Compares poetry to a dead body that teachers, like mad scientists, are trying to revive. Suggests that teachers stop trying to teach students to find the meaning in a poem but to simply accept the experience in a nonjudgmental, open way. Offers three activities designed to help students to explore poetry in their own way. (PRA)

In 1958 in their journal, "The Fifties," Robert Bly and William Duffy introduced North American readers and students to a number of European and South American poets who had developed an imagination variously described as "ecstatic,""surreal,""fantastic,""mythic," etc. That same year the American poet Donald Hall began to write poetry in a new…