Poetry is. . .

Well, according to Carl Sandburg, "Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits." Although I find this quite amusing, unfortunately the statement was rather lost on my 8th graders.

We are starting our unit on poetry this week, which I'm sure that I'm much more excited about than my students. Thankfully, I do have a few exceptional students (the kind that I wish I could clone and have an entire class of when teaching things like poetry at a middle school level).

I must say it is a challenge for me to introduce Donne, Herbert, Milton, Frost, Dickinson and others when the only poets my students know are Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein. I guess I'll have to find a way to "synthesize hyacinths and biscuits."

While preparing for this study, I found the following poem at this excellent website.
The title of the poem is "Poetry" by Marianne Moore.

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond


    all this fiddle.


 Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one


    discovers in


 it after all, a place for the genuine.


    Hands that can grasp, eyes


    that can dilate, hair that can rise


       if it must, these things are important not because a




high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because


    they are


 useful. When they become so derivative as to become


    unintelligible,


 the same thing may be said for all of us, that we


    do not admire what


    we cannot understand: the bat


       holding on upside down or in quest of something to




eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless


    wolf under


 a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse


    that feels a flea, the base-


 ball fan, the statistician--


    nor is it valid


       to discriminate against "business documents and




school-books"; all these phenomena are important. One must make


    a distinction


 however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the


    result is not poetry,


 nor till the poets among us can be


   "literalists of


    the imagination"--above


       insolence and triviality and can present




for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them,"


    shall we have


 it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,


 the raw material of poetry in


    all its rawness and


    that which is on the other hand


       genuine, you are interested in poetry.

From The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore. Copyright © 1961 Marianne Moore, © renewed 1989 by Lawrence E. Brinn and Louise Crane, executors of the Estate of Marianne Moore.