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Celebrating National Poetry Month
Posted on April 7, 2026 in Blog Posts
Poetry as Reflection and Voice
When I think about National Poetry Month, the opening lines of Lucille Clifton’s poem come to mind:
won’t you celebrate with me / what i have shaped into / a kind of life
from “won’t you celebrate with me“ by Lucille Clifton
These lines are an invitation, a mark of agency, and an acknowledgment of survival. Clifton’s words remind us that our lives, voices, and understandings are shaped through reflection, experience, and the stories we carry. In many ways, poetry invites students to do this same work. It encourages them to reflect on their experiences, shape language around them, and discover how their voices fit within a larger world.
Poetry in the Classroom
As an educator, I have found poetry to be one of the most valuable tools I have brought into the classroom. I have used it in nearly every course I teach and in the books I write because poetry has been instrumental in both my own learning and my teaching. Poetry slows us down and encourages us to listen closely to language, to ourselves, and to one another.
The poets I have had the privilege of collaborating with have influenced both my teaching and writing. One of the first times I intentionally integrated poetry into my teaching was at the suggestion of poet and educator Jordan Stempleman. What began as a small classroom activity soon became a practice I returned to again and again.
Poetry helped transform the classroom atmosphere. Students who were hesitant to speak during traditional discussions often found their voice through poems. Poetry offered a way to explore identity, articulate difficult experiences, and imagine new possibilities. It allowed students to listen to one another in ways that were thoughtful and attentive. Over time, poetry helped build a sense of community and connections in the classroom.
This reflects poetry’s potential and power in education and learning. Poetry not only celebrates the self, as Clifton’s poem reminds us, it also helps us build relationships. When students write and share poems, they learn more about themselves and about one another. They begin to see their peers not just as classmates, but as people with stories, histories, and perspectives worth hearing. This helps to foster listening, respect, collaboration, and empathy.
Poetry is also inherently cross-disciplinary. Bringing poetry into a learning space offers an opportunity not only for creativity but for deeper learning. Poetry can connect history, literature, art, and social inquiry, inviting students to interpret language, examine perspective, and engage with ideas across fields. In this way, poetry becomes more than an expressive exercise. It becomes a tool for critical thinking, reflection, and understanding.
In moments when the world feels heavy, when culturally responsive teaching is essential and students need learning experiences that support both their academic and emotional growth, poetry offers space for reflection and expression.
Poetry, Museums, and Learning Across Spaces
As I mentioned above, one activity I often share with students comes from poet and educator Jordan Stempleman.1 The prompt invites students to enter a museum, not to focus on the artwork itself, but to pay attention to the language and space that surrounds it.
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| “Leave the Painting & Steal the Language Walk,” poetry prompt by Jordan Stempleman. |
Students walk through the museum reading exhibit labels, descriptions, and wall text. They transcribe phrases or sentences that stand out to them, collecting fragments of language from the space. They also take two photographs during their visit, but the photos cannot be of any of the artworks. Instead, they are instructed to capture moments from their experience in the museum: a hallway, a staircase, a reflection in glass, or a shadow across the floor.
After leaving the museum, students use the language they collected and the photos they took to compose a poem with “no beginning and no end.”
What makes this prompt so powerful is that it transforms how students perceive and allows the primary encounter to continue beyond the museum space. The photos extend the visit into a visual archive; the gathered wall text becomes a portable lexicon. In the writing, image and sentence stay connected, exchanging pressure, so that looking becomes phrasing, and phrasing brings students back to looking.
Museums, like poetry, invite us to pause and observe closely. They ask us to consider perspectives beyond our own and to reflect on the stories that objects, spaces, and language carry. When students gather language from museum walls and transform it into poetry, they start to see how meaning is built. They realize that interpretation, context, and voice all shape how we perceive the world around us. In this way, poetry and museums share an important trait: both encourage us to slow down, empty our minds of language, and then reconnect with language, a process that helps us imagine beyond our usual ways of thinking.
Poetry as Ongoing Practice
National Poetry Month offers a reminder that poetry is not confined to literature courses or special occasions. It is a living practice that invites us to reflect, connect, and imagine, and it can be found in daily interactions, moments, and places.
And perhaps most importantly, poetry asks us to pause, to notice the lives we are shaping and the stories we carry. Like Clifton’s invitation, poetry encourages us to recognize what we have shaped, what we are still shaping, and the voices that shape us in return. Through that process, poetry helps build understanding not only of the self, but of the collective we are part of and the communities we learn alongside.
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Notes
- For additional poetry prompts or guidance, see Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? (1973) by Kenneth Koch, The Teachers and Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms (1987) by Ron Padgett, and Real Toads, Imaginary Gardens: On Reading and Writing Poetry Forensically (2024) by Paisley Rekdal
References
The Magnitude of Us: An Educator’s Guide to Creating Culturally Responsive Classrooms (2024) by Marlee S. Bunch
Unlearning the Hush: Oral Histories of Black Female Educators in Mississippi in the Civil Rights Era (2025) by Marlee S. Bunch
“Won’t you celebrate with me” by Lucille Clifton. In The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965–2010 (2012)
Spilt (2025) by Jordan Stempleman
About Dr. Marlee Bunch:
Dr. Marlee Bunch is an interdisciplinary educator, author, researcher, and lifelong learner. Her research examines the oral histories of Black female educators in Hattiesburg, Mississippi who taught between 1954 and 1971.
She received her doctoral degree from the University of Illinois in 2022 in Education/Policy/Organizational Leadership. Additionally, she has a Masters in Education (MEd), a Masters in Gifted Education (MS), a Bachelors in English, a certification in Diversity/Equity/Inclusion, and a certification in ESL (English as a Second Language).
Bunch has been an educator for 17+ years and is the founder of the un/Hush teaching framework. You can reach out or learn more about her work at https://www.marleebunch.com/.
About Jordan Stempleman:
Jordan Stempleman is the author of ten books of poetry, including Cover Songs (2022), Wallop (2015), No, Not Today (2012), and, most recently, Spilt (2025). He also serves as the editor for The Continental Review, Windfall Room, and Sprung Formal. Since 2011, he has organized the Common Sense Reading Series in Kansas City, Missouri. In addition to his editorial work, Stempleman is an associate professor in the Liberal Arts Department and the Creative Writing Program at the Kansas City Art Institute.
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Header image is a detail of This is Harlem by Jacob Lawrence. Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. © 2021 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. For more information, click here.