(For my cousin: a promise tardily fulfilled.)

I grew up reading and reading and reading. I loved the moments in English classes when we cracked open a poem, and all the intentions and feelings became apparent to us all. More, I miss hearing my classmates read poems— maybe there was snickering, there were definitely stumbles, but now I rarely hear poetry recited so ubiquitously. As a child, it would be a bad Tuesday morning, and you could hear that someone else maybe already went through this, said in a cracking voice you know well.

But, it wasn’t until I started AP English that analysing a poem became more of a skill. A great poem is understandable and moving in a passing read, but there is nothing like a good poem, one that only makes sense after a layer has been pulled away, a historical fact stumbled across, or read in the appropriate accent.

I took the class for the last three years of high school, taught by two fantastic women. They were also excited, I think, to be able to speak about poetry on a deeper level with students. It’s difficult to unpack Sylvia Plath in a class of 25 somewhat bored teenagers, but I think it must be enlivening to watch Plath’s rage move the five students in front of you.

So, from then, I could enjoy reading poetry a little more, because I knew how to read it. I loved writing verse before then, but I grew to respect the form and medium I had been handed. All this is to say that poetry is one of the loveliest things we’ve created together, and I wanted to share some poetry that I have enjoyed, I’ve quoted to death, and even one I read when I was fourteen, memorised, and have not found since.

Loving Rage

• Koleka Putuma — my countrymate poet
  • In Debt
  • Inheritance
  • Interview
• W.H. Auden — saddest guy I ever read sees love everywhere
  • As I Walked Out One Evening
  • The More Loving One
  • Funeral Blues

Freeing Verse

• Allen Ginsberg — leader of an artistic movement, who felt a lot
  • Kraj Majales (King of May)
  • A Supermarket in California
• Walt Whitman — the “you” in many poems, I believe
  • To You
  • Trickle Drops

Poetry is anywhere

• i hate when i can’t even write a poem about something because it’s too obvious — tumblr user @canthaveshitingotham-crucified and following reblogs.

Poetry for Speaking

• Maya Angelou — the wonderfullest of treasures
  • Still I Rise
• Poem I pinned up in my teenage bedroom:
  

  The stars caught
  between the branches
  of the apple tree
  remind me there are
  things in life
  worth waiting for.

  • The extent to which there is not record of any poem similar to this, I am half-convinced I have re-written it in my memories.

I stand the shoulders of giants

• My Friend, My Love
  • A poem so filled with love and longing I felt like Auden doing an inaccurate Whitman.
• In the Beginning
  • Putuma showed me I can say whatever I want to.