10 Engaging Poems for Students Who Hate Poetry

I write this knowing there are tens of thousands of poems for you to choose from when planning your poetry lessons. However, in my 16 years of teaching poetry to 9-12 grade students, I’ve identified some that are too tough, unrelatable, or just plain boring. These poems are the opposite: some that students find easily relatable and engaging for what a poem lesson should be, a discussion on who we are as people and our purpose as members of the human race. Here are my 10 poem suggestions for students who struggle with poetry.

“Baked Goods” by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

When I teach my Poetry Boot Camp to my Honors and English 10 students, one of the most engaging poems of the unit is this charming poem by Nezhukumatathil. Many students complain that literature is depressing because it is all about death, so this poem brings a breath of fresh air in its warm message about love in the midst of chaos and anger. There’s depth in the anecdote about the rats in the middle and in the contrasts between the speaker’s happy life versus the “angry voices next door.” After teaching it each year I realize that I’ve missed an opportunity to bring in muffins for the sake of the lesson, but one day I’ll remember!

“the drone” by Clint Smith

It was hard for me to select a single Clint Smith poem, in fact I highly recommend a study of his collection Counting Descent if you want a focused poem unit for a week. However, my students get the most out of “the drone.” Not only does its prose structure expose them to a new form of poetry, but the message is interesting and relevant. I also like how it uses personification, a relatively easy poetic element for students to understand, to complicate the poem, making them wonder, when does a drone become evil like a person?

“Gate A-4” by Naomi Shihab Nye

I came across this poem during the Covid shutdown of 2020. Even though it doesn’t reflect the events of the pandemic, people shared it a lot during that time as a demonstration of human goodness and our desire for connections. I love the poem’s message of crossing cultural lines as well. While it is the longest poem on this list, it is a simple narrative one, making it easy to follow. I recommend this engaging poem for an introductory lesson or in a lesson on theme.

“Forgetfulness” by Billy Collins

You can usually count on Billy Collins for a relatable, engaging poem with a nice sense of humor. I use this in my lesson on allusions and it is a nice departure from some of the heavier or highbrow poems that use the same skill. “Forgetfulness” uses a universal experience, forgetting things we once learned in school, to touch on a deeper fear, forgetting things that are important. When Collins recalls learning the Pythagorean theory or the mythological river of the underworld that he thinks starts with an L, my students join in their attempts to recall the same things. I find that the biggest roadblock with most poems is when students can’t find the universal feeling or experience in them, but in “Forgetfulness” they find it easily.

“Porphyria’s Lover” by Robert Browning

I had a put a twisted poem in here for my little morbid learners, and Poe seems to be all used up in junior high. I like “Porphyria’s Lover” because it presents a challenge for the speaker’s motives. Did he kill her because he loved her, or because of something else? There’s added depth in studying some of the symbology and allusions from the poem (did you know Porphyria is the name of a disease?), so it’s a great one to open up to your students for creative interpretations.

“Good Bones” by Maggie Smith

Another popular first day poem, “Good Bones” bluntly remarks on the bleak parts of life (“the world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate”). The repetition of “I keep this from my children” expresses the positive part of the poem, that even though we grow jaded and pessimistic as we age, we still maintain a sense of optimism for the younger generation. Warning, the poem does have a curse word in it, so you may want to save it for your upperclassmen. There’s a short film on YouTube that pairs with “Good Bones,” if you’re interested.

“I, Too” by Langston Hughes

I have never devoted much time to developing lessons for this poem, but I taught it to both my Honors and English 10 students this year. I’m not sure what I did right, but we hit a level of profound understanding in both lessons just by simply talking through the poem. We tackled the toxic anti-CRT message: that literature about racism is meant to instill guilt in white readers. “I, Too” is a wonderful comeback to that kind of perspective.

Hughes explains that even though they “send me to eat in the kitchen,” he waits and laughs. He knows that one day he will be invited to the table and see how beautiful he is, a surprisingly passive and hopeful response to such disrespect. While I don’t condone passivity in the face of racism, I do explain that poems about race do not equal poems about guilt. We end by talking about how certain people are still not invited to “the table,” what the table is and who those people are.

“The Illiterate” by William Meredith

I don’t usually use “gotcha” style poems with my students, as poetry already seems complicated enough. But I do like the layered message in “The Illiterate,” which gives us the complex emotions of an illiterate man who gets a letter. Not knowing what the letter says, and too ashamed to ask for help, he thinks of all the different messages that it could contain. Because he can’t read it, he simultaneously feels all the emotions attached to each prospective message.

Once we’ve gotten that part down, I refer students back to the first line. It reads, “Touching your goodness, I am like a man.” It turns out the speaker isn’t the illiterate man, but one in a complicated situation that reminds of this hypothetical man. I connect this man’s jumble of emotions to teenage hormones around a crush. In the moment before we act on our feelings, we consider all of the possible outcomes (rejection, love, embarrassment, etc.), and in that moment we feel all of them, just like this man with the letter.  

“Wide Receiver” by Mark Halliday

It’s hard to find upper-level literature about sports, but this one is fantastic. Halliday’s engaging poem uses the perspective of a football player downfield as he waits for a pass from the quarterback. As it progresses, you begin to see that the speaker has some bitterness for his teammate, resenting him for not passing to him at every open moment. The ending presents us with a statement of cautious bravado, “it is not impossible that I will make the catch.” I think this moment is very relatable for teenagers. They look out to the world with a “just let me try” kind of attitude, just like the speaker in this poem.

“This is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams

I’ll explain my reasoning for including this poem with a personal anecdote. I oversee a group of creative writers who spend 30-40 minutes a week working on a writing project of their own design. One of my students, a freshman, set out to write vignettes. Each week she spent 25 minutes thinking of a subject and wrote a paragraph. However, by the next week she would delete it and start over. As the year wore on I began to demand some permanence, so a fellow classmate suggested she write some poetry.

“Poetry!” she exclaimed. “No way! Poetry is so hard to understand; I’ll never be able to write one.” In response, her friend pulled up this poem and showed it to her. She explained how this short, engaging poem expressed a complex sentiment, of being sorry, but not that sorry for eating the plums. How could we blend emotions, perhaps adding a dose of humor, to make a short and memorable poem?

This opened up a door for that student; she learned that poetry doesn’t have to be comprised of riddles. She’s now exploring writing short form poems similar to Williams’. Even better, another student is responsible for opening that door of literature to her.

What would you include?

What engaging poems do you use to help students learn and love poetry? Which would you add to this list? Leave me a comment and let me know!