I spent about six weeks this semester teaching and talking about poetry with my students. Almost to a person, they started the term with “eh…I don’t much like poetry,” and “I don’t get poetry,” and “what the hell is poetry even about, anyway?”
All reasonable questions, I guess, for students who have grown up in a world where they almost never encounter poetry, other than in song lyrics or spoken-word events. Poetry, they tell me, is intimidating; it doesn’t make sense; it’s too complicated; it’s weird.
Full disclosure: I spent most of high school and all of college writing poetry. Whenever I’d get too philosophical during those late-conversations about Life that seem only to happen between the ages of 18-22 and only between the hours of 12-4AM, my friends would say “oh go write a poem,” as a way to get me to be quiet.
I kept writing poetry even after college—-poetry workshops, sending things off to magazines, the whole deal—-and stopped only when I got to graduate school, which pretty much thrashed every creative bone out of my body. Took me decades to get the graduate school’s pinched-face editor in my head to stop saying things like “maudlin!” “derivative!” and “you call that writing?”
All of which is to say is that although I knew my students wouldn’t be excited about spending all this time reading poetry, I was looking forward to spending time with words, nothing but words. Someone said once that poetry is language calling attention to itself, and while I think poetry can be much more than that, that idea isn’t a bad place to start. Poetry gives us a chance to think about how words feel in our mouths and sound out loud; poetry’s language works by compressing, distilling, wringing an experience or idea to a kind of essence that works on us in ways that we might not ever really understand.
We roamed through Seamus Heaney’s “Digging,” in which a gun transforms to a spade transforms to a pen in the hand of the poet; we looked at John Donne’s “Batter my heart three person’d god,” in which faith becomes a kind of ravishment, a physical experience; we talked about the bleak beauty in some of Anna Akhmatova’s lines; and marveled at the incandescent anger of Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy.” The students put aside “it’s weird,” or perhaps, actually, they began to embrace the weird; they let themselves roam around inside the poems and not insist on absolute meanings. And I got, perhaps, a little carried away by the whole thing and put a sign on my office door that said “Today’s Poem,” and then every day, I would post a new poem — a famous poem, an obscure poem, prose poem, haiku, nabati lyric — all kinds of poems.
One of the poems I put on my door is Ezra Pound’s imagist poem about being in the French Metro, called, fittingly, “In a station of the metro.” It reads like this:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:Petals on a wet, black bough.
And yes, that’s what it looks like on the page, and yes, that’s the entire poem. And yes, it’s a little weird.
But you know? Think about being in a crowded subway station, on a rainy day. Think about the blur of faces. Now think about the blur of wet, say, cherry blossoms on a dark branch.
See?
In his essay “Defence of Poetry,” Percy Bysshe Shelley (every time I say his name in class someone giggles, and I totally get it), said “Reason is the enumeration of qualities already known; imagination is the perception of the value of those qualities, both separately and as a whole. Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things. Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance.”
I guess the student who scrawled this comment at the bottom of the Pound poem wanted to live in a world governed entirely by reason. That strikes me as incredibly limited, and not a little bit sad.
That makes me sad, too.
that cynking feeling recently posted..Sing me a story
How do you know it was a student that wrote that?
Quit wasting paper, to Ezra? Holy crap! I feel like I’m friends with the guy now that I’ve been reading Paris Wife. Geeez!
Stacie recently posted..Comment on Ring My Bell by Stacie
How sadly arrogant.
Alexandra recently posted..It’s Not The Way You See It
That is very limited and actually a waste of their ink perhaps. I could be bias because I have always adored poetry and in school loved English classes and anything to do with words. I always liked this, that I found in a poetry book, Viper Rum by Mary Karr. “When the mind swings by a grass-blade an ant’s forefoot shall save you.” – Ezra Pound – Canto LXXXIII
Donetta recently posted..What’s In A Name
Oh man. There is nothing worse as a teacher, in my opinion, then when a student is so utterly dismissive of something you are passionate about. It’s true that maybe a student didn’t write that… but it doesn’t really matter – it’s that same sinking feeling. yuck.
Lynda recently posted..Sending Help to the Philippines
i don’t “get” most poetry but I certainly would never trash it. Sad.
Robbie recently posted..Pretending Normal