FALL 2023 Missouri Reader November 2023 | Page 22

The Missouri Reader

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• Is a peer reviewed professional journal

• Has been publishing for over 40 years

• Has articles on the latest literacy issues

Want to submit an article? See the last page for details about submissions. We especially welcome joint articles by teachers & professors collaborating on literacy projects. We try publish articles that will help teachers with their everyday teaching. We want to help you become that teacher we all wish we had had when we were in school.

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By David L. Harrison

Little kids don’t know a poem is a poem. Their brains are busy tracking clues about their rapidly expanding young universe. Most of the words they know wear work clothes that take care of daily needs. But sometimes those same words dress up and arranged just so spin pictures in children’s minds that transport them beyond the room where they sit, spark imagination, and leave them hungry for more. Do you remember the first book you ever read? All by yourself? That was a magic moment that helped make possible the way the rest of your life turned out. I wrote a poem about my own memory of that occasion. It was in my first book of poetry (Somebody Catch My Homework, Wordsong, 1993) and is sandblasted into the sidewalk of the Burton Barr Library in Phoenix.

My Book

I did it!

I did it!

Come and look

At what I’ve done!

I read a book!

When someone wrote it

Long ago

For me to read,

How did he know

That this was the book

I’d take from the shelf

And lie on the floor

And read by myself?

I really read it!

Just like that!

Word by word,

From first to last!

I’m sleeping with

This book in bed,

This first FIRST book

I’ve ever read!

Eventually we all grow up, get jobs, start families. Sports pages, market trends, and recipes replace picture books. But poetry is still with us, enriching our lives in songs, plays, readings, and thousands of books. Cats, the musical inspired by T.S. Eliot’s poetry, ran 18 years on Broadway and was seen by 73 million people worldwide. A 2022 survey by National Endowment for the Arts shows that 22.4 million adults in America read poetry in the last year.

Reading choices are endless both in print and electronically. Some poets write for adults, some for young people, and some for both. I don’t read all poets any more than I sample all wines, and what I like you might not. To choose a book of poems that fits you, especially if it has been a while since you’ve read much poetry, visit a library or book store, test-read a few poems, then take home a book you like. Settle into a good chair and share a human connection with a poet, somewhere in his or her own chair, who dreamed and wrote it down.

 

If you have school-age kids or grandkids, don’t forget them because they, too, have personal tastes about what kinds of poems they like best. Surveys have shown that in general kids like poems with short lines, poems that rhyme, and poems that make them laugh. Thousands of new titles are published each year so there’s going to be something for every need and taste.

 

I’m Missouri’s Poet Laureate (July 2023 – June 2025) and I hope to see many of you in person and electronically as I suggest and demonstrate ways to enjoy poetry. Website:  http://davidlharrison.com; blog: http://davidlharrison.wordpress.com; Facebook: (https://www.facebook.com/david.l.harrison.37 ). Contact at [email protected]

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The Poetry in Our Lives

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by David Harrison

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