Poetry is Home by Crystal Kelley

Writing poetry is home, and ever since I can remember, an extension of my being. Poetry saved me as an adolescent; serving as an outlet for emotion and creativity. And yet, poetry continues to feed the artist in me,  I don’t feel right if I am not writing. It is a way to wrestle with questions we have about life without having to come up with one answer.

This is a huge gift as a teacher of young writers and I understand that not all find a love with poetry--or even a like. I ask them what they know, what their experiences have been with regards to poetry.  We talk about how not everyone loves it, how some wish to run in the opposite direction, screaming. Students also share poems they love.

My approach is full of play and I ask students to promise to remain open to possibilities. We play with language, sounds, words, sketches--in our writer’s notebooks. We take sacred time with the page: every day. We write beside poems, using them as mentor texts--and enjoy them for what they are. Immersion in poetry and exposure to poets that walked before us, and those who are voicing now is important.  Pat Mora, Emily Dickinson, e.e. cummings, Denise Frohman, Emmy Perez, Juan Felipe Herrera, William Stafford, and Naomi Shihab Nye--to name a few.

One way we enter poetry is through words. Choose a set of words: randomly from the book you’re reading, the dictionary, or a list we all pick. Choose.  Then, see what happens.  Ask questions about the words, check out their history, layers of meaning, and sound and placement on the page. Make sure to share with our writing response groups--get feedback and let the creativity go from there.  This community of writers is crucial. We celebrate the pieces that inspire us and more often than not, most that wished to scream earlier, are with their pencils focused on the page as the bell rings for class to end.


Crystal Kelley is originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico, has taught there, in Syracuse, New York, and now in San Marcos, Texas.  She currently learns alongside her 9th and 10th grade English and AVID students.  She is a teacher consultant with the Central Texas Writing Project at Texas State University, an affiliate of the National Writing Project.  In 2016, she was named Region 13’s Secondary Teacher of the Year. When Crystal is not doing teacherly things, she is playing outdoors with her three kids, squeezing in time to write, and cooking with her husband. Find Crystal @cryskelley9 on Twitter and student writing at www.mrskelley9.edublogs.org.