Reading a Good Poem with Care

We often tell students that poetry can change the way we see the world. I’m not sure a poem saves the world. But I do believe the person who reads a poem might be changed. And I believe that change depends, in large part, on how we are taught to read.

The poets we read in classrooms often come from anthologies, from the canon, from the long arc of literary history. Increasingly, many are also coming from Living Poets—writers whose voices circulate now, whose bodies exist now, whose words arrive in our feeds, whose readings we attend, whose inaugurations we watch, whose work shapes us not just as readers, but as listeners.

Sometimes we meet these poets. Sometimes we hear them speak. Sometimes we come to know the timbre of their voice before we know the titles of their books.

And sometimes, a poet enters our classrooms because of how her name is suddenly moving through the world.

Today, many teachers are encountering the work of Renée Nicole Macklin through a charged rhetorical moment. Her death, and the violence surrounding it, is being taken up publicly—as headline, as symbol, as evidence of policies that harm, of systems built on insiders and outsiders, of written orders enacted by organizations structured around exclusion.

As English language arts teachers, we cannot pretend this context does not exist. Nor should we. We will need to unpack it. We will need to name how media constructs narratives. We will need to talk about how poets have always been entangled with politics, how writers become activists, witnesses, public figures, whether or not they choose to be.

But before we ask a poem to carry any of that weight, we have an ethical responsibility to slow this moment down.

Before we read this poem as evidence of harm, we must read it first as what it is:
a crafted piece of art made by a human being.

Not a symbol.
Not a headline.
A poet.

This is where the classroom work begins.

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Entering the Poem: Human Before Symbol

When I bring this poem into a classroom, I want to situate the reading carefully.

I might say something like this to students:

The poets we read in school often come from anthologies, from the canon, from history books. Increasingly, many also come from Living Poets—people who are writing now, shaping language now, breathing now. We sometimes meet them, hear them, watch them speak. We come to know their voices.

Today we are reading a poem by a poet who is being spoken about publicly because of her death. Her name is circulating as symbol, as headline, as evidence of harm.

Before we let this poem do any of that work, we are going to read it first as what it is: a crafted piece of art made by a human being.

This is not a disclaimer. It is a stance.

We are reading this poem not because a tragedy has made this poet visible, but because she was a poet before she was a headline.

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First Reading: Presence Before Interpretation

The first reading is not for analysis.

I ask students not to annotate, not to summarize, not to explain.

Instead, I invite them to read for presence.

Let the poem call things to mind.
Notice what moves, startles, confuses, or feels beautiful.

After the reading, we talk in ways that keep us close to the human encounter:

• Which lines feel alive?
• Which words or sounds stay with you?
• Where did you slow down?
• Where did your body react before your mind did?

I share a line that feels golden to me. Not to model correctness, but to model being moved.

This is where students are allowed to respond as readers, not as interpreters.

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Second Reading: Attending to Craft

Only after the poem has been encountered do we turn our attention to how it was made.

Here the questions shift:

• What did the poet choose?
• What did she shape?
• What did she resist?

We notice:

• every line break
• every indentation
• every lowercase letter resisting an auto-capitalizing machine
• the visual pacing of the page
• the way scientific language sits beside the language of faith and the language of the body

I sometimes invite students to imagine the poem before it was published:

Maybe it was sketched in a notebook.
Maybe it was revised over years.
Maybe it was rearranged, broken, stitched back together.
Maybe even this version bears the marks of other hands, other platforms, other formatting decisions.

This matters because it returns the poem to labor, care, and intention.

This poem was made by a human. With hands. With breath. With revision.

We read it as art before we read it as argument.

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Third Reading: Meaning, Tension, Living With the Poem

Only now do we open the space many classrooms begin with.

We trace images.
We sit with tensions.
We read literally and figuratively.
We ask how the poem lives for us now, in this moment, in this place, in our bodies.

We talk about science and faith.
About knowledge and comfort.
About reduction and wonder.
About where the poem locates the soul.

Interpretation enters, but it is grounded in attention, not extraction.

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Writing as Processing, Not Performance

After reading, students are given time to write—not to prove understanding, but to process being a reader in this moment.

I offer possibilities, not requirements:

• a golden shovel poem from a line that feels alive
• a letter to the poem or the poet
• a small, private poem of their own
• a paragraph that begins with “This line keeps echoing…”

I am explicit that this writing can remain private.

This is not an assessment.
It is a place to put what the poem stirred.

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Only Then: Widening the Lens

Only after the poem has been honored do we widen outward.

We can talk about poets and power.
About poets and public life.
About poets whose work becomes politicized.
About what happens when a life is overtaken by the story told about a death.

We can talk about how reading can become a form of repair rather than consumption.

And we can talk about the systems that make some deaths visible and leave so many others unnamed.

Because even as we witness this poet, we must also remember the countless people who have been victims of this violence who were not award-winning poets, not in anthologies, not circulating in the media.

We can ask students to wonder:

Whose stories are missing?
What poems were never published?
What lines were never heard?
What lives deserve witnessing, too?

We can invite them to find those stories.
To imagine those poems.
To practice remembrance.

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A Necessary Ending

This work is unfolding.

There is more to learn.
More context to understand.
More history to unpack.
More responsibility to carry.

We will need to be responsive as teachers. We will need to keep listening, revising, paying attention.

But right now, this moment in the classroom is for the poet.

For the witnessing of a person.
For honoring a craft.
For reading with care.

Because before a poem becomes a symbol, it is an offering.

And before we ask what a poem can do for the world, we must first ask how we are being taught to be with it.

Even this is insufficient. But it is a beginning.

A quick way to understand what this poem is doing (for teachers)

At its heart, this poem is about what happens when scientific learning starts to rearrange the way a person understands life, faith, and even their own body. The speaker moves from comfort and sensory memory into the world of biology—textbooks, terms, dissection—and notices how that knowledge doesn’t just add information, it changes where meaning lives.

The poem keeps placing very different worlds next to each other: insects and metrics, Bibles and biology, IHOP and the soul, organs and wonder. That’s not random. It’s showing how a life is made of overlapping systems of knowing, and how sometimes one system (science, naming, cutting, studying) can start to crowd out another (faith, mystery, comfort).

Form really matters here. The spacing, the indents, the fragments, the lowercase, the lists of terms—they mimic study, memory, and inner speech. The poem doesn’t move in a straight line because thinking and becoming don’t.

The ending doesn’t resolve anything. It lands in reduction: life described as ovum, sperm, frequency, and death. That flatness is the point. The poem lets us feel what is gained by knowledge—and what might be lost.

If you’re listening for craft, listen for:
how sound shifts from musical to clinical,
how the body becomes a landscape for meaning,
how the page visually holds thought,
and how the poem refuses to comfort us at the end.

That’s the emotional and artistic engine underneath what students will notice.