Don't teach students to write poetry

I love poetry.

I love reading it, and I write it occasionally. I've never published anything (unless you count my out of office messages, which are usually either in poetry or short story form, and the occasional blog post), but one day I might - you never know.

I sometimes write poetry in a free-form diary-type stream-of-consciousness crap, and I sometimes write "proper" poetry - sonnets (Shakespearean, Italian and Spencerian), ballads, terza rima, trochaic tetrameter... The whole nine yards. I do it because I can, and I just love the game of it.

However, most importantly, I do read it. I borrow and buy collections and anthologies. In the past two months I've re-read Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, read Chris Riddell's anthology Poems to Live Your Life By (which I found flummoxing - something I'll explain at another point) and Henry Treece's The Haunted Garden, and I've started on a collection of animal-themed haiku.

My love of poetry was formed in school - but not in English classes. Oh, no. English classes always had either exceptionally dire poems designed to teach poetry or decent poems that were dissected until they made your head hurt and you grew to hate them. And then they would make us write poetry.

Now, I wrote poems all through my schooling years. If you had asked me, in school, what I was going to be when I grew up, I would say "astronaut", because I was an idealist with little grasp of reality. But I would have also have sworn that I would make a living from writing poetry somehow. Note the comment made about being an astronaut.

Heck, I even won a poetry competition in high school (it was just one of the minor categories, but it counts).

And yet, I still say you shouldn't teach kids to write poetry in English class. No good comes of it. It just so happens that I was a poetry nut, which is why English classes didn't put me off poetry for life - otherwise there's every chance they would have.

I love poetry because I took private Speech lessons (what used to be called "Elocution" in the old days), and we read poetry.

We didn't study it. We didn't dissect it. We didn't get a steady dose of poems chosen specifically for school students. We read real poetry - the kind that used to be popular back in the days when poetry was the equivalent of rock music. Shakespeare, Coleridge, Tennyson, Poe. And we read it to read it.

That may sound strange, "we read it to read it", but that's what we did. We would read through dozens of the poems, pick the ones we love best, and read them out loud with all the nuance and passion that we could muster. Along the way we also picked up things like symbolism, rhyme scheme, major literary movements, history and the lives of the poets - but it was real and it was raw and we read poetry for the pure thrill of reading it.

All of that good stuff soaked into my brain and spilled out of my fingers. I write poetry because I read so much of it that it's in my blood. It comes out, if it's in you.

And really, that's what you need. The average poetry lesson in English class seems to be designed to tick a box and get something horrible out of the way, but poetry is like an infusion - you have to steep in it, get it to soak into you. Read the good stuff for the sake of reading it and for no other reason than that. Let people find what they love and what they hate. Let them read it out loud and read it quietly to themselves.

Then, if it seeps in deep enough, it will pour out of them. It's the only way it can be any good (even if it's terrible).