Poetry is an Egg with a Horse Inside

"Our concerns as adults and as children are not so different. We want to be surprised, transformed, challenged, delighted, understood. For me, since an early age, poetry has been a place for all these things. Poetry is a rangy, uncontainable genre--it is a place for silliness and sadness, delight and despair, invention and ideas (and also, apparently, alliteration). Giving children poems that address the whole range of the world, not just the watered-down, "child appropriate" issues, makes them feel less alone. Corny as it sounds, if children find poems that express things they have themselves thought and poems that push them beyond what they have themselves imagined, they'll have a friend for life. This is the story of how I found that friend. In the first poetry workshop I ever took (my junior year in college), my professor, Henri Cole, handed out a page of quotations about poetry from luminaries such as Yeats, Eliot, and Stevens. One of them read: "Poetry is an egg with a horse inside."-- Third grader. I have no idea who or what that third grader grew up to be (I'm guessing a poet, miniature-pony breeder, astronaut, or molecular gastronomist), but I still remember the thrill I felt seeing that quote included. I don't remember the quotes by those beloved poetry stars, but decades later, I include that third grader's quote in my handouts, and it seems to surprise and delight my students as much as it did and does me." Poet Matthea Harvey shares more in this piece that urges us not to underestimate what happens at the intersection where children and the mysteries of poetry meet.

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