[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.
I’ve read Susan Schultz’s recent blog post, “The Seductions of Can’t,” about how so many people default to this “I don’t get poetry,” “I can’t understand poetry,” and it reminds me of a recent experience. I can’t remember exactly where I was, whose classroom I was visiting, but I must have been discussing Poeta en San Francisco. I read some poems containing very concrete images and situations; the very overgeneralized, concept and abstract things the students were saying in response really astounded me. I thought perhaps this was the way in to more detailed discussion, but it wasn’t. In other words, “This is a poem about injustice,” was the alpha and omega of the conversation, with anything more detailed simply glossed over and shrugged at.
I wanted to say (but didn’t because I felt like it wasn’t my place as I was not the class professor), “Come on, people, read the words on the page,” which is what I’d say to my own students, to find those concrete, specific words describing concrete, specific situations in specific places. I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt, that some of Poeta en SF borders on surreal, that with the author in the classroom, students can get intimidated and reticent, and also that it’s my book, I’ve been speaking on it so much, and so I know it really well.
But here’s my takeaway: it feels like there was little effort to engage the text in the same way that we are taught to engage a piece of fiction or non-fiction. Not only is there little effort, but there is also little encouragement to engage the text. I feel this is related to what Susan has blogged, about how easily people come to the conclusion that they simply can’t get poetry, and how she makes her poetry classes active and interactive. I totally get this, students becoming empowered to “get” poetry through active involvement with its construction.
I want to say that poets know how to teach poetry, have special or unique insight into teaching poetry, which I think is the crux of Wilkinson’s anthology. Certainly, some of my more memorable teachers of poetry (outside of Creative Writing departments) were poets themselves. Then again, a literary scholar like Barbara Christian, whose African American women’s literature class I took at Berkeley, was not a poet, and she was fabulous with poetry because she really dredged text.
I wonder if part of the fear of getting hands on has to do with poetry being this “special” “artifact,” the rare and fragile thing behind the glass case in a museum. We speak of poetry as this special use of language, and that people come to poetry at celebratory and ceremonial times, to mark passage. We also come to poetry during difficult, trying times. We come to poetry for that kind of comfort and reassurance. If poetry is indeed like prayer, then it is sacred. And if it is sacred, then is this why we aren’t encouraged to dissect it?
Alternately, I think of Conan O’Brien introducing William Shatner to read Sarah Palin’s tweets: O’Brien mockingly refers to her tweets as poetry, because it’s in this rambling, faux heightened language, with supposedly revelatory moments and messages. Shatner reads these with his trademark pacing, in a so deadpan it’s ironic tone, with stand up bass and bongo drum accompaniment. What is this? I mean, apart from really silly, what is it but this popular view of poetry being this incomprehensible and even ridiculous thing?
I think to a certain extent poets have to take responsibility for this. What the non-poets are chiding us for is partially a reaction to their culture. The propoganda that props up the materialist colonial culture involves dumbing down the population. They chide us for self-indulgence and egocentricity. It is part of the dynamic that has existed throughout the history of modernist poetry. I think you are taking an enormous risk teaching poetry using your own poems. I understand that it is the work you know best and there are good reasons for it but it might be starting out on the wrong foot?
Paul, I am not teaching my own poems, but am frequently invited into other professors’ classes to discuss my book with the students because it is being taught. What I refer to above is one of those cases.
As for this dumbing down the population, I agree this is happening. I know poets do react to this, and it’s warranted. It isn’t just poets. I believe artists in all genres do this, create work that refuses to pander to dumbed down expectations.
I think it’s important to hear poetry out loud. When a student tells me they don’t get a poem I have them read it aloud- especially the lines they don’t get. Sometimes, I have them take it word for word- explaining to me what each word in isolation means then how they build a context when combined with what comes before and after.
I think students are “taught” to fear poetry- or given the impression that they aren’t smart or cultured enough to get it so there’s an apprehension to read and think about it openly. I try to dispel this bias in my class introduction and then spend all semester reminding them. I spent so many times this semester asking my students who they think “the bang gotta be” for? One student finally said the “bang” was for him.
Hi Steven, thanks for your comment. Sounds like you’ve been teaching my West Oakland poems. Many thanks for this! So I agree that students are taught to fear poetry, and that only the “cultured” are supposed to have access to poetry. Please do have a look at my comment in response to Dwayne, re: Juan Felipe Herrera.
I know we study different world poetries as “high art,” or as composed historically in the court and all, when literacy was reserved for certain few. But don’t we also study the history of poetries that the people compose and share via performance/recitation in central gathering places.
I like what you’ve said here, about asking students for meanings of each of the words. I like to ask that too, what’s this word, what does it mean? Which leads to why this word? I think this can be a good editing tool for poets too, to prevent us from going into incomprehensible territory! Why am I using this word? Why this word over its many other possible and less obscure synonyms?
While I agree that the population is in the fast paced dumbing down process – I feel like poetry is in a faster paced race towards a hierarchy of the incomprehensible or conversely a hierarchy of works and poets that are increasingly all a part of the same sort of subset of the population or who write from the subset of interests.
And I think poets have to take full responsibility for that. I see how we don’t look at poetry in the same way as fiction or non fiction – but I’d go further and say we don’t look at poetry, argue about meaning, or get into what is really going on beyond a truly superficial level most of the time – and what I mean by not, as poets, bringing poetry in classrooms that we teach in is essentially saying we aren’t working hard enough to create the atmosphere where people are thinking hard about what’s written.
It’s weird though, because unfortunately for me this failure to read or think about what’s written has always been higher in classrooms where there is a general acceptance of students being a few steps behind. When I’ve taught in private schools or public schools on the nicer part of town, this has rarely been a problem – the getting students to dig into a poem – and when it has, those students responded to uncovering what’s behind the words.
Hi Dwayne, I think you are right, that on the whole, we generally are not “working hard enough to create the atmosphere where people are thinking hard about what’s written.” That is, despite all of the individual educators we know are really doing their best to create and maintain this kind of atmosphere, I do not think this is rewarded in the world outside of poetry communities.
I also agree that poets are responsible for steering poetry into incomprehensible places. I often hear or read poets stating that they themselves don’t understand poetry, or their own poetry, or why they did what they did in a poem. I think this is a little different from a poet who can’t articulate his/her poetics but is working at it. Not to say there isn’t a mystical component to poetry (I have to concede this, as I do believe that poetry can be sacred). But I actually think it’s a cop out, for poets themselves to write incomprehensibly and then claim not to understand what they have written.
So I think the “dumbing down” and this incomprehensibility seem to react to rather than dialogue with one another.
I also agree with your final paragraph that this failure is apparent (or more apparent) in those primary education classrooms which practice soft expectations of certain populations, poor, of color, immigrant, et al. I think though, of how it really can be done – I think of how simple and accessible Juan Felipe Herrera’s explanation of poetics is – if folks in your families tell stories, then they are poetry makers. That is, all human communities compose poetry, have poetry, practice poetry, are skilled practitioners of poetry, in whatever languages they speak, read, and/or write, in how many different forms.