The Seduction of Poetry—Angela Alaimo O'Donnell

by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell

Every Fall Semester, after three months of teaching my university students in my literature courses, discussing great books with them, listening to their responses, gaining their trust, I invite them to write poetry.

Not just any kind of poetry. I ask them to write a sonnet.

And not just one sonnet. I ask them to write fourteen.

Most of these students have never written a single line of verse. Most have never had a burning desire to read poetry, let alone write it.

They are majoring in Computer Science, Biology, Journalism, Business—practical disciplines designed to get them a job in a field that has nothing to do with poetry.

They greet my invitation the same way students have greeted it for the 20 years I have been extending it. First, surprise: “What a ridiculous idea this is!” Then, denial: “Nope. I can’t write poetry. I don’t even like poetry!” Then, interest: “Why are you inviting me to do this?” Then, submission: “I dunno. Sounds crazy. Maybe I’ll try it.” Finally, after they have, beyond all expectations, penned their first sonnet, wonder: “I have written a poem for the first time in my life. I am proud of it. It says something important that I could not say any other way. I want to write another one.”

I call this process a “seduction” with some trepidation, lest I be misunderstood. These young poets-in-the-making are most definitely being seduced, but not by me, their teacher. I am an innocent bystander, watching while they are being seduced by poetry.

Falling in Love

Better than any rom-com movie is watching your students fall in love with language. From the first day of discussing the sonnet structure—the elegance of the two-part Petrarchan sonnet, the cleverness of the four-part Shakespearean innovation created to accommodate the Italian sonnet to our rhyme-poor English language—of remarking on the nearly natural fall of the English language into iambs, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed—of listening to the pleasures of alliteration, assonance, and consonance—of marveling at the tautness of the sonnet, which gives you exactly 140 syllables in which to say something meaningful, not a syllable more nor less—of acknowledging the power of this little linguistic engine that takes you to a place in the process of writing it that you never expected to go—they slowly become smitten as they are initiated into the mysteries that many poets before them have known. It is the mystery of attention (which, according to Simone Weil, is a form of prayer), the mystery of craft, the mystery of formal verse that enables us to discover a voice within ourselves, a register of speaking, that we didn’t know we had.