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.
9 responses
I’d say this. Good writing is about having something to say and saying it clearly. You ever been in love? Love itself is not entirely clear, right? Poetry is sometimes about those feelings that don’t make logical sense, but that a series of images can still evoke. Just like music. It communicates a feeling even if you don’t understand it.
That’s not to say that poetry is not supposed to make sense. But the goal is “show” to such a degree that “tell” doesn’t matter.
Oh, wait. That’s an answer to the wrong question. This may explain a lot about my academic career.
What a great story. Thanks for posting this today.
I’m a theatre artist, though not a performer. What makes poetry (and plays in verse) make sense to me is to hear them out loud. Then you can process the language without trying to parse the line breaks and whatnot, which certainly those things are important but can be intimidating. Or read “The Anthologist” by Nicholson Baker.
I teach high school English, and I will completely admit to initially being daunted at the task of teaching poetry. I’m pretty consumed with making material relevant and contextual to students, and tend to veer pretty strongly away from “reading comprehension” and rote memorization. I enter the task of teaching poetry from a variety of ways: looking at it from a mathematical perspective, an interpretive perspective, a language perspective. I like to leave little “hooks” for everyone to grab onto. One of the best texts I’ve come across for teaching is Helen Vendler’s “Poems, Poets, Poetry,” which focuses on looking at the “shapes” poems make, almost as if you were laying on transparency on top of transparency to see how the structure of a poem can reinforce the content.
I agree with letting students know you don’t necessarily “know” what a poem means: that’s where the greatest discussion comes from! One of the poems I’ve had the greatest success teaching, have had students become utterly consumed by (first out of frustration, and then out of intrigue) is T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” I teach it with very little initial information, other than the full disclosure that I absolutely hated the poem the first time I read it, because I didn’t understand it, and there are many parts of the poem I still don’t. And that over the course of two weeks, they’re going to teach it to me. And they always do. They largely come away from this feeling like they know what it “means” to be a poet, to write a poem, to edit a poem, and to argue about a poem.
The best response I know comes from Billy Collins in his “Introduction to Poetry.” It can be found on the Poetry 180 website, poem number 1.
By the time Collins gets to these kids (he taught at a community college early in his career), they’ve already been taught that reading poetry is about interpretation. Read Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” for a long answer to why interpretation is limiting. However, I think anyone that appreciates art knows that intuitively. There’s no reason you can’t do close reading of poems, as in careful unpackings of words and lines, looking for the interplay that makes a poem sing. But poems are not allegory. I think that is the biggest mistake.
The chronological approach most anthologies is also a problem. First impressions make a difference. Old stuff is often rich and beautiful, but Chaucer and Beowulf are primarily narrative. It takes much more work for a student to read against interpretation and look for the music of the language (esp. since some translations destroy it). But with e.e. cummings for example, it takes work (depending on the poem) to interpret anything. He has images, even themes, but you can’t help but realize there’s no key to unlock the poem, and that helps the resistance to “tie the poem to a chair and torture a confession out of it”
As far as solutions, the earlier the better. The habit of poem-torturing must not be allowed to establish itself. Make reading poems a type of play. Comparisons with art and music are apt. In middle school we don’t sit kids down in front of The Death of Marat and ask them to take apart the symbols relating to the French Revolution. We give them some watercolors and let them have at it. Same with music. Yes, in an ideal world, they’d understand how Beethoven constructed his 9th symphony, explaining sonata form, etc. But it’s better to just let them experience the energy of that piece first. Interpretation can come later, or not at all.
I also think the Poetry 180 program, created by Billy Collins when he was Poet Laureate seems like a great idea. They were selected especially for this purpose. Sometimes poems need to be digested. A poem a day keeps the torturers away?
It’s an important pedagogical issue, and a there is a fascinating discussion about it unfolding in the comments section of the post. To my mind, the most essential elements of poetry to teach in secondary schools are word play and word choice.
Word Play: There are so many poems from so many eras that demonstrate just how much fun the English language can be. From Catullus to Shakespeare to William Carlos Williams to Billy Collins, poetry can teach students to enjoy words in a way that no other use of the English language can.
Word Choice: The words in a poem do more work than the words in any other subset of literature. Diction is, of course, critical to all good writing, but the importance that each word carries its weight is especially evident when seen in the context of a poem’s structure and rhythm.
A side benefit of focusing on these aspects of poetry is that this kind of approach gives us another way into the poem. Job one does not have to be to decode the poem, but in exploring the way the words work and play together, some meaning is more likely to come organically from it.
For anyone interested in finding lesson plans for poetry for all grade levels and content areas, I highly recommend the Louisiana Poetry Project (for which I periodically contribute lesson plans). As the name suggests, the organization is focused on poets and poetry from Louisiana, but of course the poems are relevant anywhere. There is a poem and at least one lesson plan for every school day of the year, and some of the plans could be adapted to fit other poems as well. It’s a great place to start if you want help and ideas for teaching poetry.
I’ve also posted more thoughts on this on http://www.TeachYALit.com. Check it out if interested.
Can someone answer this question or send me somewhere for an answer? I want to include a poem by e.e.cummings in my how-to-write poetry Kindle booklet. Where do I go for permission to do so? Or is it sufficient to acknowledge the bibliographic entry for that poem?
Salvatore Buttaci, author of Flashing My Shorts
Salvatore,
I’d check with Norton, since they’re the ones who printed Cummings’s Collected Poems a few years back. If you’re selling that booklet, then I doubt a bibliographic entry is enough.
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