The most important thing you can do to help your kids love poetry is to show them how much you love it.

Oh...you don't like poetry?

You've probably got lots of company. For too many adults, poetry is closely linked to trauma.

Utter the word "poetry" and you've instantly returned to an elementary classroom somewhere, fully grown, your body scrunched, knees slamming against the bottom of one of those miserable wood-and-metal desks as some teacher you thought to be long gone drones out the words of Edgar Allan Poe's "Annabel Lee."

Intended to feed your imagination, it ended up choking it off. Often, children in elementary school start to think of poetry as punishment. But, take heart. It's possible, and even potentially enjoyable, to reclaim your right to love poetry and, in the process, to raise a crop of kids who will never have to suffer as their parents did.