While literature is a backbone of high school curriculum, poetry might get short shrift.

Not in Tiffany Wolf’s classroom. The longtime Cheyenne Mountain Junior High School teacher likes to stuff a poetry unit into her eighth-grade honors English class during the spring semester. She teaches kids how to interpret and analyze a poem and then lets them loose to write their own poetry anthologies.

“It’s important to communicate their feelings on a more intimate level,” Wolf said. “There’s not much poetry in our social media world. We’re losing a lot of that beauty and authenticity and appreciation of the spoken language and written word in our text messages and posts. This brings them back.”

During this year’s unit she introduced poems by Stephen Dobyns and Marie Howe before having students find their own favorite poem to share with the class. They then had to write their own poems, which they read before their classmates and parents at an open mic last month at Starsmore Discovery Center.

Yes, the kids sometimes feel much the way many adults feel about poetry: intimidated. But Wolf gives them a few parameters to help write: put poetic elements into it, make the poem matter and make it about something you care about; otherwise it stays at a surface level and doesn’t go deep.

“It gives them permission to step into that water and they walk out the other side and say OK, poetry isn’t so difficult,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be so lofty and it can use language in this way to communicate about things they hadn’t thought about necessarily.”

English is Eliana Dunn’s favorite class, but sometimes she finds literature to be restrictive.

“Poetry is a cool way to still engage with literature, but also break free from some of the rules that are applied,” said the 14-year-old.

One of her poems, “Valerie,” was inspired by one of her female friends, who isn’t actually named Valerie but wishes she was, Dunn says.

“I really love her a lot and I take a great deal of inspiration from her,” she said. “I just wanted to put in words how I feel about her so she can really see how much she means to me.”

Her second poem for class, which remains untitled, was about messy communication. She wanted to be friends with someone who thought she had a crush on him.

“I thought it would be a cool thing to turn it into a poem,” Dunn said. “There were so many feelings I had. I was kind of confused.”

This is Wolf’s intention, to help kids see the value of poetry and its way of helping people identify and relate to emotions across the spectrum.

“To read Shakespeare or Edgar Allan Poe or Alexander Pope,” Wolf said, “and can you identify with this person who lived so long ago and to relate to that human condition and human experience and see so many things we go through are part of being human and our humanity.”

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