This article considers high school students' relationship to poetry through a small-scale qualitative study guided by the question: what happens to student perceptions of poetry when class begins each day with a poem? As a former teacher and current teacher educator, I conducted a series of interviews with a small group of my former students regarding their experiences with poetry throughout their K-12 education and with hearing a poem each day in their high school English Language Arts classroom. I sought to explore the dimensions and possibilities of non-analytical literacy practices in addition to student perceptions of poetry as they relate to schooling contexts more broadly.