Rachel Donahue | Bandersnatch Books

So one of the things that you talked about at the conference was just the importance of poetry.

And I think you really explained for the folks that were in your session that there's an intimidation around poetry, but that we've got to work through that for ourselves and for our kids.

Can you talk a little bit about why is poetry so important? How do we get over this intimidation that some of us might feel? And then what does it look like to bring poetry into your homeschool?

Yeah.

I like to explain to people when you have big life events, either falling in love or the grief of a loved one dying or even other griefs and losses or, you know, these hilltop moments, the valleys, you go to poetry to try to find the words to express these deep feelings, these human experiences.

Wow.

And we want our kids to have access to those things, but not just those things.

Poetry has so much power to connect people across time and space, to help us experience these tiny moments together, to help us see the world more clearly.

And poetic language, especially the memorization of poetry, it just helps you as a person begin to articulate more deeply your own experience to other people and help to make those connections with language.

And so I've seen it even with my own children.

We'll be memorizing a poem with our boys.

And then our daughter, who was three at the time, had a capacity for memorizing the poem almost faster than they did because she wanted to.

And she just was so quick about it.

And that stores up this treasury of language.

that will be there the rest of her life.

These little snippets of language and poetry and beauty are the things that will come later in life.

For example, I was on a trip recently and was up with the sunrise and I saw the sunrise at an angle first on the wall.

It was just this beautiful spot of like early morning light.

And so I walked over to the window and looked straight out to see the sun about to crest the horizon.

And I thought of the line from Hopkins, God's Grandeur, where it says, a morning from the brown brink eastward springs.

And just this moment of intense beauty was then paired with words that just, I wish I could just read the whole poem because it's such a beautiful thing.

But look up Gerard Manley Hopkins, God's Grandeur.

And you guys can can read it and just appreciate like he has given us words for that moment of beauty, but also connecting it to God's work in our lives and the Holy Spirit.

And those images are so tightly knit.

And that's the power of what poetry can do.