Reading poetry today reminds me how inadequate poetry instruction is in grade school. The wrong poets, the wrong poems, the wrong concepts. It really is a monumental failure on the part of our education system. 1/

We start students with "THE GREATS," a sequence of dead, largely white men whose experiences barely share the same air as our students, then expect students to learn the beauty that poetry affords, to see the magic of a cleverly verbed noun or improbably punny image. 2/

Sure, poetry is universal as water, but we can't teach the young to appreciate today's deep literary wells by reminding them that our waters are sourced in the fluids of long-dead dinosaurs (yes, that's a pee joke. I'm not sorry, not while students see poetry as a waste) 3/

Instead, we should be teaching students that poetry is rebellion. It is punk rock. Not Blink 182, but the Ramones singing "I Want to Be Sedated", Dead Kennedys singing "Nazi Punks F*** Off", and The Donnas asking "Who Invited You?" 4/

Poetry is sometimes Sam Cooke, singing "A Change is Gonna Come" and Rick Astley promising never to give you up and Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion... Well, I guess I can't say what it is there 5/

And that's exactly the problem. I can give students William Wordsworth wandering lonely as a cloud, but can I give them Jennifer Chang's "Dorothy Wordsworth," whose opening line suggests her brother's daffodils "can go [redacted] themselves"? Not in class, for sure 6/

But can I teach allusion, metaphor, polysyndeton, irony, cliché, enjambment and more? Definitely. Can I lure students into the body of the poem with an F word and then hook them with the the artistry of the poet? Could they become poets themselves once on that line? Of course! 7/

Maybe it is that we don't have love for poets. Maybe we keep poetry instruction in the land of the dead because, socially, culturally, we want poetry to be dead and sterile, a sculpture whose creators are untouchable artistic savants and not those in the cultural tenches. 8/

So we'll read Walt Witman singing America and Langston Hughes singing America, too, when we want to show how gentile and conscientious the fight for civil rights can be through the arts, as though Hughes' optimistic and respectful strength represents a whole race or movement 9/

As though Hughes' didn't demand to know why Democracy meant everyone but him, as though poetry didn't mean so many fists in the air, as though today Danez Smith isn't wielding their poetry against police, mayors and news personalities to protect their body and identity. 10/

We need poetry to be alive in the classroom, for it to be lazily complaining of love being confusing and to be angrily demanding change and for it to be saying, as loudly as young people themselves, "NO!", "NOW!", and "NEVER!" as energetically as students themselves do 11/

And then we can blow their minds with the poetry that gave birth to storytelling. Beowulf. Homer. Inanna. And when they realize that poetry has always been sex, drugs, and rock n roll (with a side of red roses and daffodils), they'll be poets themselves, and they'll be glad. //

(This has been gnawing at me - I apologize to Blink 182. Nothing against Blink. What's My Name Again still is a bop, Adam's Song was good hurt, had some jams. Sometimes poetry is Blink 182 - just not when it is punk. Whew. Feels good to clear that up.)