Listed here is a poem neither your students nor mine have ever seen before. I wrote it last night, so it’s about as contemporary as you may get, lacking seated at this time and writing your own. To me it’s a living, breathing organism—not occur stone; tomorrow I possibly could change it. An organism manufactured from words, that each and every reader will bring your in her own way. Emily Dickinson says, “A phrase is dead / When it’s said, / Some say. / I say it really / Begins to reside / That day.” (1)

Whatever my poem way to me, I couldn’t possibly reduce this meaning to a prose paragraph. I don’t want to express, “It’s about making pot holders when I was young and homesick at summer camp,” or “This really is about my loss in my mother,” or “Actually, it’s about applied art versus fine art.” Or “It’s about the type of home and separation.” I didn’t lay out, at the very least consciously, to produce a poem about any of this; I needed to learn why seeing the pot holder when I opened a cabinet gave me a sudden, inexplicable urge to write. Given that the poem’s written, and I’ve discovered some answers, I guess I could say it’s exactly about these things.

But I’m a great deal more thinking about asking, “What does it say for you?”—you who’re reading it, remember, as if your lifetime depended onto it, letting in your beliefs, your dream life, your physical sensations—and, I’d add to Adrienne Rich’s list, your memories and the mood you happen to stay just now…?

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We don’t have to begin with a discussion of what poetry is, or with a list of figures of speech, or a disagreement about whether this is a great poem or a lesser poem. I offer it, you bring it or leave it. One thing I try to remember to inform students when the very first poem of the season surfaces is that they’ll like some poems a lot better than others, irrespective of alleged “greatness.” I tell them I’m really eager to see which poems each person chooses to share during the season ahead—or chooses to see aloud, copy into a notebook, go find more poems by mcdougal of, write a poem back to, or steal words from.

They are all fine responses to a poem, just as effective as writing a three-page critical analysis of it. Of course, many college professors won’t feel this way, but carpe diem. Right now it’s high school. Or junior high. And surely there’s life after college—some sixty years of it.

You can find certain advantages to starting with a modern poem. Fewer footnotes, most likely, meaning fewer opportunities for us to produce our expertise: “In Shakespeare’s day the word ‘die’also known the moment of sexual consummation. So that is clearly a pun right there. And there’s an allusion—an indirect mention of religiomythicopastoralhistorical.”

Fewer preliminaries, too. Before I hand out Shakespeare’s sonnet about envying this man’s art and that man’s scope, I might want to do some free-writing with my class on what they most envy within their friends and enemies, perhaps how envy feels, and what they themselves possess that others might envy. It will help create a familiar context for the poem, so the unfamiliar language and inverted word order won’t bring fifteen-year-olds to a grinding halt. Then I’d read it aloud—again, before they see it on the page in all its footnoted and eternal greatness. I may even memorize the poem so I really could present it with the conviction and urgency that eye contact can give.

Another reason to start off with some current poems is that the contemporary poet is less prone to view a poem as a chance to do some overt teaching: “They also serve who only stand and wait.” “The proper study of mankind is man.” Teenagers get enough of that from their parents and from us, so it’s not surprising if they prefer poems that give them a tad bit more leeway—that let them burrow (or skim) to see what the poem must offer them, not Mankind.