“I often tell students that it's a bit
like visual art — that's a metaphor that they can relate to,” McCabe
said. “Just like you learn techniques when you're learning how to
produce a painting, [it’s the] same thing with poetry. You might start
out with an idea … but learning the craft allows them to go in and
really shape it. [Poetry] isn’t something that you get an inspiration
for and then you do it and there's your poem. It's something that you
should conserve for a while and go back to and revise, and that's where
all those craft elements come in.”
Most UD students will encounter poetry somewhere along their academic
career, regardless of their major. Ernest acknowledged that not
everyone will like all poems or all poets. Indeed, that’s something he
embraces by bringing many different styles and different kinds of poetry
to his classes. If you have enough different kinds of poems, he said,
chances are students will connect with one of them.
The benefits of learning how to read and write poetry extend to non-English majors, Ernest said.
“They are sometimes some of our most enthusiastic students because
after you've been using your brain to think about engineering or
business for a while, many of these students absolutely welcome the
opportunity to be creative and to think differently — to use their
brains differently,” Ernest said. “I think they actually end up
discovering that that helps them in unexpected ways when they go back to
engineering or business.”
Poetry can be especially useful for science-minded students, Miller-Duggan said.
“Scientists are very linear in the way they're trained. A goes to B
goes to C and you are looking for X, Y or Z outcome — it's all fairly
straightforward,” Miller-Duggan said. “The problem is that the world
doesn’t work that way. It's not a straight line. So giving them the
opportunity to function in zigzags and leaps is ultimately going to
benefit their capacity to function as scientists and to trust their
instincts.”
Morgan Wright, a senior majoring in political science and English,
took Miller-Duggan’s poetry writing class in the spring of 2022 and said
that the best part of the class was the sense of community that was
fostered. At the start of the semester, she was nervous that the
workshop-heavy class would be a judgmental space, but she found just the
opposite. Because of her incredibly positive experience in that class
and others, she plans to pursue a master’s of fine arts (MFA) in
creative writing after graduation.
Beyond teaching her the ability to write great poetry, creative
writing classes at UD gave Wright insight into working with other people
and collaborating.
“In a workshop setting, you have to learn very quickly that someone
else's success is not your failure, and this is something I had always
struggled with before,” she said. “If someone else produces something
amazing, it is easy to be jealous, but it takes a lot more self
awareness and confidence to step back and ask yourself what it is that
makes their work so great and if that is something you'd like to
challenge yourself to try to emulate with your own personal spin. I
think that learning to celebrate others while also celebrating yourself
is a message that is relevant in any workplace or field.”
McCabe said that when it comes down to it, poetry can help us to be more human and remind us of what really matters.
“The deep points that are made in poetry are really universal points,
so poetry can be a way to erase our differences and remind us that we
really are dependent on each other as a global community and even
smaller communities, just as neighbors and friends,” she said. “I think
it returns us to that kind of understanding rather than keeping us
separate. Poetry is a way to bring people together.”