What do you wish you'd learned at school about poetry?

[rayheinrich]

Looking back on it, I read a fair bit of poetry in my English
classes.

A few of the things I would have changed are:

1. Less (much less) memorization.

2. A broader selection. Nothing we read was created later
than 1900, not even T.S. Eliot or William Carlos Williams!!!!!
(And I would have liked to read a few slightly obscure
contemporaneous poets as well.)

3. Instruction in, or at least the opportunity to, write something
other than business letters, book reviews, essays, and 'what I did
this summer'. While those are important, we did NOT write fiction,
poetry, or, for that matter, either news articles or step-by-step
instructions. Writing step-by-step instructions, by the way, is
a very important exercise. Not because it's a specifically necessary
skill to have, but because we get to experience, first-hand, how
imprecise our written communications actually are.

And...
(Well, Ok, maybe that's asking a bit much, but you get the idea.)

Oops, my cats are about to tear the place up (including myself) if I
don't feed them. Hmm... maybe there should be a lesson about cats;
not just about fog coming in using their feet (IMHO they are rarely
that silent as they tend to crash into things or yowl at each other),
but about not attracting too many. I know this doesn't have much to
do with learning to write, it's just that learning this is so
important that it should be mentioned in every class, from math
to history. Now THAT's something I wish I'd learned!