In this article, the author relates her experience in teaching poetry and how it shapes everything she and her students do in the classroom. As a language arts teacher for students in grades 7 to 12, she discovered poetry to be magical in many ways, for it offers such advantages as, brevity, which allows a quick reading and discussion of a complete piece of text as a way to begin a class period, variety, which allows students to discover a vast array of subjects and styles. It also provides a powerful tool for teaching word choice, fluency, and the impact of conventions. It offers questions with no answers, invitations to support assertions based on text, and it helps students understand what mood, tone and emotion really mean when it comes to writing. It offers models for students to try on and wear around for a while, eventually helping them to tailor their writing styles. It also offeres students a genre for documenting their lives, one poetic snapshot at a time. Her most important memory as a teacher is that poetry has helped dozens of young writers from a tiny, rural school in Alaska to become poets, lovers of language, and wordsmiths capable of changing the world.