Good poetry offers ways of expressing emotions, capturing experiences and language techniques that stimulate students in ways other genres don’t. So how can teachers get students more engaged in poetry? Poet and writer, Vaughan Rapatahana (Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Te Whiti) explains how.“In short, they can make poetry more prevalent and therefore more relevant”
“For Māori, ngā mōteatea are a holistic and intrinsic part of our heritage, an oral tradition from long before the advent of written English language poetry to the nation’s shores.”
“Students can express, as well as strive to refine and define their emotions, their likes and dislikes, beliefs, credos, in all the multifarious ways and methods poetry opens up for them.”
“Poetry offers a window to their soul.”
About the author
About Vaughan Rapatahana: Vaughan was a semi-finalist in the Proverse Prize for Literature in 2009, highly commended in the 2013 erbacce poetry prize (from 6000+ entrants), and won the inaugural Proverse Poetry prize in 2016, the same year as his poetry collection Atonement was nominated for a National Book Award in Philippines. His latest poetry collection is ternion (erbacce-press, Liverpool, England). Rapatahana has a PhD in existential philosophy from University of Auckland, on the novels of Colin Wilson, whom he has written extensively about and will lecture on at the Wilson conference in Nottingham in July, 2018. He is also a language critic and instigated and co-edited English language as Hydra and Why English? Confronting the Hydra (Multilingual Matters, U.K, 2012 and 2016). He has also written commentaries for Jacket 2 (University of Pennsylvania).
