Poetry Madness at SAHS Crowns a Winning Verse

April is National Poetry Month, and teacher Rachel Parent’s Advanced Placement (AP) Literature and Composition class at the Saline Area High School (SAHS) makes celebrating poetry especially exciting.

Poetry Bracketology

Fashioned after March Madness basketball, Parent explains the method of the madness of poet bracketology: “Brackets start out with 32 poems and each face off includes one contemporary versus one classic poem.” In all, 83 students weighed in on their favorites.

In the first two rounds of elimination students wrote stump speeches, created poetry propaganda posters, and wrote essays to garner votes for their favorite poem. When it came down to the last two finalists, students had formal debates to choose the victorious verse.

Along the way several elimination rounds were hotly contested, with flames noting those matchups on the bracket. One close vote between Michael Kleber-Diggs’ “Coniferous Fathers” and Ilya Kaminsky’s “Psalm for the Slightly Tilted” had only 3 votes separating them. According to Parent, that debate “spanned several days last week, and students are still talking about it!”

Vs Traditional Lessons

Describing how this exercise works versus traditional lecture-style poetry lessons, Parent says, “This format encourages students to take a stand on what counts as good poetry. They actively engage with the poems in multiple ways, all while defending their choices based on the literary elements learned in class. Our sessions are much more engaging as opposed to having them listen to me talk for an hour about a poem’s merits.”

Kindnesses vs Maternal Sacrifice

In the end, it came down to the two last poems “Small Kindnesses” by Danusha Laméris and “The Raincoat” by Ada Limón.

Student Avery Dixon describes “Small Kindnesses” by saying the poem reframes polite gestures “like saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ as humans naturally wanting to connect with others.” By contrast, Parent describes “The Raincoat” as “a poem about maternal sacrifice and a child’s recognition of that sacrifice years later.”

Student Henry Lizotte reflects on both poems by saying “Readers evaluate poetry based on their ability to relate to the depicted emotions. Initially, I planned on voting for ‘Small Kindnesses’ because I could relate to the poem’s warm view of humanity and I couldn’t relate to the emotional self-reflection depicted in ‘The Raincoat.’”

And the Winner is…

After a lot of campaigning and grueling debate, “The Raincoat” was chosen as the literary winner.

Student Chloe Swantek expresses the universal appeal of the winning poem by saying, “The multifacetedness of sacrifice and devotion, even when that time spent is bitterly painful, is the most profound and genuinely universal experience in existence.”

From words of kindness, to sacrifice and devotion, each poem is a winner as they inspire and motivate. And in this celebration of National Poetry Month, the students are the real winners.