The final chapter of Teaching with Heart has many examples of how educators use poetry in the classroom, with their colleagues and out in the world.  Below is the introduction to the chapter, for the full chapter, see Using Poetry for Reflection and Conversation.

When President Barack Obama visited South Africa in the summer of 2013, he visited Robbins Island prison, where Nelson Mandela was incarcerated for twenty-seven years. The president brought his daughters to the cell where Mandela was imprisoned. “Seeing them stand within the walls that once surrounded Nelson Mandela, I knew this was an experience they would never forget,” Obama said.[1]

At a dinner with South African president Jacob Zuma, Obama then recited the poem “Invictus” that Mandela read to the other Robben Island prisoners to sustain their courage and give them the fortitude to withstand the horrific and unjust conditions of their captivity. “It matters not how strait the gate, / How charged with punishments the scroll,” Obama read. “I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul.”

Obama’s recognition of the power of this poem in Mandela’s life speaks to poetry’s capacity to touch the human soul and open up opportunities for us to retain our humanity. For Mandela and his fellow prisoners, the words of “Invictus” joined them together amid their punishing isolation and served as a talisman against hopelessness and despair.

Poetry, as Edward Hirsch wrote, “sacramentalizes experience.”[2] It is in some way odd that mere words can have such an enduring impact, because unto itself, poetry exists as scratches on a page, spoken words, or pixels on a screen. The structure of this book illumines a potent alchemic exchange that occurs in the relationship between a poem and a reader. The commentaries highlight how, as the noted literary theorist Lois Rosenblatt contended, “A poem or a play remains merely ink spots on paper until a reader transforms them into a set of meaningful symbols.”[3] The companion essays represent how teachers experience that encounter. Hirsch wrote of this meeting of reader and poem by quoting the great French poet Paul Celan, who said, “A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the—not always greatly hopeful—belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense, too, are under way: they are making toward something.”[4] This “something” results in a response of tension, insight, emotion, and sensation. It stirs us. As Hirsch concluded, “Imagine you have gone down to the shore and there, amidst the other debris—the seaweed and rotten wood, the crushed cans and dead fish—you find an unlikely looking bottle from the past. You bring it home and discover a message inside.”[5]

This section describes those moments of uncorking the bottle. It describes in practical, pragmatic, and procedural ways how to find your way to the “shore” with more frequency and structure. It shares the ideas, habits, and approaches to poetry suggested by educators. It is important to note that we focus not on the pedagogy of bringing poetry to students—that is beyond the scope of this book—but on how teachers use poetry in their own lives and in the practice of being a teacher.

[1] M. Shear, “Obama Visits Prison Cell That Helped Shape Modern South Africa,” New York Times, June 30, 2013.

[2] E. Hirsch, Poet’s Choice (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006), xv.

[3] L. M. Rosenblatt, Literature as Exploration (1938; repr., New York: Modern Language Association, 1938), 23.

[4] Quoted in E. Hirsch, How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry (Boston: Houghton MifflinHarcourt, 1999), 13.

[5] Hirsch, How to Read a Poem, 1.