“Listen my children and you shall hear…” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

This week I’ve decided to give equal time to an art form I really enjoy but never have written about in the past: poetry! I guess that isn’t surprising; it seems to me that while poetry is certainly a very ancient form of artistic expression, it often garners a relatively low level of attention these days. Maybe that stems from the personal nature of poetry, but that could be said of many individual artistic undertakings. It just seems to me that poetry is the National Hockey League of the art world - enjoying a rabid but limited fan base, and only to be found in the public eye when the other major sports are in hiatus.

But poetry can be found thriving throughout the world. You can experience it in its purest forms, in poetry “slams” for the young and in more traditional “readings” for those a little longer in the tooth. At a more subliminal level, it is woven throughout both high and popular culture, often disguised as lyrics, jingles, or prose, but the broad range of what is considered poetry allows for a lot of variations. To me, the pervasive nature of rhythmic, cadenced writing and speech is a paradox to the minimal amount of attention poetry receives in our own culture.

I have a theory -which is just that, a completely uninformed theory - but I think that the way many of us were introduced to poetry as children has had a less than beneficial impact on our appreciation for the medium. Think about it - sometime in the third or fourth grade, you are assigned to memorize The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere by Longfellow, a daunting task to be sure. You do seem to have some advantages going in: it’s narrative in nature, it’s a story from American history full of action and suspense, it features famous refrains such as “One if by land, and two if by sea…”, and it has a pretty basic rhyming structure. But it is really long, and was written a long time ago, and then there’s all that goofy language like muffled oars and belfry tower and, worst of all, Middlesex- everyone snickers when you say that. No wonder you approach the experience with mounting anxiety until you pass out during the fourth stanza from hyperventilation!

I think a better approach can be offered, and much of it starts way before the third or fourth grade. Filling children’s earliest years with poetry is easy, and it doesn’t have to be limited to the great standards like Green Eggs and Ham. Seek out and read to the very young selected works from the poetry of Lewis Carroll, Percy Bysshe Shelly, A.A. Milne, Langston Hughes, or other names from classic and modern literature. Their stories are often vivid and playful and intelligent and come across almost as music to young ears. Expose children to classes that infuse rhythm and cadence into contexts they can understand, such as movement or volume or group play. The Music Settlement offers several classes that offer just such an experience in our homegrown Music and Movement program, and in general Dalcroze instruction. Identify with a child’s natural inclination to alliteration and rhyme in their own speech patterns, and help them recognize it in others. There are plenty of examples of enthralling orators out there - folks who understand and display the characteristics of poetry in everyday language and voice modulation. One of my favorites is Muhammad Ali, whose street-wise banter in his prime always sounded completely unrehearsed and spontaneous.

From iambic pentameter to haiku, from Irving Berlin to hip-hop, from Abraham Lincoln to Barack Obama, poetry infuses life and pulses to the rhythm of our collective hearts. The world that waits the next generation might be scary enough. Let’s not rob it of its most eloquent voice.