PETER MURPHY, who teaches English at Atlantic City High School, starts off his classes by announcing he will say a particular dirty word of four letters. The word, he says, is poem. Boring stuff, pointless and stilted, he says. The Rodney Dangerfield of arts.

He hates poems when they are like that, too. That's why he refuses to teach them schmaltzy verses a million miles removed from teen-agers' lives. Instead, he startles his students by reading poems about child abuse and Superman's kryptonite. Then he urges them to write poems themselves, poems that aren't safe or cute or self-indulgent. To Mr. Murphy, poetry is not a frill or an elite or expendable art. He knows poetry that is outrageous, cutting and profound. He wants his students to know about these poems, too, and to write some like them—lean and gut-hitting, about concrete, personal subjects.

Often, he gets what he wants. More often, anyway, then any other English teacher in the state, if poetry awards are any measure. This year Mr. Murphy's students won two first-place prizes in the statewide Rutgers high-school poetry contest. This has become routine. Since the Rutgers contest began six years ago, Mr. Murphy's students have won 17 prizes, far more than those of any other teacher.

Poetry is taught in schools in many ways, from the classics to a Beat poem or two. But a teacher's approach can make the difference between seeing poems as pointless or vivid. A teacher chary of poetry may stick to rote recitations and memorization of technical terms, said James Haba, poetry director of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, which sponsors poetry-in-schools programs. Students who learn poetry that seems to speak directly to them may be more open to poetry of earlier eras.

"You need some teacher who's interested in poetry," said Gerry Warshaver, associate dean of the Arts and Sciences Department at Rutgers University. "Unfortunately, a lot of schools don't have it."

Atlantic City High School is not in the well-off suburbs. It is not a place where parents who are high-powered professionals move for the strong academics and prestigious college placement. It is a huge urban high school with a preponderance of students from low-income families. Many were raised by young single mothers on welfare. There are drugs and violence, Mr. Murphy said. One of his students was killed in March.

To teach poetry, he must get students to see that the real issues in their lives—drugs, violence, love, rejection, poverty—are fit topics for poetry.

"The biggest thing is getting them to want to do it," he said. When he succeeds, students who come to his class are thinking poetry is indecipherable wordplay leave knowing it can be as real and earthy as menstrual cramps, the subject of one of dozens of poems he hands out.

He gives them assignments to write about their lives, their real lives. "First you just want them to write it down," he said. "The second step is, be outrageous. Focus and write anything that comes to mind about it."

Anything and everything. "He wants people to see poetry everywhere in people's lives," said Mr. Haba of the Dodge Foundation. "There are profound cultural, emotional and psychological consequences to this. People learn to trust their own imaginations and language, to function better as parents, brothers, sisters, citizens, employers."

Mr. Murphy's final teaching step is the least popular. "Revise," he said. "Revise, revise. When you wrote a draft, it's not the end but the beginning of a relationship with the poem. Most beginning writers just want to express themselves. But it takes discipline to make it mature into a work of art."

It also takes encouragement—nagging some of his students say—to get young writers to look critically at the emotions they've spilled onto paper.

He brings an edgy passion to his work with students," Mr. Haba said. "He has a cutting passion for making poetry matter in people's lives."

It's obvious that the best lines his students write are lines that matter very much. Lines like these, by Tammara Lindsay, a senior and a Rutgers poetry contest winner:

Crack explodes
in your head
like lightning
on a dark
dark night

Like many of his students, Mr. Murphy might at first have seemed an unlikely candidate to be a poet. He was born in Wales in 1950 and moved with his family to New York City as a toddler. His father worked in heavy construction. His mother died when he was a child. After high school, he enrolled in three colleges and rapidly failed and dropped out of each. He supported himself at his father's trade, construction working in New York and Wales. Overseas his life was changed by two introductions—one to his future wife, a woman from New Jersey also traveling in Great Britain, and one to the Bahá’í religion, which was founded in the 19th century and emphasizes the "oneness of humanity" and that people should develop their own art, craft or trade as worship," he said.

He settled in New Jersey, earning a bachelor's degree from Stockton State College. After being hired to teach English at Atlantic City High School, he earned a master's degree in writing education from New York University, doing his thesis on teaching poetry to high school students.

The school where Mr. Murphy has taught for 20 years, has had racial and academic problems. For years its advanced classes had been largely white, though the school's population was predominantly black. The principal did away with advanced classes last year, putting students of varying levels together. Many parents, white and black, say this has drastically lowered academic standards.

Mr. Murphy says that he tries to concentrate on his classes and keep away from school politics, and that he is allowed to teach what he wants, as he wants, without interference. He counts as victories students like Tammara Lindsay, who knew little or nothing about poetry before his classes.

He recites his own poetry at public readings and has had it published in various poetry magazines. He also teaches poetry writing to adults. Working with the Dodge Foundation, he teaches other English teachers to teach poetry to teen-agers. In winter, he holds an annual poetry-writing retreat at Cape May, attended by some 60 adults. The idea for the annual retreat came from his own method of forcing himself to write. Once a month, he takes his own writing retreat, a weekend away from his wife and teen-age daughter, away from their home in the comfortable suburb of Ventnor. He gathers books and paper and goes to "the most anonymous, most impersonal hotel I can find." There, in the hotel's plainness, he feels free to write, giving himself assignments to get himself going. "I'll write about the lighter side of something dark, like the good parts of something or someone I hate," he said.

In the anonymous room he tries to do what he teaches. He tries to push his writing further than he thinks he can. "I want my students to find something to surprise themselves when they write—in the subject, the sound, the music. If they surprise themselves, they'll surprise the reader."

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