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.

Meditation on Mind and Poesis

We live in a fast-paced world. The pressures we face come from a life on the run—from meetings to emails and phone calls to soccer practices, we work long and hard at our jobs, at parenting, and at figuring out what we are and what we hope to become. The job is not made any easier by our cultural habits. Fast food and fast sex, drive-through restaurants and drive-through relationships, hurry-up educations and hurried career changes. We scurry ahead toward some narrowly-defined destination, climbing the corporate ladder, fueled by coffee, cigarettes and alcohol. Slowing down is not an option, because to slow down is to be less competitive, less successful, less likely to get rich and famous. No one wants to be “slow.”

But something important is lost along the way. Quality engagement. Attention. Depth perception. We skate across the surface of our lives, coolly avoiding both the water under us and the land around us. We interact without engaging and hear without listening. We measure success dollar by dollar and award by award, rather than by personal fulfillment and meaningful, life-enriching results. Our hurry blinds us to our blundering force, which destroys the earth, disrupts our relationships with one another, and impoverishes our collective and individual spirits. We are ill, and need to regain our health—our wholeness and harmony and balance.
And so we seek meaning in New Age ideas, in a return to religious fundamentalism, in “healthy living” and diet and all sorts of quick fixes. But our need is not met. Something vital is missing from our experience of the world, and we don’t know how to recover it.
The problem, oddly enough, is the world that reason has built. Reason and Rationality have been the guiding lights of Western Culture for the past 400 years, and we have come to worship them. The light that led us out of the dark ages! But as Kenneth Burke observed, computers are not only the product of our reason, but the caricature of it. And as Robert Pirsig observed in his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,

The whole university he was attending smelled of the same
ugliness. It was everywhere, in the classroom, in the textbooks.
It was in himself and he didn’t know how or why. It was reason
itself that was ugly and there seemed no way to get free.

Reason, in the particular form that has come to rule our culture, is indeed ugly. It oversimplifies and falsely formulates; it encourages hubris rather than humility; it de-sensitizes us to the local, the individual, and the personal. It encourages us to ignore the irrational, the intuitive, the imaginative, the emotional. In short, it encourages us to ignore the wellsprings of our own lives and relationships. It has become the figurehead of standardized testing, encouraging the multiple-choicing of reality. It has driven technological innovation beyond the bounds of sensitivity to the earth and the life it bears. It has encouraged us to operate within a calculus of large scale building and monetary manipulation, in the domain in which formulas can guide us, rather than in the complex domain of local decision-making and action.

How did Reason become such an ugly and perverse thing? And what can we, as people anxious for a more meaningful life, do about it (without discarding all that it GOOD about rationality)? These questions were first addressed with serious attention in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and we can learn much from the answers that poets, philosophers, and scientists of that era came up with.
One of the answers was simple. Reason is not enough, in and of itself. The manipulation of symbols and formulas, the predictive success of the hard sciences, the logic that we use to make large-scale decisions. All of these are limited in important ways. Negotiation, relationship, interaction, integration are not accommodated well by rational deliberation only. Reason can easily become a tyrannical force that ignores alternatives, rides roughshod over diverse opinions, and destroys difference. It needs to be kept in check.

In addition, we know that reason all-too-easily becomes rationalization. Ideally, we reason without personal interests in mind. Realistically, that does not happen. Reasoning depends on focus, selection, and prioritization. All of these depend on the individual mind—with its interests, prejudices, and pre-existing codes of decision. Thus we must counterbalance reason with an awareness of personal interests and habits of mind.

Reason does not cultivate attention, or wonder, or reflection, or revision. It encourages an instrumental view of materials, creatures, objects, and other people. It narrows our appreciation for uniqueness, reduces our respect for non-human creatures (they aren’t “rational”), and encourages us to dismiss intuition, imagination, and the unknown.

We need a broader understanding of mind, and a better way of looking at the biological and linguistic processes by which meaning is made. Oddly enough, poetry is a vital avenue by which to pursue such understandings.

What can poetry teach us? Well at the peak of the Enlightenment, a shift took place in the world of writing and thinking that placed poetry at the center of the stage. Why? I think it was the assimilation of empirical philosophy and the French Revolution among other things, but the moment was pregnant with possibilities. Apparently the world of brain science was engaging the “embodied mind” with an interest and seriousness that was unprecedented. At the same time, the poets were exploring poetry as a medium of interaction with extended audiences of real people—not just a handful of literati. That medium was ideal for its ability to work on the embodied mind—to create powerful experiences and to alter pre-existing codes of decision. It was, in effect, a technology for moving and uniting people.
In chemical experiments with nitrous oxide, firelit evenings reciting poetry, lecture halls filled with eager listeners and participants, there was an excitement about the possibilities of human experience and the dynamic range of the embodied mind. But there was also fear. What if that is all that mind is? What if we are temporary? Wordsworth did not deal well with this. Coleridge did not either. Somehow there was a swerving away from engagement into denial. And as a result, poetry and science both became more attenuated and less “embodied.” We need to recapture that moment now.

Somehow we were allied with nature in ways that no one was prepared to understand. Darwin’s conclusions were in the air already, but the ways in which his ideas could be interpreted were many.

Wordsworth sensed that our union with the natural world was the site of new and important understanding, and he made it very clear that the development of urban life was an obstacle to that kind of understanding. But why? Because it was fast, and frantic, and mechanical, and impersonal. Small is beautiful, according to E.F. Shumacher, and Wordsworth would have agreed.

The crux of the matter was a view of life which was in harmony with the natural world, small scale interaction, and slow, deliberate cultivation of relationship and meaning over time. Reason and rationality were not dismissed, but they were deemed inadequate in and of themselves. Intuition, feeling, spontaneous connection with all that lived and breathed—a “fellowship of sense with all that breathes” in Barbauld’s terms—were vital too.

So how does poetry fit in? By providing a matrix for experiential learning and relationship that brought the unknown, the possible, and the improbable into the hearts and minds of readers without “overstimulating” their imagination (unlike the “frantic German novels” that Wordsworth disparages).

Rhythmically structured, image-centered, abductive, exploratory language events. Feel it on the pulses, think about it and reflect on its possibilities. Poetry reminds us of the ever-vital, shifting domain of MEANING. It calls attention to the maps we live by and encourages us to re-examine and re-make them when necessary. Poetry is, in a real sense, meditative practice.

Poesis is really what I’m talking about—composition. The making of order out of chaos. The crafting of a life out of possibility. The shaping of meaning out of potential meaninglessness. To learn the right approach to life, one must grow close to poesis. To the patience that comes with faulty beginnings and premature endings, to the persistence that leads to a made thing, to the engagement that recognizes and adapts to changes in the material of life as they approach, to the wonder that recognizes and explores everything beautiful and joyful, to the laughter that never erases seriousness but only leavens it with love and relationship.