Edward Hirsch's How To Read A Poem And Fall In Love It Poetry

After scrolling through Edward Hirsch’s chapters of “How to Read a Poem (and Fall in Love it Poetry,” the section that resonated with me the most was “The Immense Intimacy, The Intimate Immensity.” The way in which Hirsch describes the experience of reading poetry felt like poetry itself. Hirsch’s introduction reads, “The physical life wants the spirit. I know this because I hear it in the words, because when I liberate the message in the bottle a physical—a spiritual—urgency pulses through the arranged text. It is as if the spirit grows in my hands. Or the words rise in the air” (1). Immediately, I thought of Maya Angelou’s poem “Still Like Air I Rise.” Angelou’s poem has always been one of my favorites. I have always said it is my favorite
because of its repetition of the line “I rise” (“Still I Rise”). However, Hirsch specifically clarifies for me the real reason I love Angelou’s poem; it is actually the spirit of what I hear in the words; it is the “physical intensity” ("The Immense Intimacy”) I feel when reading the poem.
My question is huge. How can I teach poetry so that students feel a physical reaction, a physical intimacy poetry? The school where I teach is incredibly focused on student achievement and teaching the standards. Reading poetry according to Hirsch, at least in this section of his book, has nothing to do with either.