My Creative Writing class at the high school is just starting with poetry, so I gave them my most basic lesson yesterday.  This is one of those "foundation" lessons that underpins everything else I tell them during the unit.  The lesson is on "private" vs "public" poetry.

The difference is this, private poetry cannot be critiqued (or taught, for that matter), but public poetry can.  I give them a little table on the board that separates the differences between the two:

Private Poetry Qualities:

Telling (you might find out how the poet feels about something)
Abstract
Generalities

Public Poetry Qualities:

Showing (the reader gets to feel something)
Concrete (appeals to the senses)
Specifics

Private poetry, in general, only has an emotional or intellectual effect on the poet who knows what it is about.  In contrast, public poetry can effect the readers, even if they have never met the poet and have no idea what provoked the poem.

A private poem might go like this:

I'm in love.
Happiness fills the world.
My joy knows no end.
Everything is beautiful.
Gladness makes my paradise.

And it might go on like that for stanza after stanza, piling one abstraction on top of another until it reaches (thankfully) an end somewhere toward the bottom of the page.  All the reader will be able to conclude from the poem is "I guess the poet is in love."  This poem, by the way, is at least comprehensible.  There's quite a bit of student poetry that is not only abstract and general, but, if you are honest, you have to admit you don't know that the heck it's about.

Here's a much more interesting poem that I give them as an example of a public poem.  You don't have to know the poet or the situation to be effected by this.  It's a high school student's first poem to me from a couple of years ago:

The Girl Who Was Always Trying to Light Me On Fire

I once knew a girl who never tired
of trying to light me on fire--
Her flaming eyes her molten heart
succeeded in setting her apart,
from all those other phony dames
so afraid of life and flames.
She burned my bridges as I crossed--
Molotov cocktails she always tossed
into the room where I slept.
A bottle of lighter fluid she always kept
to squirt at me in that affectionate way--
then dodge the matches we would play.
Then one day in the yard--
She said she could not love one so scarred.

This isn't without flaws, but it's a darned sight more interesting than the other poem.

As it turns out, this basic lesson on moving from telling to showing, from generalities to specifics is the biggest hurdle most of my students face.  I tell them that it's actually pretty easy to be original: all you need to do is be ferociously specific.  If you are specific enough, you will not be duplicating anyone else's effort.

The lesson after this is about how if you want to be universal you need to be specific.  When writers generalize in an effort to reach everyone, oddly enough, they become increasingly less universal.  It's one of those interesting contradictions in writing.

When we get to the writing of stories later in the class, we draw on this initial lesson dividing poems into the private and the public.  If they can make the leap in poetry early, I get much better stories at the end.  Instead of them summarizing scenes, they actually paint them with detail.  What I teach them with poetry is the power of the well chosen detail, and that goes a long way toward making them better story writers when we get there.