In 1999, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) declared March 21 as World Poetry Day to celebrate and support linguistic diversity through poetic expression. World Poetry Day honors poets, promotes the reading, writing, and teaching of poetry, and encourages the connection between poetry and other art forms.

To kick off the celebration at Arcadia, we asked Assistant Professor of English and published poet Daniel Schall, who teaches many of the University’s poetry courses, to share some insight into not only his teaching but also his own creative writing.

This Q&A has been slightly edited for clarity and length.

What can we learn from poetry? How does poetry fit into the wider literary landscape?

Poetry is generally considered to be the oldest form of literature because of its oral and musical roots, and virtually every culture has developed poetry. I’m certainly biased, but I might ask the opposite question: how does everything else besides poetry fit into the literary landscape that poetry itself established?

I like to think about what we can learn from poetry the way I do of all art: we learn through that which we devote our attention. What we focus on in almost every art form can teach us some of the bromides we might expect: what it means to be human; how to empathize with others; how to love others and yourself; what an artist might consider justice or the lack thereof.

But sometimes I just like listening to a song because it sounds good. Sometimes I like to read a poem just because it’s beautiful and breathtaking and renders an image perhaps even better than my own eyes can. I think it’s important to have both understandings of art, including poetry: it’s a repository of human cultures, social problems, stories, philosophies (the list could go on…). But it’s also something that—if we’re paying attention—we sometimes just absorb. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi famously talked about the idea of “flow”: a kind of productive concentration in which someone is fully immersed in their task. Paying good attention to poetry is kind of like that, I think, and can yield the same personal and cultural benefits.

What does your creative process look like for poetry? How does that inform your teaching style?

I try not to get too “cozy” with my own work, both so I can look at it critically and also so I don’t preclude elements that might surprise or move me or my readers. I think a lot about juxtapositions, and how startlingly and accurately they can reveal shared experiences. I try not to limit myself to one process or style. I don’t think I could grow that way.

Because of this, as a teacher, I often try to strike a balance. I want students to feel like their vision is what is driving their poetry. However, I still do ask students to experiment a lot—with voice, with forms they’ve never tried or heard of, with tension between abstractions and concrete detail, with subject matter, etc.—because sometimes students might feel especially connected to a form, an approach, or an aesthetic that they didn’t know existed. Ultimately, I want students to have a lot of information about what’s out there in the world of poetry, while still feeling like their own voice and style is part of that larger celebration.

How do you start a new poem? How do you know when you’re “finished” with a piece?

While every poem is different, I don’t like to limit process—I often find myself starting with an image, something that evokes sensory perception(s), a mood, or an emotional timbre. I usually work from there on aspects of the poem like structure and voice.

It sounds trite, I’m sure, but I never quite feel finished with a piece! If I see a poem of mine in a journal, I’m often still looking over it, wishing I could have made this or that revision, wishing I could just tweak that one word. It’s common for poets, when they publish a collection, to acknowledge journals where poems previously appeared, and for those acknowledgments to include the phrase “some of which appeared as earlier versions.” I imagine poets who use this phrase feel similarly to how I do when I see my poems in print.