Why There's Always Poetry On My First-Year Writing Syllabus
and why some of it is always recent-ish and lots of it is work to read
In my interview the other week with the political writer John Ganz, I asked him about style — who influences him, how much does he self-consciously think about what he wants his sentences to sound like, and so on. He said:
I keep Shakespeare, Milton, the King James Bible, and the Oxford Book of English Verse handy and just dip into them every now and again to sort of hear how English is supposed to sound. I don't do it systematically at all. ... I'm a big believer that you should just immerse yourself in the best stuff and maybe it will rub off on you a little. I think I got this idea from the great medieval Islamic historian Ibn Khaldun, who writes something like, "If you want to improve your writing, just attend to the best verse in your language." Okay, easy, done.
I was struck by this answer, because it rhymes with my own practice as a teacher. I make my writing students read a lot of poetry, even when I’m just teaching regular-degular expository writing. Poetry has several advantages as a teaching tool, for teachers of prose writing specifically, over prose: