Like? Poetry?! Are you Nuts?!

Anyone of my friends that knows I am taking a poetry class believes me to be insane. Some comments that I have gotten include: "A full year of reading fluffy bunny stuff that you can't understand?", "Good luck with that! Let me know how it turns out for you" and "Was that the only class left with space in it?" My personal favourite would have to be: "You're going to be writing poetry of your own, right? Please don't use me and our relationship as inspiration." Thanks guys...I love you too =p

In lieu of being called nuts twice in the same month by my friends, I didn't actually ask if they liked poetry. I'm thinking that the above comments speak for themselves. The people most cherished to me are not fans of the poem. Not a problem most people aren't!

There are only a few key words and phrases that instill the fear of god into the hearts people. Some would be: hell, I Love You, death, Will you Marry Me, cancer, or You're pregnant. Unfortunately none of those are the topic for the class but another words that makes people quake in their boots is: POETRY! To me this is an incomprehensible fear. What is there to fear of carefully selected words, that have been deliberately arranged on a page to invoke buried emotions?! Apparently there is a lot to fear...this observation has been augmented by reading through other people's blogs about the same topic.

In my opinion, it's all in how poems are initially presented to people. Often in an academic setting people were kept in strict confines with their poetry choices. Made to write sonnets, or even worse hikuis(spelling?) at the whims of their teachers. That's no fun =( Conversely I must have ended up with the small handful of teachers that made poems fun to learn and enjoyable to write. We did some seriously cool shit with poems in my schools! Such as:

• in groups, each person would have their own piece of paper and write down one line of poetry. We would then pass the paper to the person beside us to write another line. This would continue until all group members had written down something.
• on 20 different small pieces of paper, each student was to write down words (verbs, nouns, adjectives) to be placed into a large bin. We would then reach our hand into the bin and pull out 10 words. From those words we were expected to write a specified type of poem
• from an assigned sonnet, we were to rearrange the words of the poem to create our own. We had to use ALL of the words, including the title to create another poem. (I may still have that saved somewhere if anyone is interested in seeing it)

Does anyone else have a similar experience with poetry that was positive? Like a fun filled activity that a teacher made you do? Please share...I'm an aspiring teacher and would love to learn different teaching techniques.

sv