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To encourage poetry writing among our state's youth, the Laureate's
website highlights noteworthy poems written by those age eighteen
and under. My goal is to demonstrate that poetry is an art form
hospitable to the young. It answers their need to reflect on life's
experiences and gives meaning and order to these events. Doing
so, young people discover not only the language to express their
thoughts and emotions but also the pleasures of language itself.
Writing a poem, then, becomes a means for the young to learn equally
notions of selfhood and modes of language that express and thus
define them. As added benefit, we adults are privy to what the
young have to say and how they say it. We thereby deepen our understanding
of the range of challenges children face in the contemporary world.
That their poems appear on this site, alongside the work of our state's
best poets, underscores that words – their words – indeed matter.
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