I feel that poetry should be read and listened to and be almost a communal thing, rather than just read on the page. Though I have some reservations about poetry slams, but I have to admit I don’t know that much about them and a few that I’ve witnessed, I’ve liked parts of them very much. And it just seems that I’m not the only one. There are a lot of people out there now and really talking up poetry.
And I’ve known from the time I was a kid and then from the time that I had kids myself and went into the schools I have no doubt that children love poetry. They love language. They love word play. They have a good time and it just takes someone who really is enthusiastic and kind of knows her stuff a little bit to get them. Audience participation is the sine qua non. You just can’t go into a school or an audience and just stand there and read the way you would at an adult poetry event; you’ve got to get the kids to participate from the get-go.
And it can get a little raucous sometimes, but that’s just fine. And they all have ideas and they all want to share. And I’m always very curious and when I hear and get feedback about what a visit of mine has meant, it’s often very, very encouraging because the teacher feels more empowered and the children are excited. And poetry is fun and you can go from fun and light verse and word play and you can segue very nicely into far more serious ideas and use of words and you bring the children with you.
I find no difficulty in talking to kids about serious ideas and using adult poems sometimes that are proper for them. And I believe that it’s now one of the things that I’m saying with all the cutbacks in the arts and everything — no art supplies, no instruments — the art of poetry is free. It’s absolutely free. It probably should be liberated to a certain extent from language arts and put into the arts where you can do it as choral reading, as back and forth reading, use it with plays, with drama. So there is just an infinite number of ways that you can use language.