Access Granted: How Melissa Smith and #TeachLivingPoets is Bringing Love of Poetry to a New Generation
I have a long term love affair with poetry, but as a high school teacher, I realized students were not as enamored as myself. Poetry often gets isolated into a “unit” that needs to be taught to satisfy some learning standard or prepare for a test. Students have learned this and developed a dread of something they don’t understand, and want to try to decipher even less. Somewhere along the way, we lost the knowledge that poetry speaks truth when it is needed, poetry heals when the hurt seems insurmountable, and poetry celebrates the small unnoticed moments that inspire joy. It has become something to be analyzed rather than enjoyed.
For me, this journey of inspiring young people to take a look at poetry again started at The Blue Ridge Writing Project. The National Writing Project is built around the idea of Teachers Teaching Teachers. Its core program is an invitational summer institute (ISI), a six week program that brings together teacher-fellows to hone their writing craft and make visible writing practices that encourage other writers. Our Director, Aileen Murphy, is a living, breathing published poet, and a great inspiration to my life and writing after 2010.
Part of the ISI is to genuinely dig into personal and professional writing. Each week, I met with my writing group, mentored by Aileen, and each week I was privileged to hear her words, as well as those of my fellow teacher-writers. I always loved poetry from afar, but this experience showed me I could be a part of that poetic world I so loved. The culmination of the institute was a day of writing where everyone sits in the Writer’s Chair and shares a piece of writing from the summer. One of our special guests was Nikki Giovanni. She read a poem from her coming collection, “Artichoke Soup.” Just to be in her presence, and hear her voice, showed me the power of access to living poets.
After that summer, I started a book club and writing group to keep the fire stoked. A few years later, I joined Twitter and sought out other writers and educators to grow my own writing and teaching. The hashtag TeachLivingPoets kept cropping up so I “sat” in on one of their monthly chats. It covered the poem, “There is a Lake Here,” from Clint Smith’s collection, Counting Descent. The chat drew educators, readers of poetry, and the poet himself. We discussed the writing “moves” made by Smith, and the larger ideas of institutionalized racism, stereotypes, and hope as well. I decided then I needed to bring this energy and passion to my own classroom. I hit Twitter to reach out to living poets about teaching their collections in my high school classroom. The highlight was a thread between Sarah Kay and Clint Smith about who would be the better choice. Clint Smith won, but it was close.
“When you first introduced the Pick-a-Poet project, I thought wow, more busy work. But reading Rudy Francisco’s collection and watching his spoken word videos brought me into the world of poetry in a way I had never experienced. There is something to be said about reading poetry written not only in a modern era but written by someone who is currently alive. There is a silent comfort you feel. The language is easy. The perspectives are relatable. Most importantly, it feels like a conversation; rather than a lecture.” Olivia H. (former student of Carrie Honaker)
Helping students develop writing craft and authentic voice is always a challenge, but poetry offers a unique opportunity to allow students to play with short mentor texts, imitate them, and move into developing the tools to exercise their own style. There were many groans when I introduced the idea of reading an entire poetry collection. Most of my students had not looked at poetry since 6th grade, and were not excited for spending weeks reading, discussing, and worst of all, writing poetry. That all changed when I handed out Counting Descent, dimmed the lights, and put on Clint Smith’s TED Talk, “The Danger of Silence.” It was political, poetic, and there was not a sound in the classroom. When I turned the lights back on, students eagerly perused the collection. I brought up Smith’s website and pointed out his Twitter and Instagram handles. I encouraged the students to follow him, most did. I also showed students my own Twitter feed where I participated in the #TeachLivingPoets chat that inspired our study of Counting Descent. They were shocked that Smith actually participated, and that he and I had exchanged tweets about teaching his collection. The icing on the cake was that Smith agreed to Skype with my students after we finished the collection to discuss the poems, and the writing process. They would have access to a real, live published poet to discuss their work. This was my Nikki Giovanni moment.
None of this would have come about if not for Melissa Smith and her #TeachLivingPoets movement. I am so inspired by her willingness to dive into unchartered waters so I reached out to discuss Teach Living Poets, the mission, and how the landscape of teaching poetry is changing.
How has TLP changed since you started on this journey?
It started with some tweets and has developed and grown into a supportive community of teachers seeking to change the way poetry is taught. More and more teachers are finding that their students appreciate poetry when it is relevant to them, and when they can see themselves in it; and those teachers are sharing their ideas and stories on social media and on the TLP website. The TLP family keeps growing each year since it started back in 2017.
As an AP Lit teacher, I was scared about teaching such new poetry in a course where the test is usually so canon-driven. For me, it opened my eyes to how poetry, especially stuff kids like, can be the perfect avenue to develop student voice in their writing. I made huge changes to what and how I taught from one year to the next. How has TLP changed your approach to teaching?
It’s really invigorated and energized me as a teacher. To see my students get excited about poetry made me excited to teach it. To bring in new poems that I don’t even understand fully myself was a shift in my teaching style—and a much needed shift at that. Discovering poems alongside students, and working our way through a poem together, allowed us to be on the same level of mutual learning. There’s been so many times when students taught me something about a poem, and I don’t think those moments would have happened if I was up in the front of the room sage-on-the-stage style “teaching” a poem to the class. I had to let go of control. And, as a type A person, that was a real challenge for me. It wasn’t until I saw the benefits that directly impacted my students that I realized I needed to let it go. I learned to be vulnerable. I learned to stop talking and listen.
It’s also caused me to take a critical eye to the voices I bring into the classroom space. If we are only teaching the traditional canon, then we are limiting those voices to white, male, cis-gendered, and hetero-normative, which does not mirror reality. Through teaching living poets, I love that I can uplift so many more voices, not only to my own students, but to other teachers and readers through social media and the TLP website.
I know personally, my most memorable moments over the last couple years have been my students Skyping with Clint Smith and Jose Olivarez. They asked (mostly) thoughtful questions and those sessions made lifelong poetry fans out of more than a few. It also opened the eyes of my predominantly suburban, upper middle-class white students. What are some of those aha moments for you?
Yes, I absolutely agree that Skypes and classroom visits are incredible moments! Students get to see the actual person responsible for writing they are reading in class. How often does that happen? I think it can be a really affirming experience for students. It allows them to wonder—if that person can write poems, maybe I could write poems, too.
A few other moments that stand out to me was back in my first year of TLP when a student named Madeline wrote her own song on the guitar inspired by a RA Villanueva poem we read in class, and she played that song for him when we Skyped. It was a very cool moment. Another that I will probably remember forever is a former student’s connection with Kaveh Akbar’s poems. The student, Janais, suffered a family loss and battled depression, and found healing and inspiration in Kaveh’s poems. When they got to meet Kaveh in person and tell him thank you for his poems, I got really emotional. It was a beautiful memory that will stay with me forever. Janais is now a Creative Writing major in college.
“There is no better opportunity for students to connect with the material they study than by teaching living poets. The passion my generation exudes for social justice, mental health, climate change, anything, everything is reflected in poetry from living poets. People like me will take the relevant nature of those poems and run with it, engage with it, and find it easier to love than some older poets. Studying living poets makes the entire discipline of poetry widely accessible to younger students.” Janais (former student of Melissa Smith)
Why would you say teaching a work by a living author is important?
Kids get to read great poetry, start to develop their own love of verse, and we get to support artists! It’s a win-win for everyone. I think it comes down to relevance. Students can see that poets today write about the same things they care about—the same things that move them—which allows them to appreciate it more.
Teaching living poets can also be a door to teaching older, canonical poems. If a student can understand how the speaker in a Rudy Francisco poem feels about the person he has a crush on, then they can take that same understanding to a Robert Browning poem. One of the coolest aspects of teaching living poets is to see how they are in conversation with their ancestors, the poets who came before them.
Obviously right now we are all teaching differently. How has Covid-19, and subsequent closing of schools, impacted TLP?
I can only speak to my own experience with my students. We suffered a devastating disappointment when we had to cancel our spring poetry workshop with poets RA Villanueva, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Gabrielle Calvocoressi. Everything was planned and set to go for the poets to spend the day at our school with my students who had read and enjoyed their collections so much.
Once school was let out, we had no choice but to cancel. The poets lost out on their honorariums. It was one of the first events my seniors had canceled on them, and it was heartbreaking all around.
I know you have done conference sessions and have a book in the works. Last question, what do you hope for the future of TLP?
I hope to continue building community. I hope to inspire more teachers to try something new that might be out of their comfort zones by equipping them with incredible poems and engaging lessons and resources to just that. I hope to share more teachers’ success stories. I hope to inspire students to love reading poetry and to write their own poetry. And, ultimately, our TLP mission to complicate the canon and empower students through poetry.
Between the eye-opening monthly Twitter chats, collaborations with Scott Bayer and #TheBookChat, the virtual library created by Smith and Bayer, and a treasure trove of teaching appreciating resources on https://teachlivingpoets.com/, Melissa Smith is creating a space where poetry is no longer feared, but embraced and celebrated for longer than just the month of April.
Melissa Alter Smith is a high school English teacher, author, and poetry cheerleader. She is 2017 District Teacher of the Year, an NCETA Executive Board member, and a National Board Certified Teacher. She has presented at NCTIES, WVELA, NCETA, WLU Summer Institute, NCTE, and the AP Annual Conference, and is currently co-authoring a book on teaching poetry that will be published by NCTE. Melissa is also a co-author of the Instructor’s Manual and AP Correlation Guide for the 13th high school edition of The Norton Introduction to Literature. She is a contributing author for aplithelp.com., the NCTE Verse project; she is the creator of the #TeachLivingPoets hashtag and teachlivingpoets.com. She has been featured in NEATE News and on Education Talk Radio. She lives with her family in Charlotte, NC. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram @MelAlterSmith.
