Why I Teach Poetry

This year has been hard with the poetry assignment in my creative writing class because most of the students simply puked words on a page for points.  I was frustrated with their efforts, work, depth of thought. 

Then, this sentence showed up in a poetry portfolio that made up for all the crap - poems about emus, TV, love, hate and other generic crap.

"Once a person writes a poem, their soul cannot be broken by society, conformity, trauma or anything else; not completely."

Worth it.