Introduce Your Tween or Young Teenager to Poetry with Two Great Contemporary American Poets They'll Really Love

Mention poetry to young teens and tweens, and you are likely to see eyes rolling, and very sarcastic grimaces. If the idea of poetry seems antiquated to today's young'uns, it's because they have probably been introduced to it by those who don't actually read contemporary poetry.

Books of poetry for children seem to be filled with tired old nursery rhyme level offerings. Some teen and amateur poetry they may have access to on internet forums is trite and unsophisticated. Classic poetry will probably seem archaic, boring, and irrelevant to tweens and young teens. Although these types of poetry undoubtably have their place, using them as an introduction may turn them off permanently. Happily, poetry is alive and well, and your tween will love it; you just have to know where to look.

James Tate and Russell Edson are both prize-winning American poets, highly regarded by writers, readers, and academicians. James Tate's poetry has won the Pulitzer Prize, The National Book Award, and several other prestigious poetry awards. Russell Edson received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Both have many books of poetry, several readily available off-the-shelf in bookstores like Barnes and Noble, and others still in print available by order on venues like amazon.com. Most moderate sized libraries with good poetry sections will carry at least a couple books from both of these writers. There are also several online sites that offer several selections from each.

James Tate's poetry is surreal, yet straightforward enough so it doesn't come off as pretentious. His words create concrete images that rely innately on cerebral, abstract connections--metaphors-- that tweens will easily be able to grasp. There is a huge element of the hilariously preposterous. Tate's How the Pope is Chosen from Worshipful Company of Fletchers is a masterpiece. There are cardinals vomiting up their slurpies at 7-Eleven, popes morphing inexplicably into poodles, with names like "Buffalo Bill" and "Wild Bill."

Also included in this same collection are poems in which: glow worms drive to Philosophy Department meetings, bumblebees with shaggy coats take walks on leashes, and Military Academy janitors name all the spots of the City: River of Untruth, River of Unwavering Desire, Spring of Spies. There are battleships, llamas, mudslides, insane asylums, and fishsticks. Your tween will be transfixed.

Russell Edson is the pioneering, masterful enfant terrible of the prose poem. His poems are encapsulated, miniature creepshows from the otherworld, fabulously bursting at their psychotic seams. There is a juxtapositioning of the everyday and mundane with inflated grandiosity and the bizarre, which seems to somehow capture an extremely internal narrative that is ineffably horrifying when taken out of context-a context of seemingly benign blabber of subconscious dialogue--and put into words and paper with story and meaning. Reading Edson's poetry is like getting a stamp of approval for everything you never thought you needed to articulate. There is a great sense of archetypal Happening, but you aren't quite sure what events are scheduled. Tweens will identify with the simple everyday characters and settings, which take strange and funny, sarcastic twists and turns into the Twilight Zone. For example, here is a stanza from A Historical Breakfast, "Oh my, now he's buttering toast, another piece of history is being made." The prose style of Edson's poems is easy to read and digest, and they are also nicely short.

And there's even a remnant of familiar Mother Goose-but she seems to have finally lost it. From the poem A Wounded Breakfast:

Up in the unlaced ankle-part an old woman/stands at a helm behind the great tongue curled/forward; the thick laces dragging like ships' rope/on the ground as the huge thing squeals and/grinds forward; children everywhere, they look/from the shoelace holes, they crowd about the/old woman, even as she pilots this huge shoe/over the earth . . .

If your tween is not a habitual reader, or if there are otherwise concerns about even getting a tween to open a book of poetry on their own, there are several ways to introduce it. Consider selecting one of the poems to read aloud at bedtime, and if appropriate, informally discuss the imagery and metaphors. Continue this for a few nights, then the next night, leave the book prominently displayed upon their pillow. Hopefully, once it is in their hands, they will open it and begin reading alone. Another effective method of introduction is the make a game out of it. Take 5,10, or more minutes and have a contest to see who can find the 'weirdest', 'wildest', or 'craziest' poem. Your tween's innate competitive nature will insure poems are read (or at least skimmed) and evaluated. In the process, they may find the writing is appealing, and more akin to rock lyrics than greeting cards. This contest is simple and can be done using whole bookstore or library poetry sections with multiple books, or just by using one book each. It's a fun road trip car activity, or perfect for waiting rooms.

Older tweens and young teens who are exposed to great poetry early are more likely to be open to classics later. If they have already formed positive ideas about poetry, they may actually pay attention when deconstructing Ode on a Grecian Urn in high school sophomore English lit class. By ages 11-14, most are ready to be challenged by much of the sophisticated writing of poets like James Tate, Russell Edson, and many others.