David Harrison

Tim, thank you for inviting me to share some thoughts about poetry and why I think it’s important to introduce poems to young people at an early age. The other night my wife Sandy and I were sitting in the living room, she with a newspaper, I with no visible means of entertainment. When she asked what I was thinking about, I answered that to myself I was reciting the first stanza of “The Raven,” by Edgar Allan Poe. It’s a poem I admired enough to memorize part of nearly seventy years ago. If recalling favorite lines of a poem strikes you as unusual, remember that large numbers of people of all ages – enough to pack concert stadiums around the world — can quote the lyrics of dozens of songs, just as rappers, hymn singers, and Christmas carolers easily perform from memory.

The engine that drives this phenomenon is structured language, verse poetry known for its rhyme and meter. This kind of poetry has many names: nursery rhymes, Shakespearean plays, Broadway musicals, opera, doggerel, limericks, jump rope rhymes, rhyming jingles, and every kind of song imaginable. These are all examples of structured language, the kind that makes them easy to remember and fun to recite. Compare any of these with prose and with rare exceptions poetry sticks with us more readily than prose.

This fact is why it’s so important to introduce young people to poetry, the younger the better. There are reasons why kids relate to poetry. Often the poem feels like a conversation between the poet and the reader. There’s a certain “me-to-you” sense, as though the poet sat down, thought about something the reader would like, and then wrote about it. In long prose, the reader may feel like a spectator. In a poem, the reader often feels like a participant. This sense of intimacy is an important link that connects the poet with the reader. It has to do with how a poet writes. It has to do with how the reader responds.

Plenty of well-documented research shows ways that using poetry in the classroom supports reading skills – phonemic and phonological awareness, vocabulary development, understanding, fluency — but kids tell us, too, why they like poetry and have fun with it. They tell us in surveys that they like poems because they have short lines. Because there aren’t many lines in a stanza or stanzas in a poem. Because the words paint pictures in their minds. Because poems help them understand new words. Because some poems make them laugh and they love to laugh. Because poems can be about feelings they have too. Because many poems tell stories and kids love good stories. Because many poems rhyme and kids love rhyme. Because many poems are about animals and kids like animals. Because poems are fun to read aloud and perform.

But there is another important advantage of sharing poetry in the classroom. Because of reasons given in the previous paragraph for why kids like to hear and read poetry, they also like to write poems of their own. The poems we introduce to kids can make excellent models for poems they write (or make up) themselves, which is all the more reason to stock the classroom library with a variety of poetry collections that students like. Early efforts at writing a poem may not be much more than stringing a few words and thoughts together. But oh! What a glorious accomplishment that is! The very act of writing provides experience in framing what we want to say so that someone else may learn about it. Starting off by writing a novel is out of the question. Same with a short story of much length. But a poem? Yes. A poem is just the right size. I’ve interviewed dozens of poets across America and asked when they started writing poems. Very often they tell me they were six or seven. At least one was younger. She “wrote” her first poems on walls in her house.

Tim, you, Richard Allington, and numerous other authorities on early literacy stress over and over the importance of reading to students and giving them opportunities to read on their own. Here again, poetry provides an ideal option for both. Bernice Cullinan used to urge teachers to marinate their kids in poetry. Because most poems are short, they fit easily into busy days. Kenn Nesbitt, former Children’s Poet Laureate, published a book of poems that can be read in one minute.

I’ll conclude with a quote I love by actress/writer Helena Bonham Carter in Sylvia Vardell’s guest column in Poetry from Daily Life. “Give your child an appetite for poems and they will never be bored … with poems in your pocket, you’ll be armed with beauty and food for the soul, and you will never be lonely.”

One hundred fifty years from when

a borrowed bell summoned

Drury’s first students,

the hopes of that time

graduate anew with you today.

You are historical.

That alone is worth a poem.

It takes courage to face the unknown,

to dare set out on a journey alone,

discover hard truths about who you are,

earn the audacity that grants permission to dream.

Today you are the boundary

between past and future.

Your own journey begins

when you step out of this poem

and through those doors.

You’ll draw strength, when you need it,

from memories of moments

when you thought you couldn’t do it,

but somehow did;

memories of professors

who challenged you, dare you.

They have earned a place in your poem.

When you are old, and need new knees,

friends you made here

will need new knees, too,

and they will still love you,

and you will become fond of saying,

“Remember that time when…?”

This moment will not come again,

with the ink scarcely dry

on the beginning of the rest of your lives.

You’ve learned how to go about learning,

learned how to make some pieces fit.

It’s alchemy time, when dreams transform into reality.

And you, our talented new graduates, are definitely worthy of

a poem.

Couldn’t reach a chair,

just stood there begging,

eyes bright, fanny wagging

until I reached down.

His puddles were so little

sometimes I’d miss them,

but he always gave himself away,

head hanging,

ears drooping,

ashamed.

Loud noises scared him,

made him whimper,

come running to me

too scared to know what to do,

I’d pick him up,

hold him against my chest

till the shivering stopped.

We grew up together

except I got bigger,

he just got older.

Yesterday

we took him to the vet,

said goodbye,

left him there.

He was so little,

the hole in my heart

is

so

big.

© 2013, David L Harrison, from The Poetry Friday Anthology for Middle School, all rights reserved

The saber-tooth enforced the law

With giant canine, leap, and claw.

Victims whom he gnawed and chewed

Agreed he was a handsome dude.

No one thought the saber mean,

Just a perfect eating machine.

But vision dims as time passes.

Soon he needed eating glasses.

One day when he went to roam,

He forgot his specks at home.

Nearsightedly he lost his mate,

Who, by accident, he ate.

For months he moped about his loss

Without the will to bathe or floss

Until at last his stink was linked

To how the saber went extinct.

With rotten teeth and rancid breath,

The saber stank himself to death.

© 2014 David L Harrison, all rights reserved

Inside himself he mutters down the street,

Conceiving symphonies he plans to write,

Ignoring food and bath another night,

Until he’s satisfied a work’s complete.

Sonatas, string quartets are Ludwig’s meat,

Signs of growing deaf his crippling plight,

Conquering piano his delight,

To be Vienna’s finest his conceit.

As stone abyss of silence seals his fate,

He still imagines music in his head,

Denies his genius leave to lie at rest.

Beethoven earns his place among the great.

While lesser talents might have quit, instead,

As sound retreats, he writes his ageless best.

© 2017 David L Harrison, all rights reserved

Written by tradition of incoming Missouri Poets Laureate

They asked a child,

“Why do you like Missouri?”

The child answered,

“I live here.

My friends live here.

I love Missouri.

It’s my home.”

It was a good answer.

They asked a student,

“Why do you like Missouri?”

The student answered,

“In school I learned,

the first people canoed Missouri waters,

cupped their hands at its springs,

drew bows in deer-high grass,

lived well off the land.”

The teacher said,

“Explorers came, wagons followed,

packed with bibles, fiddles, cooking pots.

Folks built cabins, churches, schools,

outposts, the seeds of towns.”

The farmer, voice soft as tilled soil,

said, “Missouri is dogwood trees,

front porches, barns, lakes.

It’s rows of corn whispering in river-rich earth,

cows in rolling pastures,

frogs at night singing to the moon.”

The business person said,

“Missouri is the heartbeat of many nations,

the confluence of cultures,

sharing visions, growing together.”

The writer said, “It is original thinkers –

Truman, Carver, Benton, Twain.

It is serious fishermen, rabid fans,

the Show Me State, Missouri . . .”

They asked an older person,

“Why do you like Missouri?”

The older person answered,

“I live here.

My friends live here.

I love Missouri.

It’s my home.”

It was a very good answer.

© 2023 David L Harrison, all rights reserved

Tenderly,

fingers lingering

over wondrous gifts,

peeling

paring

slicing,

he contemplates with satisfaction

the completed act.

“Nothing beats home-grown,”

he says.

“You won’t find corn this sweet

in any store.”

Another platter,

meaty red slabs

surprisingly heavy

on white china.

“Try these tomatoes,

tell me these aren’t

the best you ever tasted.”

Sweet onions

served with garden talk,

language of the soil,

wisdom of grandfathers.

Golden ears dripping butter,

spinach wrinkly tender,

delicately green,

cauliflower better than expected,

green beans

demanding to be bragged on . . .

“You won’t find these

in any store,” he says

to heads bobbing

over full plates.

He nods,

agreeing with himself.

I smile and think,

“Nothing beats home-grown.”

© 1998, from The Purchase of Small Secrets, Boyds Mills Press, all rights reserved

Ducks fly over

and I think of him,

quacking silly like a duck.

They never landed.

Such a dope!

Who needs

a friend like that?

Who needs a guy

who cracks you up

with jokes you never tell your mom,

and you wonder where

he gets such stupid stuff?

The halls at school

are full of kids,

but no one looks for me.

No one tells me like it is,

borrows shirts that disappear,

knows our house as well as his.

Now he’s gone.

He won’t be back.

So why do I keep looking up?

Think I miss his funny grin?

Who needs a friend like that?

© 2004, from Connecting Dots, Boyds Mills Press, all rights reserved

A tick has no friends.

Therefore, my story ends.

© 2013, David L Harrison, from bugs, poems about creeping things, BMP, all rights reserved