> The poetry reading helps—but as a substitute for reviewing it is inefficient.

Anyone have any contemporary poetry recommendations?

> ...fewer people attend poetry readings in the United States than in Russia.

This is probably still true. I was surprised to discover that at music concerts (not pop, but the organisational jubilee variety) there are poetry readings in between the musical numbers.

A soviet classroom activity (which may or may not still be used in the RF) was to issue famous lines from classic poems to the class — and each student had to incorporate that line into a composition of their own.

Then again, russian peasants also had their answer to United States street vernacular tradition in the частушка: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBpY8w6X_JI

here, MC Gram spitting mad flow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeuEFZHKYzM

(YT offered me "Chastushki for kids", so this genre even sometime comes in a SFW version!)