Data-Driven Fiction
The Best Way To Get Started With Poetry
The Power of Poetry
I never expected that my selfless, hands-on approach to poetry research would result in a handsome reward. Nevertheless, I have found a niche market for my efforts and received a small but respectable income.
Just the other day, I had an agonizingly long afternoon spent analyzing more than 4 years of data on 849 students from grades ten through twelve of the University of Washington’s Honors English Language Arts program. It got me thinking about the next steps for my research and what would be exciting to try out in future projects. In particular, I am interested in investigating how poems develop their artistic properties over time and how we might use this knowledge with younger poets to help them become better writers — sooner rather than later.
As a high school Poetry teacher, I have observed it is not uncommon for the creative process to take a little over a year to develop. As students read and write, their capacity for expression waxes and wanes as they tease apart the difficulties of rhyme and rhythm from those of cadence and meter. At first, their poems are scrappy experimental fumblings that feel as though they will never amount to anything substantial. Later, their work takes on a decided finesse and clarity that begins to look like art.
I’m not the first person to take note of the slow artistic development of young poets. In 1968, Nancy Mairs took a series of quantitative approaches to study children’s poetry and noticed evidence for “a developmental curve in writing poems” from ages four through fifteen. She concluded that “the process of normal growth seems to be taking place in this area of development” where “poems are not only learning how to be good but also learning to become good.” Whether or not younger poets are genuinely developing into better writers or merely indolent misfits, it seems vital that we understand the process they go through.
Mairs controlled for demographics, grades, and writing ability. My goal is to do the same for school, region, and gender. I am also going to account for a range of variables that Mairs left out of her studies. It will be interesting to see if her results hold up over time.
Where do kids get the time to read? What makes them interested in poetry? How do they learn about writing? These are just a few of the questions I plan to investigate. As you might guess, I am submitting this paper to the American Educational Research Association for consideration for their journal’s annual conference in June. Still, I will also be presenting it at the National Poetry Conference in April.
As always, I thank you most sincerely for your time and consideration.
Sincerely,
Augmented Poet
If you are interested in reviewing your poem, please tag it The Power of Poetry
The article is part of the Data-Driven Fiction project; the data used was generated for the article’s purpose. Therefore, the story is fiction and is not related to actual facts and real persons.
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