[Some edits below.]
Dwayne has left an interesting comment for my recent post, “Poets on Teaching,” which tells me that poetry is taught in an abstract, clinical, detached way: “I walk into rooms where young people are being taught poetry – and by and large the teachers aren’t emphasizing reading.” To this, I’ve responded that nowhere in my essay for the forthcoming Poets on Teaching anthology do I explicitly state that when I teach, I always ask my students to read poems aloud. This applies to the assigned reading, and of course to their own work in progress. I tell them that poems are traditionally meant to be read aloud, and that doing so can help us understand what’s happening in the poems, or what the poet is doing, or what the poet wants the poem to do.
Maybe it’s because in my classes, I meet or encounter so many self-proclaimed “spoken word artists,” or those drawn to spoken word, or because I come from a community that centers around oral tradition, but this has not been an issue before, apart from students’ personal shyness, reading poems aloud, understanding why we do it. When we’ve finished reading a poem, I always ask what’s going on in the poem, what is this poem about, what is the poet telling us. From the general, I encourage specifics. “This poem is about injustice,” becomes a discussion on what kinds of injustices, done to whom by whom, and why. Who is the speaker, who does s/he represent, what is his/her position on said injustices? How do we know these things, as per what the poet has given us, what specific words, images, poetic forms. That is, I ask them to really dredge the text, and give me evidence from the text to support their arguments.
I don’t think these are radical or revelatory things I am saying here.
