My passion is writing and poetry -- seriously, I have prints of my favorite poems (just 20 or so!) lining the walls of our family room -- and it's my great joy that my five kids can quote Shakespeare and Longfellow. So many students claim to "hate" poetry, but that's often because poetry is difficult to understand. My goal is to give students the tools they need to unlock poems. Like John Keats suddenly understanding Homer once he read the English translation, I want my students to look "...at each other with a wild surmise/ Silent, upon a peak in Darien."