Nick Ripatrazone on #TeachLivingPoets

At Literary Hub, Nick Ripatrazone considers the evolution of poetry in high school classrooms, from the fruition of programs like "Poets in Schools" to the more contemporary initiative spearheaded by Melissa Smith called #TeachLivingPoets. Starting things off, Ripatrazone notes that "before he died in 1963, Robert Frost told Marie Bullock, founder and president of the Academy of American Poets, that not merely poetry, but poets belonged in schools." More: 

...She started the “Poets in the Schools” program in 1966, sending poets like Donald Hall—by then the former poetry editor of The Paris Review—into public schools. “Poets are used to reading to college students,” Hall told Life magazine. When he visited Amelia Earhart Junior High School in Detroit, he was surrounded by eager students who asked him to recite poems in the hallway. At nearby Hutchins Junior High School, kids chanted repeating stanzas along with him.

“Poetry has a huge potential audience in this country,” Hall said. “The young are ready: they lack only the teachers and poets and boards of education to bring it to them.” Fifteen years of teaching high school English has shown me that Hall is right. Teenagers are our most buoyant selves; they are also skeptical, curious, stubborn, selfish, selfless. Storytelling—on their own terms, in their own language—is a huge part of their lives. Poetry could reach them.

Read more at Literary Hub.