Justin McGee

Poetry used to be central to education, and people loved it because it was taught terribly. Kids memorized poems and chanted verses out loud. The words were alive: something to be experienced, performed, felt in the marrow of your bones. Then came the 1920s, when a group of brilliant Southern thinkers called the New Critics emerged and cracked the code on how poetry worked. They showed the world how to analyze a poem, and in the process, they killed the common man's love for poetry. Strangely, for the first time ever, poetry was taught correctly, but that correctness sucked the life out of it. Poems turned into silent, lifeless puzzles lying flat on a page. People stopped loving poetry because they stopped experiencing poetry. Teaching poetry, at its best, is simple: first you experience it, then you perform it, then you memorize it. Analysis comes last. It’s secondary. Think of pop music. You don't fall in love with songs by analyzing the chord structures. You fall in love with them by experiencing them. You don't start with the analysis. You start by tapping your feet, singing along, feeling the music in your body. Poetry works the same way.