Open the door How to excite young people about poetry

*Starred Review* The classroom is not the only, nor the best, venue for encouraging children and young adults to revel in reading and writing poetry. McSweeney's and the Poetry Foundation have teamed up to create this unique and inspiring collection of essays, a roundtable discussion with 18 leaders of literary organizations (including Dave Eggers of 826 and Mimi Herman of Poetry Out Loud), and smart and lively lesson plans for poets, educators, librarians, and other enthusiasts who are thinking about or embarking on creating community, excitement, joy, and learning around poetry for younger audiences. As poet Kenneth Koch (1925-2002), this collection's guiding light, discovered, Children have a natural talent for writing poetry, so the instructor's task is to help them get tuned into their own strong feelings, to their spontaneity, their sensitivity, and their carefree inventiveness. All these factors are addressed and cultivated in the energetically instructive and imaginative techniques and wisdom shared by 40 teaching poets, including Yusef Komunyakaa, Eileen Myles, Theodore Roethke, and Jimmy Santiago Baca. When asked about the benefits of teaching poetry to children, one roundtable participant, Megan McNamer, responded, Children have a chance to flourish spiritually, socially, and intellectually. Teaching poetry is one important way to help children become human beings who are fully awake to the world. --Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

Editors Lasky, Luxford, and Nathan, in collecting essays, roundtable discussions with practitioners, and sample lesson plans, have assembled an invaluable resource not only for teaching poetry to young people, but for exciting them about the art form and language in general. As many of the contributors are quick to point out, traditional approaches, in which canonical poems are to be decoded and interpreted in certain, specific ways, tend to disenfranchise younger students and, as educator and author Jim Trelease puts it, "poetry dies for most people on graduation day." In the face of such tendencies, organizations such as Teachers & Writers Collaborative and Youth Speaks focus on engaging students by bringing active poets and writers into schools, and organizing opportunities for children to perform and publish their own work. In so doing, poetry becomes a living, vital form of expression, and, according to Jeff Kass (literary arts director at the Ann Arbor Teen Center), it becomes "one of the few places that people, especially young people, tell the truth about their lives." The benefits of such efforts go far beyond arts education; when children "understand that their voices matter, they understand that they matter." (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.