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Teaching Poetry · Aug 25, 07:45 PM

Over my years of teaching introductory creative writing I have often been stymied by the preconceptions about poetry that my students bring with them to the class. This semester, I decided to try an empirical approach. On the first day, I assigned them four poems from the anthology we’re using: Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 130” (My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun), Swift’s “A Description of the Morning,” Bukowski’s “my old man” & Sharon Olds’ “I Go Back to May 1939” (though I am not much impressed by Olds’ work). What I was trying to do is give these real beginners a problem to solve. How can we call all these different works poetry? What do they have in common? For all you radicals out there, don’t worry—I’ll be having them reading Ron Silliman by the end of the semester. Baby steps, baby. I also gave them Moore’s anthology piece, “Poetry” & a very early poem by Laura Jensen, “What is Poetry,” which includes the line, “the purpose of poetry is to make the reader worry deeply.”

Today in class I asked, given only the sample of poems they had read, to try to define poetry & I encouraged them to proceed empirically. After all, many of the students in the class are majoring in the sciences or in engineering, so empiricism ought to come naturally to them, no? No, not really. The first responses had to do with self-expression, personal experience, feelings, etc. I accepted all such ideas with bland approbation—I have great admiration for the Romantic tradition from which such notions of poetry spring. It is just that I think we have been propelled past Romanticism, though you might not notice if you hadn’t been watching. When one student—bless him—suggested that poetry ought to be “accurate,” I had my opening & I began developing the idea that poetry can face outward as much as inward. And when another student—bless her—suggested that poetry had both “flow” & “pattern” I was able to zero in on some of the specifically linguistic qualities of poetry.

So that’s what I’ll be working to develop over the coming weeks. The Janus face of poetry that looks not just forward & back, but also inwardly & out. That negotiates the tension between flow & pattern. Their assignment for next week? Write an ars poetica.

* * *

  1. You know, this is very similar to the approach we often take in sciences these days (from the constructivist school of cognition). Information is compartmentalized in the brain, knowledge is tied to context. People can (and usually do) hold contradictory views of the same subject at the same time, but used in different situations. A key to really changing the way someone thinks, instead of merely generating a new compartment (of the answers expected on the exam), is to get them to confront their current conceptions first, and compare them to empirical observations.

    In (basic) physical science, where the right answers are cut and dry, progress can be viewed and measured explicitly. However, because there are definite right and wrong answers, I find it difficult to encourage exploratory thinking in this setting. I’m working on it.
    — efp    08/25/2004 10:27 PM    #
  2. Sounds like a great opening exercise. I began this semester also by asking them how they know something is poetry—how would they describe a poem to a Martian who landed in their back yard. One guy actually offered up “word sculpture” which I kinda liked. But flow, that famous, nebulous flow, that’s tough to get them to break down. (what do you mean, flow? you know, it just flows. [arrgh]) We eventually get there, but not on the first day.
    — Mel    08/28/2004 06:38 PM    #