5/10/2023 0 Comments Bull by david elliott![]() ![]() ![]() The end words of lines one and two set the rhyme scheme.The first and second lines form an unrhymed couplet.And when we do, we get closer to all the human beings with whom we share the planet. Of course, we can’t duplicate the experience of grief, or love, or jealousy, or rage, or astonishment, or confusion or any of it through metaphors, and syntax, and line breaks. I think that’s an excellent definition of a poem. Carl Jung once defined a symbol as the best representation of that which cannot be represented. I can’t think of any better way to give our young women and men these skills than to sustain them with poetry. But if we’re going to get anywhere in this weary world we need engineers who can feel, doctors who can empathize with their patients, astronomers who can communicate the wonders of the universe to the rest of us, and mathematicians and coders who are firmly grounded in notions of what it means to be human. Yes, of course, we need great engineers, great doctors, great astronomers and mathematicians and coders. There are so, so many reasons to get poetry into the ears and mouths and hearts of our younger citizens. If we’re not very careful, teaching it is like refusing to give a starving kid dinner until she can recite every ingredient that went into its preparation. Bringing poetry to young people is an act of love. Well, this is like asking why it’s important to bring math into the classroom, right? And I love that the question refers to bringing poetry into the classroom, rather than teaching it. ![]()
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