Ted Kooser

The Rural Trust and the National Writing Project are pleased to join the Library of Congress in celebrating poetry written about rural places by young people who live there. You will read poems on this site with topics of family and coal mining and bull riding. You will hear about nature and the seasons. These poems of familiar things also evoke timeless topics--fear, loss, love, joy, awe.

Why celebrate poetry? Shouldn't young people be writing essays and research reports and term papers? Of course they should, and they do. But poetry demands a special discipline from young writers. As poet Rita Dove has said, "Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful." Concise and precise, poetry demands that we look and look again at our world in order to find the exact word, the specific image. A young writer who develops the powers of observation, reflection, precision and craft that poetry requires will find all those skills serve her well across the curriculum.

Why focus poetry--student learning in general--on place? We live in a world where decisions half a world away affect our every day lives--the cost of gasoline for our cars, the safety of our families in military service, the price of corn and wheat and coal. Shouldn't education focus on other places and not on the small rural places we call home?

We at the Rural Trust and at the National Writing Project think both roots and wings are important. Of course, students need to learn about the world, be fluent in languages that are not their native tongues, and be comfortable discussing ideas that might not get talked about around their dining room table.

But students can learn a heap of science and history and math and literature by starting with those things that are most familiar. What lives in the streams and forests and plains outside your doors? Who are the writers and artists and musicians in your community?  How does the government in my town work - who decides important things? Learning to be an active citizen in one place makes it more likely that one can be a good citizen anywhere. All of this can be part of a curriculum that is academically challenging and engages students in the real world. And if young people learn something of the promise and possibility of their place, perhaps as they study it carefully through writing, they may decide that living in a rural town is a good idea.