How does reading a living writer change the way students connect with a text? When Melissa Smith, who teaches creative writing and AP and American literature at Lake Norman Charter High School near Charlotte, N.C., brought contemporary poetry into her classroom four years ago, the difference was revolutionary. Her students began learning from poets like Clint Smith, Safia Elhillo, and Jay Ward online and in person, poets who visited to shake students' hands and sign their books and talk craft over Skype and demystify how to turn real life into words on the page.
Smith watches class after class light up when they engage in dialogue with the artists and realize the poets are not much older than they are, or also crossed the border, or also lose sleep over school safety. Some students perform songs inspired by their favorite stanzas or find the words to come out.
"I wanted to scream from the rooftops to all teachers—you guys, this is it!" says Smith. "I just don't think this kind of creativity would have happened with Robert Frost poems."
So, she took to the message virtual. Smith's vision to bring more contemporary poetry into K–12 schools has broadened into a movement known as #TeachLivingPoets.
Expanded Curriculum
Smith started the Twitter hashtag in 2014 to crowdsource hard-to-find teaching resources for newer poetry. The name stuck after poet Kaveh Akbar responded to one of Smith's first tweets, thanking her for "teaching living poets." Now, educators around the country use the hashtag as a convening tool to modernize and diversify a literary canon of mostly white, deceased poets students have traditionally studied.
Smith, who started the dive into modern poetry alongside her students, says her main goal is to empower students through the art form in more thoughtful, personalized ways—showing them how poetry can be a means to speak out and understand what's going on in their lives and in the world.
In the first days of school, Smith's students study Clint Smith's poem "Something You Should Know" and write their own models to introduce themselves. In creative writing, they use poems as mentor texts for writing prompts. In AP lit, they focus on close reading and poetry analysis, keep poetry blogs, and memorize and perform poems. Throughout the year, a few of the authors students have studied will bridge the gap and conduct workshops and Q&As in person or through social media.
Teachers "can fall into this trap of the same canonical writers with the same interpretations," says Smith. "If we are only teaching the traditional canon, then we are limiting those voices to white, male, cis-gendered, and heteronormative, which does not mirror reality. Your average student is not going to see themselves mirrored in any poem."
'Heartfelt Engagement'
Poetry in schools has too often run a predictable course that keeps students at arm's length or makes the form feel intimidating and inaccessible: Read some Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare, throw in a dash of T. S. Eliot and Langston Hughes, and call it a unit. Teach Living Poets encourages replacing narrow curriculum with a broader diversity of voices. On TeachLivingPoets.com, there are curated resources for this purpose, including a digital poetry library Smith created with teacher Scott Bayer; a Facebook group; a Twitter chat on the last Tuesday of every month, where educators discuss how they might unpack one specific poem; and Google hyperdoc lessons for texts, such as the books Smith is teaching virtually this fall (Richard Blanco's How to Love a Country and Aimee Nezhukumatathil's Oceanic).
Guest bloggers share strategies and lesson plans that have worked for them, including how to start literary podcasts or annotate poems, how to make units out of food poems or spoken-word poetry, or how to discuss the contributions of U.S. poet laureates like Joy Harjo and Tracy K. Smith.
R. A. Villanueva, a poet and 6th grade English teacher in the Bronx who has visited Smith's classroom twice, says having an online space for sharing about poets who are at work now is "catalytic."
"Once you turn the frame of reference from the top of the hierarchy—the people who are long gone and have the weight of accolades and history behind them—to people who come to this work because they need it to survive, the energy shifts," says Villanueva. "I want students to see that inspiration doesn't come from magic or sorcery. It's attentiveness. It's being radically observant of the world."
Villanueva's own students know that he is a published poet, and he shares with them the contemporary poetry influences he tries to emulate. For a recent unit, Villanueva started with narrative poems about "life's minute particulars" so that students understood poetry's attention to detail (Elizabeth Alexander's "Small Kindnesses") before moving to pieces that played with punctuation, space, capitalization, and multiple languages (Eloisa Amezcua's "Teaching My Mother English over the Phone" or "Self-Portrait with No Flag" by Safia Elhillo). As students journaled their thoughts, questions, and epiphanies, Villanueva noticed they could make sense of the poems "through the prism of their lives," especially as subjects dealt with common middle school experiences such as rivalry, friendships, and even braces.
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Shaping Future Artists
Modern poetry also unlocks ways for students to imagine themselves as writers. Jay, one of Smith's former students, was so moved by the poetry workshops as a high school senior—especially poet Kaveh Akbar's work—that they are now majoring in creative writing at Appalachian State University.
"The passion my generation exudes for social justice, mental health, climate change, anything, everything is reflected in poetry from living poets," Jay said in an interview with Smith. "Reading Kaveh's work helped me see myself somewhere other than a mirror...No one line in his poems told me everything would be OK, but every single one of his poems told me I would make it out OK." These connections are equally valuable for the poets, says poet José Olivarez, a teaching artist for high schools and universities, because students' questions and interpretations remind him that he isn't writing into a vacuum.
Olivarez, whose poetry collection Citizen Illegal explores his experiences as the son of Mexican immigrants growing up in Chicago, wants to make space for students to see themselves as part of the poetry world. He came to the craft as a teenager through his love for hip hop but had no idea he could become a writer until he saw his school's slam team perform. Writing was the outlet through which he realized teachers weren't the only experts; he could interpret history and literature in his own ways.
To embrace the role he had in shaping his own education was "both frightening and very liberating," says Olivarez. "I meet students who are just looking for permission to begin this journey for themselves."
In any learning environment, Olivarez often mixes media and genre to help students recognize the literature in familiar spheres like YouTube and TikTok videos. He'll pair Eve L. Ewing's Afrofuturist poem "Arrival Day" with the music video "Never Catch Me" by Flying Lotus and Kendrick Lamar. This widespread thinking of what can be a poem is at the heart of Teach Living Poets, making room for the many ways poets are redefining what art looks like.
Teaching modern poetry doesn't mean educators have to discard older poetry altogether—though the two don't need to be studied in tandem. Today's poets are "in conversation with their ancestors, the poets who came before them," says Smith, which can serve as a gateway to older poems. When students understand the nuances of a romantic crush in a newer poem like Rudy Francisco's "To the Girl Who Works at Starbucks," they can apply the same understanding to a Robert Browning poem about love.
"Through teaching living poets, I can uplift so many more voices," says Smith. "Not only to my own students, but to other teachers and readers."
