Making Improvements

With school done I've decided I need to find a way to stay on the ball when it comes to my subject area (English). One of my weakest areas is poetry. I like some poetry, but it's not exactly something I'll go and just read. When I was in school and taking literature courses, poetry was frequently and prominently featured (we actually did a whole project on writing, teaching, and reading poetry in my English methods course). So this is where I got a big dose of poetry. But I am horribly underread in that area. I have a smattering of contemporary poets who I've sort of vaguely heard of and read and lots of much less contemporary poets who I am more than familiar with, but don't have an appreciation for them because I has forced to read and interpret their work like a machine crunching numbers. I haven't read poetry with any real pleasure for many, many years, and I'd like to be able to.

So here is one of my (many) summer goals: Read a poem a day. I don't know what I'll do with all this read poetry (if anything--it really just needs to something I do with no real purpose other than to enjoy it), but I feel like it will be good for me on a variety of levels. Poetry, to me, is like exercise. I don't necessarily look forward to doing it, but I'm always glad I did, plus it's good for me. This, along with reading as many books as I possibly can over the summer and along with some professional books I feel better prepared to be in my own classroom (hopefully) next fall.

I think, since I'm writing about this here, I'll at least have some sort of little blurb about what poem I'm reading each day, or maybe a favorite poem for that week? We'll see...we shall see...