I could have linked to this in Poetic Lives Online, but I feel inspired by the Chaka Khan playing in the background to open it up to the Saturday crown. (Don’t ask me what I mean by that.)
So a few weeks ago, a high school English and Literature teacher emailed John Gallaher with some questions about ways to make teachers better at teaching poetry to junior high and high school students. That’s a tough discussion to have, and so John threw the questions open to his readers.
Elisa Gabbert responded with some interesting points, and the gist of a number of them (my interpretation here) was that teachers shouldn’t fear poetry. Teachers don’t often write fiction, but they teach it without much trepidation. Treat poetry the same way. But I think this was the best advice she provided:
Just admit that there are poems you like that you don’t understand. Say things like, “I love this line, but I don’t know what it means.” Or offer interpretations, but don’t shut the poem down by claiming there is only one interpretation. Talk about the difficulty/impossibility of paraphrasing poetry — there is no “other” poem, the real meaning. The poem is the meaning.
I had a teacher who did this in high school–Nancy McKee, Junior year. We were plodding our way through American Lit when one day she decided to just drop E. E. Cummings on us. It was “in Just-” and even then I could tell she hadn’t really planned to do it to us, because she tried to recreate it on the chalk board, complete with all its insane jumping all over the page and words run together. And she tried to take us through it, through “when the world is mud-/luscious” (though she wouldn’t get into the “goat-footed / balloonMan” bit). When we weren’t yet wowed by poetry, she erased it and replaced it with Cummings’s “i(a” which completely blew my 16 year old mind. I wanted to write poetry then, and so did a lot of my friends, and write we did, horrible, angsty shit, but we wrote, and we memorized poems (I did “since feeling is first” and I can recite it to this day) and we took over the high school literary magazine and we snuck curse words in and got in trouble and loved every second of it. All because Nancy McKee decided one day that she was going to show us a poem that she admitted she didn’t fully get.
The teacher who made the request, Marlee Stempleman, sent Elisa a thank you note, and she’s given me permission to quote it in part here.
I’m actually working on a project now that includes compiling student poetry from Title 1/low-income schools, and includes a reference section for educators where poets speak to questions like the ones you answered. If you have any idea about how to best get the word out about it and get some poets to respond, please let me know.
If you have an answer for Marlee, feel free to post it in the comments here, or send it to me at poetry-at-therumpus-dot-net and I’ll forward it along.
