Many thanks to Joshua Marie Wilkinson, poet and editor of the forthcoming anthology, Poets on Teaching (University of Iowa Press, 2010). My essay, “Some Thoughts on Teaching Poetry to Spoken Word Artists,” has made the final cut for this anthology. Certainly, this is timely in that I start teaching again at the end of next month, and while I will not strictly be form oriented, nor will I be poetry-specific, there is still some time to “tweak” my syllabus a bit to include some traditional (and not so traditional) poetic form.
So there’s that thing again, about stage and page, the craft work a poet does in order to have one reflect the other, not like musical score, but rather, in order to give the reader and audience a clue about the poet’s intent, whether the poet is present to explain the piece, or (as is my case most of the time with students in cities such as Lincoln, Nebraska; Columbus, Ohio; and El Paso, Texas reading my book), the poet has to have faith that her intentions are clear enough with what she’s left on the page. OR that she’s confident in her work’s applicability to the contexts of others.
(I take this term “applicability” from JRR Tolkien, who was said to detest allegorical interpretations of his work, what he considered oversimplified one on one substitution.)
In my essay, I discuss the self-proclaimed “spoken word artist” distancing herself from “poet” and “poetry,” and the more I think about it, the more I think about the fear or uncertainty that our words and intentions can be carried in a poem on a page without us present to explain every bit of context, word choice, image, cultural artifact and reference.
The argument I commonly hear, however, is that traditional poetic form has nothing to do with folks of color, and surely this is a short sighted statement, given oral traditions’ emphases on meter, rhyme, repetition; given traditional closed poetic forms such as qasida, zajal, ghazal, pantun, balagtasan, tanaga, haiku, tanka, sijo, décima, and so forth. We can, of course, look at the sonnets of the Harlem Renaissance poets as a great example of American writers of color gettin down with traditional poetic form. We can read Harryette Mullen’s Muse and Drudge for that blues and African American spiritual, quatrains in metered rhyme, much punning and wordplay. We can read Juan Felipe Herrera’s litanies, Justin Chin’s zuihitsu, Vince Gotera’s sonnets.
Anyway. So that’s my progress report for the day. Poets on Teaching, out next year. This evening, I’m in Diwata editing mode.
BJR,
You know what I’ve been finding discouraging lately? I walk into rooms where young people are being taught poetry – and by and large the teachers aren’t emphasizing reading. It’s amazing that today a group of kids could be putting out a collection of poems, backed by someone’s money, without really having read any poetry at all.
So, that’s why I look forward to your essay – because the generation of spoken word artists coming up today, will likely be major players in the poetry worlds that come from that generation.
dwayne
Hi Dwayne, thanks for this comment. You know, I’ve just looked back at my essay and nowhere do I explicitly state that we read poetry out loud – those of the assigned authors and the students. I actually thought that went without saying, as I remember reading poetry aloud in elementary school, junior high, and high school English Lit courses. I remember William Blake’s “Tyger, Tyger,” and my sophomore Honors English teacher having to explain the rhyme:
“what immortal hand or eye / could frame thy fearful symmetry…”
Similar to reading Andrew Marvell’s “To his coy mistress,” in which he rhymed “try” and “virginity.”
Anyway, yeah, so that’s one thing I always do, have students read poems out loud. I think my Mills students had fun reading Muse & Drudge. They did get shy about reading Marilyn Hacker’s “Elegy for Janis Joplin.” I’d actually be interested in hearing from others whether they do this as teachers, or whether as students they remember reading poems aloud.