Guest Post: How poetry made me feel smart

On the second day of NPM, our first guest post! Although many people might say poetry makes them feel anything but smart, this hilarious essay by my dear friend Corrie shows how poetry can be a place of solace. After six years of being an awesome high school teacher, Corrie now works as a private tutor to her beautiful baby boy. Enjoy!


I remember an oversized Mother Goose’s Nursery Rhymes on our bookshelf in the basement. In my best teacher voice I would recite “Little Miss Muffet Sat on a Tuffet” to all my imaginary students. It was a very good thing that the little poems rhymed and that I had memorized the illustrations because being 4 or 5 I couldn’t properly read yet. These facts were ignored by my parents who claimed to friends and family members that I could already “read as good as any grown up.” I also loved Dr. Seuss and Shel Sliverstein --who taught me that if you write poetry, you can be a man with a very odd name. I remember the weight of Where the Sidewalk Ends hunkering me down as I lumbered off the school bus.

In middle-school I had several brief love affairs with boys who wrote me sonnets and odes. Of course none of us knew what either of these poetry titles meant. But they sounded classy right? Your odds of getting to first base were particularly good if you composed a sonnet entitled “Ode to Corrie.” Also, if you could rhyme anything with Corrie besides “hunkie dorie” you might get to hold my hand.

In the dark days of high school, I tried to counterweight my cheerleading uniform with copies of Longfellow and Dickinson. After Friday’s game of chanting “Hit ‘em again, Hit ‘em again, Harder, Har, DER!” to my quarterback boyfriend, I appeased the part of my brain that called me a stereotyped airhead by staying up late and memorizing “The Day is Done” or Poe’s “Annabel Lee.” I then told myself that I was really moving up in the world by dumping the quarterback for a soulful dreamer I met on the beach, doing what? You guessed it, writing his own poetry.

In college I had Maya Angelou’s “Phenomenal Woman” taped to my dorm room door. Between classes I would sit on walls or on patches of grass smoking and writing in journals—sometimes poems, sometimes pieces of nothing that someone maybe somewhere might call poetry. Both the smoking and the writing and Maya Angelou’s poem taped to my dorm room door made me feel capable of getting through four years without my family. I was mature. I was smart. I read and wrote poetry, had gotten into Carolina and was taking classes where they asked me to read very old guy’s work –Keats, Shelley, Shakespeare. I found out that as long as I raised my hand to answer some open ended question thereby breaking the horrific silence in the room, the professor gratefully agreed with me.

My total and complete failure of attempts to teach poetry to high school students somehow continued to make me feel smart. I could see them thinking I knew what e.e cummings’ “1(a…(a leaf falls on loneliness” was about, and they were pissed that I wouldn’t just tell them. They really wanted things to rhyme. I abandoned all hope of ever teaching Elliot while reading Gatsby. I found the titillation of Burn’s titled poem in Catcher in the Rye always got good reviews.

The first time I sang “Row row row your boat, gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream” to my nine month old, he squealed like a pig and looked up at me with eyes that said “Awesome!” And I felt, brilliant.