Poetry Cafe

Having a fun and safe place to share art with a class is an important thing. Sometimes students don’t feel comfortable sharing their work or even their favorite work by other artists. Students get bashful and nervous to express their own opinions.

So, my professor’s idea to combat this is to create a safe and fun place that will hopefully lessen their nervousness and increase their comfort. She did this in the form of a poetry café for our class. She played soft peaceful music, decorated the tables with table cloths and flowers, and dimmed the lights a little bit. We all got to pick our favorite poems that we then shared with small groups during our café time. We then got to discuss what the poems meant to us, as well as why we chose it.

The poem that I chose was a poem by Shel Silverstein called ‘Don’t tell me.’ This is a poem that I have known since I was a kid, however I didn’t put much thought into it until a few semesters ago when I had to do a research project about Shel Silverstein. It was then that I noticed how much his poems can be prominent and encouraging even for adults. This poem speaks to the teacher in me; you can’t just expect to tell students to do something without modeling it to them as well

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Conversation during this café time proved to flow very easily with all of us sharing our opinions and poems. Some of us even chose the same poems! It was nice to see all of the connections that we made with each other simply based off of the pieces that we chose to share with one another.