Poetry: Such an amazing teacher

By Michael R. Malone [email protected] 04-16-2026

This month marks the 30th anniversary of April as National Poetry Month, this year themed "Poetry and the Creative Mind." For this largest literary celebration in the world, tens of millions of readers, students, K-12 teachers, librarians, booksellers, literary events curators, publishers, families, and-of course-poets, are paying homage to the craft and marking its importance in our lives.

A cadre of faculty and student poets and teachers from the University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences' Department of English share their insights on how poetry, whether reading or writing the craft, strengthens our ability to think critically, among the most essential skills that a college education affords and so valuable to every arena of our lives.

Kimberly Reyes, assistant professor, Department of English and Creative Writing

Poetry strengthens critical thinking because it resists passive reading. It slows us down. A poem demands that we pay attention to language at the level of the line, the image, even the silence between words. That kind of attention trains readers to question assumptions, to recognize ambiguity, and to engage with complexity rather than avoiding it.

For writers, poetry is an exercise in precision and constraint. You're constantly making decisions about what to include, what to withhold, and how meaning is shaped through structure and sound. That process builds both analytical and creative intelligence. You're not just expressing ideas-you're interrogating how those ideas, and entire worlds, get built on the page. You're both author and architect.

Jay Moyer, a senior majoring in creative writing, published poet, and editor-in-chief of Distraction Magazine

Good poetry is a marvel of engineering. Each line functions as a self-contained unit of meaning while also bearing weight for the poem as a whole. Because of this, every word chosen, and the placement of each word, can completely change the integrity of the structure.

Poetry classes teach us that individual words wield a lot of power. Anyone who has spent an hour-long class picking apart a single poem can vouch for that fact. For creative writing students, we don't just go through that experience as readers, but as writers in workshops. The experience of having your own poem examined under a microscope, checked for structural flaws and gaps, and reflected back at you is as eye-opening as it is vulnerable. It teaches you to understand words as each carrying a tangled web of meanings, associations and emotional resonances, and it then teaches you to use these to your advantage.

As thinkers, poetry trains us to look closely at writing that most eyes skip over, like news headlines and tweets. In a single sentence, or in 280 characters, narratives can be constructed and twisted with small turns of phrase. To examine that, you have to be used to looking at the small picture and the big picture at the same time.

Maxine Zahler, a first-year student studying advertising management in the Communication Honors Program, with minors in political science and law and politics, and PR chair for Written in my Soul, the University up-and-coming poetry club

Poetry forces us to think deeply and critically because it relates one's subjective, unique experience-through universal symbols and language-to all our experiences, which can make us think critically about how we perceive and react to basically anything.

The writing process forces us to be insightful: First, we have to vomit out our pure, painful, subjective, and emotional life experiences into physical form and then edit it for whatever purpose you want it to serve. Every seemingly "small" choice in punctuation, word choice, and rhyme is sensitive and requires deep thinking because it changes the style, tone, and overall experience of the piece. At the same time, my unedited poems give me the most insight. When I let myself word vomit a poem, it helps me recognize thought patterns at their most visceral state.