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Poetry and Literacy
Literacy begins in hearts, not heads. Unless written words capture early a child's imagination and sense of wonder, there will be little interest
later in reading and writing them. For the distinguished children's poet, Myra Cohn Livingston, who left a priceless legacy of poetry for children, it was poetry that kindled an interest which grew to a passion. In Books Remembered: Nurturing the Budding Writer (New
York: The Children's Book Council, 1997), she recalls her close relationship as a toddler with SingSong, a small book bound in green. In it the poet, Christina Rossetti, asks and answers in lilting language the
intriguing question, "Who has seen the wind?" This and all the abundant poetry of her childhood enchanted Livingston, held her in thrall; the love of words poetry engendered compelled her to write poetry herself.
Many notable writers have a tale to tell of an early infatuation or preoccupation with words.Eve Merriam, another children's poet leaving a rich legacy,
speaks in the same book of "the reverberating shock waves" caused by the poem, "Pied Beauty," when she discovered the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins through a favorite pastime, "lovely idle leafing through
anthologies" (63). Brendan Gill, for decades a writer of distinguished prose for The New Yorker, earned as a child a dollar a line to memorize verse. Even a sonnet net good pay in the 1920s. But a greater payoff was
Gill's ability to write acclaimed prose, unquestionably aided by the store of cadenced language he held in his head. If we are what we eat, surely our language is what we read and hear.
In well-crafted literature, poetry especially, language ideally is at its best: rhythmic, evocative, and witty. Use of metaphor and imagery brings a sense of
concreteness to language just as the rise and fall of cadences brings a sense of rhythm and timing. Verse, being closely related to dance and song, is also closely related to the kinesthetic child, ever in motion, and to the
child's speech, with its chants, war cries, taunt-songs, and rhythmic repetitions of polysyllabic words. Like the poet, the young child explains things in terms of other things, often things unlike but imaginatively the same. (Awed by the sight of varicose veins, a child asked why the sufferer's leg was all thunder and lightning.)
Two authorities, Northrop Frye, the literary theorist, and Kornei Chukofsky, the Russian poet, considered poetry to be central to a literary education. Frye and
Chukofsky insist that early experiencing of the rhythms of verse that reflect the child's own bodily rhythms teaches the basics of using language. Language, spoken or written, so rooted in personality and physicality, becomes
a genuine expression of them. Educators discovered that beginning readers had greatest success with rhythmic, repetitive language like the rhymes of Dr. Seuss. A primer in Bill Martin's Sounds of Language series (Holt 1972) contained rhythmic chants, counting songs, and jingles as first reading material.
While experts may trumpet the advantages of placing poetry front and center in programs to develop literacy, the truth is that in most classrooms it is nothing
more than a frill at the very edge of the curriculum. Listening to the occasional poem will not provide children with possession of poetry's power nor are chance encounters with poems sufficient to astonish them with all the
marvelous, magical things words can be made to do. Knowing this, I require teachers in a graduate class on poetry for children, now in its third decade at Queens College of the City University of New York, to make a concerted
effort to bring poetry and children together in the classroom over a period of several weeks.
To begin, teachers informally survey their classes to determine the children's knowledge of poetry and their attitude toward it. Knowledge is typically sparse
and attitudes, sadly, are often negative. Based on their findings from the survey, teachers design a "treatment" for the group, designed to wipe out ignorance about poetry and to change for the better attitudes toward it.
In the college class, they have been reading and sharing the works of fine children's poets, classic and contemporary, writing poetry, and discussing how to nurture an interest in words through poetry. As the teachers plan,
words like "delight," "immersion," "pleasure," and "enjoyment," guide them.
Over the many years of teaching the class and assigning this exercise, the classroom teachers and I have discovered, without exception, that planned, intensive effort to use poetry in the classroom, without abusing it in any way, even over the short span of a few weeks, has significant results in increased knowledge and changed attitudes. Abuse, among other horrors, includes: forced memorization; use of poems of little interest to young children (they enjoy most rhythmic, rhymed verse on outrageous, humorous subjects); verse vivisection; erroneous attempts to get at the "true" meaning of the poem by translating it into prose; and learning the names of poetic devices and techniques, then rummaging around in poems to find and list them. Teachers learn to trust the poetry itself to teach the joy of language; it has the words for it.
At the end of the "treatment," the survey is administered again. Left blank in the beginning, the spaces for answers now bloom with names of poets, titles
of favorite poems, and testimonials to the joyful challenge of reading, writing, and listening to poetry and verse. Once, few children thought of checking out poetry books from the library; now, most regularly leaf through
anthologies to find poems for their personal collections.
The poetry project raises consciousness about poetry, erasing indifference, negativism, fears, and lack of knowledge. Both children and teachers say so in their
own words. Asked at first "What comes to mind when you hear the word "poetry?" a fifth grader says it is "hard to write and boring to read." At the end of ten weeks of working regularly with poetry, the same child
declares that poetry "is fun to read and easy to write; you can get your words to explode on the page." Children speak of "learning a lot," of never realizing that poetry could be "so fun." Likewise, the teachers
say:
"In just a few months, my entire third grade class embraced poetry. They want to read it, listen to it, buy it through book club orders, and write it
every chance they get. Even Jorge, who swore he hated poetry, has found three poems that make him laugh as he reads them over and over to himself or to anyone who will listen."
"The poetry books in my classroom never get a rest. Every night children borrow them to take home. The books are being read during sustained silent
reading, probably because they aren't assigned and no strings of questions are attached to them. The children read poems to their reading partners. I can't wait to work like this again with poetry. Next year we'll
start September 1 and include poetry in every curriculum area all year."
These children and teachers are coming to know the power of poetry that Eve Merriam believed in absolutely as a way toward literacy: "If we can get teachers
to read poetry, lots of it, out loud to children, we'll develop a generation of poetry readers; we may even have some poetry writers, but the main thing, we'll have language appreciators" (Sloan, Glenna. 1981. Profile:
Eve Merriam. Language Arts 58, no. 8.).
Glenna Sloan teaches courses in the graduate children's literature program at Queens College of The City University of New York. She is the author of numerous articles on literacy development through literature and of the book, The Child as Critic: Teaching Literature in Elementary and Middle School (New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 1991). Forthcoming from Teachers College Press is a handbook for librarians and educators on bringing children and poetry together.
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