express themselves - you will be surprised at how many students have no personal opinion about things!

So I ran a poetry workshop. I made it appealing for all sorts of learners - the visual, the kinaesthetic, the musical, the linguistic, the logical, the intrapersonal, the interpersonal, the musical, all of Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligence theories. And I thought it extraordinary the lengths I went through. I made attractive posters, and made a plan to collate all of the varied poetic techniques I would have taught students into a final slam poem that they would perform at the end of my two-week block, boosting their oral and performance skills as well, all vital in order to thrive academically. 

The number of students that attended went from six to two in four sessions. Then one. I could not believe it - what was I missing? I made it engaging. I placed bulletin notices that rhymed. I incorporated varied interests, even catering for those interesting in writing rap music. I touched on all elements. I asked several students to attend - their responses varied from "I can't write poetry" to "no thanks" to "maybe". 

Poetry is so beautiful. It is everything a soul could ask for. It is everything students could ask for in the middle of a bust day. But it was something rejected. Even those two who attended towards the end were bored halfway and began to doodle all over things instead of sticking to the poetic task. So I did the thing I feared the most about this project: I gave up.

I revised it entirely. I now run origami workshops. Students come in, fold pieces of paper to their amusement, trash the area in which they are folding paper, and leave. I cannot believe that language, the most beautiful communicative tool since the uttering of cavemen and cavewomen, is being trashed like this.