Say+Something+Wonderful

=Say Something Wonderful: Teaching the Pleasures of Poetry=

By T.J. Gillespie, 2007

The chorus of complaints never changes. Like some atavistic song whose words aren’t taught, but inherited by blood right, the plaintive call resounds through the classroom:

“Why do they have to write like that?” “Why can’t they just say what they mean?” “I liked it. I don’t know what they mean, but I liked it. I mean, I know what they mean, but I don’t know what they //mean// mean. I’m sure there is some secret symbol that I am just not seeing. Right?” “I just don’t get it. This sucks. When are we going to read, like, you know, a novel?”

Every year, without fail, I have students who don’t like English class. I am no longer so naïve or so insecure to take this personally. My students, whether they are sophomores entering the high school for the first time or world weary seniors counting down to graduation, react the same way the first time I mention the p-word: poetry. Fresh faces, still bronzed from summer’s brief respite, arrive in September with new backpacks and virginally pure notebooks, their hair freshly shorn and combed, accoutered in the newest fashions, but burdened with old ideas. While a new school year is a new start in most respects—new seats in a new room, new books, a new teacher with a blank grade book! a new chance to make a first impression—most students bring with them their past experiences, old attitudes and prejudices, and expectations that are difficult to rectify. I have come to realize that any lesson on poetry cannot start with a lecture on stanza forms or symbol, simile or metaphor, not even rhyme (God forbid I mention feet and meter), but rather it must open with deconstructing the bias against poetry [|[1]]. Most high school students criticize the things they don’t understand, but poetry is seen as inscrutable as a foreign language, as challenging as a puzzle missing a key piece, as frustratingly impenetrable as a Kandinsky canvas. The first task is to convince the skeptics that poetry is not some riddle that needs to be solved, but rather language that can be experienced. Poetry can be pleasurable!

I suppose one question that keeps emerging in my head is where did the animosity toward verse come from? Granted, some of my seniors are stats-addicted numerophiles who will be majoring in calculus and engineering and will never have an affinity for poetry, but even some of those kids will eagerly read Joyce’s “Araby” or Dostoevsky’s //Crime and Punishment//, relishing in the difficulty while appreciating the characterization or the plot. What is it about poetry that inspires late-onset narcolepsy and apathetic shutdowns, even among students who genuinely like literature? [|[2]] As a teacher of three sections of Advanced Placement English literature, I often consult the College Board’s materials for test simulations, pedagogical approaches, and other recommendations. I was quite surprised by one line in an otherwise generic A.P. outline on the teaching of poetry: “Appreciation is honorable but not useful.” I was dumbstruck by its callous declaration of priorities. The tone is condescending, dismissive, and, I believe, quite harmful. According to this philosophy (and I wince as I write that; it is more like a testing strategy or marketing campaign than an educational philosophy), readers need to focus on use, on Utility, while antiquated, outmoded Appreciation, like an old professor who, after years of thankless service, still requires memorization or sentence diagramming, is “honorable” in its quaintness. Perhaps, this is why students are reluctant to read poetry—it isn’t seen as useful and they aren’t expected (let alone encouraged) to appreciate it. If we can’t test or measure it, then it must not be important. Because the enjoyment of literature is not tethered to “adequate yearly progress” or legislated accountability or a state standard, because no administrator, school board member or parental group ever pushed for increased appreciation, we focus instead on interpretation, interpolation, close reading, and analysis. We take practice multiple-choice questions. What is lost, of course, is the beauty, the feeling, the power, the art; in short, we’ve lost the poetry.

Since it is my contention that appreciation is not merely honorable //and// useful, but absolutely necessary, I try to frame my classes’ reading by reminding them that poetry can and should affect us emotionally as well as intellectually. This is not to say that I am advocating a feel-good experience where every interpretation is correct, every verse of pop song doggerel is worthy of study, and the priority is making the Metaphysicals “cool” or “hip.” High level thinking, complex analysis, comparative study can still be the ultimate goal, but I don’t believe that seeing the beauty of a Shakespearean love sonnet or being moved by the melancholy longing of a Keats couplet competes with understanding of poetic technique; in fact, I believe it is the greatest kind of understanding. For the last few years I’ve begun my lessons on poetry with two selections from Billy Collins, “Introduction to Poetry” and “Marginalia.” Collins, the former poet laureate and, I write this with genuine respect and admiration, a literary populist, has dedicated himself to making poetry approachable, accessible, and, yes, enjoyable. The latter poem opens as a celebration of the scrawled notations that readers jot in the white perimeter of books before it turns into a confession of the loneliness that results after surreptitious connections with strangers, the feeling that we have when we see someone else has read the same books but we’ll never ever get to meet them. In his “Introduction,” Collins articulates a desire for readers to pick up a poem with curiosity, to look at in the light, to feel around it without the fear of being wrong or feeling the responsibility of solving it. In his final lines, Collins, like all great poets I presume, is able to express feelings that I recognize as my own in words that could only be his:

I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

In the end, this mindset does more than beat the poem down; it beats the interest out of the student, too. We’ve got to convince the kids, the readers, our students that while water skiing may look scary, especially if they’ve never done it before, it is “something wonderful.” It is because I love poetry and I want my students to love it, or at least open themselves to the possibility that they could love it, that I am addressing the National Endowment of the Humanities. When I read Professor Selinger’s letter and description of the seminar projects, I felt like I did when I first read Collins’ poems; here were my feelings shared by others. Like the speaker of “Marginalia” who opens his borrowed copy of //Catcher in the Rye// and discovers the scribbles of a similar soul next to stains of egg salad, I see my world amplified, but instead of the poignant epiphany of being alone, I see the exciting potential to collaborate with like-minded professionals, educators who seek to inspire their students, challenge them to find the beauty in what is difficult, and to find the usefulness in appreciation. Dylan Thomas once described poetry as the thing that “makes me laugh or cry or yawn, what makes my toenails twinkle, what makes me want to do this or that or nothing.” Or maybe even water-ski.

[|[1]] I actually had one of more articulate seniors once diagnose himself as suffering from metrophobia, which he explained was an acute fear of poetry. I don’t know whether this condition actually exists in the // Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders // or not, but I do admire his dedication. [|[2]] I do not mean to imply that all my students are resistant to poetry’s charms. I have a number of kids, both male and female, who fancy themselves creative writers, who keep journals, forward submissions to literary publications and contests, and who copy lyrics to favorite songs into their diaries. I have twelfth grade girls who are obsessively devoted to Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, and I know tenth grade boys who view themselves as budding rappers and will vocally defend Tupac Shakur as hip-hop’s laureate. These students, a small but passionate minority, are a pleasure to have in class, but discussing the joys of poetry to them is, to use the cliché, preaching to the choir. While these students are a great asset in proselytizing their peers, I am still required to come up with honest and compelling arguments for why poetry is worth the effort.