Poor, misunderstood poetry

I’d like to begin, as the romantic poets did, with poetry itself. The talk about poems, and poetry, and life, can come later. Let’s start with a poem that, for me, represents nicely what poems can and should be at their best. It is a very short poem called “The Pasture,” by Robert Frost. This poem was the first poem in Frost’s 1915 collection North of Boston. Please read it aloud, slowly. Then we can consider what it is doing to us and with us.

The Pasture

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha’n’t be gone long.— You come too.

I’m going out to fetch the little calf
That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I sha’n’t be gone long.— You come too.

The speaker of this poem invites us, as readers, to share a moment of experience. With lilting rhythms and simple language, the poem draws and focuses our attention. From “I’m going out” to “You come too” the speaker suggests the sharing of simple pleasures. And even though he claims that he “sha’n’t be gone long” and the poem is brief, a world of timeless awareness and possibility lies just beyond the practical moments here. “I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away,” the narrator claims, suggesting that simple daily work is the cause of this trip. But the beauty of the moment opens up with lines that suggest reflection, broadened attention, and intensified awareness. The narrator may “wait to watch the water clear,” pausing in his daily rounds. As he “fetches” the calf, he will be aware that it is so young that it “totters when she licks it with her tongue.” Pleasure and awareness of beauty are deeply connected to the world of everyday activity here. Poetry invites us to recognize, and remember, and remind ourselves of the pleasures and beauties that surround us. It provides an affective bridge connecting our different worlds of personal experience, and by doing so it captures something of essential truth. Great poetry invites us to experience new things, to experience familiar things in a new way, and to re-consider the ways we approach our daily lives and our interactions with the world. As Ellen Dissanayake claims for art in general, its role is “making special.” And that makes it valuable, indeed.

What is Poetry, Anyway?

I’ve been asking students this question for more than a decade, usually on the first or second day of class. Usually I will ask them to come up with some words that describe poetry: “based on your experience, what do you think of when you hear the word ‘poetry’? Write down 2 or 3 words that you associate with poetry.” They sit and think, and start to scribble down some words, and then we discuss their associations. While the answers have varied to some degree, a good number of terms come up nearly every time I ask the question. They include:

emotional
difficult
meter
rhyme (scheme)
feelings
boring
personal
rhythm
deep/profound

After discussing these ideas with class after class of students who are new to the study of English at the college level (first year “Introduction to Literature” and second year “British Literature II” students), I have come to the conclusion that these terms cluster around three “centers of response” that tell us a lot about how we (as a culture) think about poetry. Re-arranging the key terms above brings these clusters into view:

rhyme (scheme)                              emotion                                         difficult
meter                                              feeling                                           deep/profound
rhythm                                            personal                                        boring

The first group centers on poetry as form, or as a collection of formal rules and properties. The second group focuses on poetry as the expression of personal feelings. The third group centers on poetry as non-ordinary use of language, and both exalts (“deep”) and questions the value of (“boring”) such uses of language. As we discuss these responses, students reveal some interesting and worrisome views about language, about schooling, and about art. Let’s consider them for a moment.

First of all, students have often been “taught poetry” in one of two ways. I will call them the “objective” and “subjective” schools. The objective school of poetry-teaching focuses on poetic forms and conventions, and tends to be term- and test-heavy. By forcing students to memorize the difference between dactyls and iambs, and forcing them to identify different rhyme schemes in sonnets, and forcing them to analyze metric patterns, this school typically erases any interest students may have originally had in poetry itself. In Wordsworth’s terms, it “murders to dissect,” killing the pleasures of poetry even as it reduces poetry to clear, well-defined, rule-bound behavior. But it is clear and well-defined, and for that reason, it is well-suited to our current educational environment.

The subjective school of poetry, on the other hand, takes us into the realm of Dead Poets’ Society. It focuses on poetry as powerful personal expression tapping into the depths of the psyche, and tends to be more about performance and reaction than careful analysis. In fact, it tends to shun analysis as “murdering to dissect.” By shunning analysis, of course, it opens another set of possible interest-killing problems. What if the feelings expressed are different from my own? They usually are. And what if (shudder) the author wrote those feelings down in a prior century? What can that have to do with me, a progressive 21st century person?

Both of these schools create difficulties for students who are exploring poetry, and the third group of connections reveals them. For students who are submitted to the subjective approach, poetry is profound or deep, but inaccessible, hard to follow, and often unrelated to their experiences. For those who endure the objective approach, poetry is complicated and technical. It is, as a result, inevitably boring. So as a college teacher of poetry, my work is cut out for me. I must begin by convincing students that poetry can be more than mere technique, more than purposeful and often pointless difficulty, more than the “gush of feelings” voiced by people who are long dead and probably irrelevant.

How has poetry gotten into this mess? And what does the mess tell us about the ways we approach language, meaning, and learning?

More soon. . . comments appreciated from all my friends who are poets, or value poetry.