Right off the bat, Lesley Wheeler plays videos of poetry slams, showing her students how intense and powerful she believes poetry can be.

Then she tells them they're going to have a haiku death match.

She's not kidding, although she is likely to laugh herself to tears when it takes place.

The students at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., pull on Japanese headbands, bow to the judges, and recite haikus that others in the class have written — sometimes emotional and deeply personal, more often silly, nearly always about sex.

The idea is to show students how powerful and easy and, yes, fun poetry can be.

Some of them come to class with a sense that poetry is pretentious gibberish (but requires less reading than the other English courses). Wheeler, 42, wants them to find poetry they love — whether it is the quiet elegance of an Elizabethan sonnet or the angry elbows of a slam poem shouted out to a packed bar. Or both.

She thinks poetry matters now, more than ever, as other things have taken over some of the space that poetry used to fill in people's lives. In a world that's fast and hectic and demanding, poetry is one way to slow down, be quiet and think, Wheeler says.

But poetry has evolved along with culture. As a cheap, often free, art form, it's nimble and adaptable. The rhymes that sounded stilted to many of Wheeler's classmates when she was in college have a different resonance — more current maybe, more real — for this generation of students, who grew up with hip-hop. And although for much of the past century, poetry was found most often in quiet libraries and in classrooms, the past couple of decades brought it into the street and cafes, onto HBO and YouTube.

People snarl poems, scat them, stomp them, scream them.

Wheeler studies the ways technology is bringing writer and audience together in new ways, with poems online, audio files and videos. And she is researching how technology creates unexpected communities of poets; identity and ideas can link people in ways that are changing how people understand, and write, about the world, she said.

It used to be easy to identify the major American poets, said Julia Spicher Kasdorf, an associate professor of English and women's studies at Penn State, who is familiar with Wheeler's work. Now, there's a huge variety in the types of poems being written and the ways they're published or distributed, creating more schisms among different types of poets. But Wheeler is one who bridges those gaps, Kasdorf said.

"I love them all!" Wheeler says.

"There's a lot of disagreement about what poems should look or sound like among contemporary poets, critics and audiences," she explains. "Some slam poets or other independent writers would say that poet-professors are stuffy elitists who drive away poetry's natural audiences; some university-based poets do say, in print, that slam isn't poetry at all." There are divisions among "academic poets," as well, Wheeler says. "In any art form there's always a vanguard, people who view themselves as enlightened and innovative, and a traditionalist faction, people who view themselves as keepers of a sacred flame. "

But she argued in a recent book that despite those schisms, poets are united by a shared obsession with "voice," which can mean the way the poem is presented or be a metaphor for the sense of the author's presence in the work.

And she has described 21st-century poetry as an international and technological field, now that writers are sharing ideas with others online.

Wheeler fell into poetry at the urging of a somewhat batty elderly nun at her Catholic high school in New Jersey. The teacher often entered students into writing contests, seemingly at random, and one day told Wheeler to write poems.

To Wheeler's surprise, she won. She went to Rutgers University, where her world became wrapped around the literary magazine (she married one of the editors). She didn't tell her parents she wasn't going to law school until she got a fellowship to study poetry at Princeton.

"I always felt being a poet was my secret superhero identity," she says of a part of herself she was nervous to expose.

This spring, she published her first volume of poetry, "Heathen," titled after her high-school nickname.