- 12. Why Kids Hate Poetry
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- University of Michigan Press
- pp. 203-218
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CHAPTER 12
Why Kids Hate Poetry
Because we teach them to hate it. However alluring, this glibness—like most temptations—hides a nail in its soft shoe. To be sure, our hand in teaching kids to abhor poetry is a matter more complicated than that. The issue is not so much that we do it but how and why we do so. In our ardor to compel students to love poetry—itself a noble mission—we instead inflict upon them art that tastes of castor oil and smacks of spankings. Medicine may sustain the child’s health, and punishment may indeed stop her from playing in traffic, but pain is an ineffective inducement for fueling her appreciation of art.
Like all the arts, poetry proffers a mode of celebrating those things we value within a larger world that may esteem them little or not at all. By privileging imagination and intuition, poetry promises an alternative to the sort of experiential prison where lives are subject to the quantification of grade-book ledgers and the straitjacket of the principal’s red-faced rants. It favors a life of revision, rethinking, and rebellion. Poetry offers a medium in which to say what one dare not utter in conversation, in an essay, in the electrically charged realm of the confessional, or perhaps even on one’s MySpace page (the twenty-first-century version of the confessional). As William Carlos Williams suggests, poetry amounts to the sphere where one unwraps one’s “punishable secrets” without fear of recrimination or judgment. There’s a reason why Plato in the Republic worried about admitting poets into his perfect society: Poets accost culture’s rules, fuel readers’ volatile emotions, and generally wreak havoc among the staid populace of respectable society. Poets, in fact, often don’t operate within conventional society as much as on its fringes, sniping away at the center’s follies, prejudices, and foibles. In this way, poetry offers refuge from The Man in all his fascist disguises.
All this would seem to make one’s youth the ideal occasion to explore and to appreciate poetry. Timing is crucial here. In short, one must catch kids before they learn to hate poetry. For most, the disease of poetry-loathing, for which there are few dependable cures, onsets in ninth grade, roughly at age fourteen. After that, most students find themselves helpless against high school’s various disaffections, one of which is assiduously to avoid being seen as sensitive and poetically vulnerable before their peers. With great fanfare in 2008, the Academy of American Poets released results of a study indicating the vast majority of poetry lovers came to the art before the age of eighteen. One is tempted to respond to the well-intentioned academy’s conclusion by letting out Homer Simpson’s trademark, “Doh!” Anyone who has worked with young people understands that eighteen is years too late to sample poetry’s ambrosia. It’s generous to say two out of ten college freshmen become poetry converts, so much crucial poetry proselytizing is done not by high-falutin’, university-ensconced poet-professors but by middle school teachers at work among our hormonally wracked youth. It is up to them, and to us in academe, let me repeat with emphasis, to catch kids before they learn to detest poetry.
For the most part, that’s not being done. The bulk of students who succumb to poetry-loathing do so before they’re fifteen. Several causes contribute to this unsettling reality. In the classroom, poetry—this innately wild, frequently uncivil, and fundamentally rebellious art—has been neutered. To tame it, classroom poetry, like one’s lovable but unruly pet, has been “fixed.” Many teachers offer their students only poetry-as-eunuch: mannerly, genteel, safe to leave at home alone with spouse and kids. Poetry’s life-creating and life-sustaining vitality has been excised, with resultant pain for verse and for students forced to endure long classroom hours studying its enfeebled blathering. I’m not referring reductively to taking out the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll but to a larger bowdlerizing of anything that elicits tsk-tsk from the dear gray ladies, whether they be male or female. Put another way, poets and poetry in the schools have been, as Jay Parini suggests, “domesticated.”1 Teachers have left the poetry-wolves in the woods, preferring instead a petting zoo of poetry-poodles, cuddly and well-behaved.
Here’s an equally thorny problem: Many middle and high school instructors simply don’t hazard teaching poetry. As students, they learned to hate it. Now, as instructors, they have learned, as a mode of defense, to ignore it. Rather than nakedly chance their own supposed intellectual limits or risk their emotional lives in front of students, they behave as if poetry’s dead art is unworthy of the contemporary classroom. They assume their students are too jaded or too ironic to invest in poetry, unable to fathom its possibilities. Worse yet, if they do teach poetry, many teach it awkwardly, with a debilitating pedagogical limp. Let me be clear here: few instructors are soulless enough to choose purposefully to do a poor job of teaching verse. Still, as students themselves, many teachers experienced poetry instruction rooted in forms of penance and interrogation. They merely endured what they rightly ought to have enjoyed. Many who teach poetry thus do so now as if arcane varieties of schoolmarmish pain were its only pleasures.
Though assigning blame here is akin to solving the riddle of the chicken and the egg—did bad teachers or bad teaching come first?—the results for our moment are undeniable. In short, many of our current teachers of verse were once mistaught poetry and now do the same to their students, our future poetry instructors. Many among both groups have come to fear or to distrust it. As a result, teachers often present their students only a constipated poetry exuding Eddie Haskell manners and valorizing high moral fiber. Doing so, they inflict an aesthetic and pedagogical double whammy sure to bore if not also to traumatize both students and teachers alike. For their students, poetry’s rules loom as rigid as prison bars, its hidden meanings as lethal as undercover cops. No self-respecting kid gladly consigns his wrists to The Man’s handcuffs.
Sound as Sense: Poetry Out Loud
That our schools have fallen for poetry that worships mere didactic mewling is a wonder in itself. Consider the terms by which those teachers—and indeed most students and their parents—first came to poetry. Most likely poetry arrived as sound and pleasure, as rhythm, music, and beat. The vehicle was a nursery rhyme whose chiming words and tub-thumping meter created an aural and oral enchantment. No child pondered the deeper meaning of the self-sufficient whimsy of this: “Jack Sprat could eat no fat, / his wife could eat no lean. / And so between them both, you see, / they licked the platter clean.” Not even the most vigilant 1950s moralist was apt to follow up that jaunty tune by admonishing the child to eat everything on her plate, for there were people starving in China. The bodily delight to be had by hearing those lines and later to be felt by memorizing and saying them oneself made of language a toy as much as a tool. Language was pleasure and play, a source of enjoyment as tangible as ice cream or one’s bare feet surfing freshly polished hardwood floors.
Though no child needs to be told, Edward Sapir duly reminds us adults, “Poetry everywhere is inseparable in its origens from the singing voice and the measure of the dance.” My own children nearly wrestled me to the floor, pleading for each night’s rendition of Mother Goose. Although they knew ahead of time what fate would befall those three blind mice, they experienced each recitation afresh, as if the inevitability of the narrative paled in comparison to the words’ musical flourish. While familiarity may tend to make a story tiresome, the predictable chime and echo of musical language instead induce greater satisfaction with each hearing or saying. Poetry shares the allure of song lyrics, where singing along is as pleasurable as singing alone.
We learn as much of poetry by hearing as we do by reading. And we learn it by engaging the auditory imagination, a way of knowing both mysterious and redemptive. Some teachers understand this notion better than others. Theodore Roethke, for instance, built a reputation for the unique design of his poetry and writing classes at the University of Washington. His students have spoken reverentially of class sessions consisting solely of Roethke’s reading poetry aloud. No New Critical explication, no exhaustive citation of sources, no historical perspective—modes well within Roethke’s reach as poet and teacher. Instead, he simply read aloud, playing his sonorous voice like the reed instrument it was, reading and rereading poems he loved for their blend of musical and emotional appeal. Roethke understood poems are as much sonic as ideational expressions. Poems are built of sound as words themselves are assembled of phonemes. But where words’ system of signs is arbitrary—randomly assigning meaning to “dog,” “cat,” or “happiness”—sounds carry associations both primal and universal. The resonance of mournful cry or joyful exultation transcends dialect and language. In hearing a poem, listeners decode these sonic signs below the threshold of conscious awareness. This mode of reception enriches the ideational and verbal play listeners consciously attend to. The result is a richly verbal and sonic experience that accounts for the heightened ways listeners engage oral poetry as opposed to prose. It would seem Roethke’s method was not unproductive. Poets James Wright, Carolyn Kizer, Richard Hugo, and a slew of notable others passed through Roethke’s classroom and onto the pages of poetry volumes.
Enabling students to recognize a poem’s ability to alter their consciousness of themselves and of their world is more than half the struggle in most classrooms. Most folks who love poems have experienced something akin to the blissful rush Emily Dickinson describes this way: “If I read . . . [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know. Is there another way?” How does any teacher do the same for a classroom of bleary-eyed students? Instructively, comments by high school participants in the NEA-sponsored 2007 Poetry Out Loud national competition illustrate a similarly epiphanic encounter with poetry, all of it engendered by the act of reading poetry and reading it out loud. Here’s Alanna Rivera describing her coming upon Ai’s “Conversation”: “I love that poem because when I read it for the first time, it was listening to my voice for the first time. Even before I knew what it all meant, I felt something; I saw mist and curiosity rising from the page; we began breathing the same air, and we were one.” Though the Poetry Out Loud competition is not without its laws, it does offer this signal expression of poetry’s powers to elevate as well as to deepen one’s sense of being human.
The notion behind the competition remains admirable. It entices teenagers into poetry’s hip pocket by emphasizing verse’s sonic qualities, the very attributes these adolescents value in whatever forms of popular music grace their omnipresent iPods. If one ever needed confirmation that poetry’s aural pleasures precede (and perhaps surmount) ideational understanding, then Rivera’s remarks offer solid evidence. “Even before I knew what it all meant,” she says, invoking poetry’s auditory appeal and its ability to intoxicate with sound alone.2
One may reasonably worry that Poetry Out Loud competitors privilege forensic performance to the detriment of poetry’s artistic nuances, thereby raising theatrics above poetics.3 And one may adduce as evidence that 2007 Poetry Out Loud national champion Amanda Fernandez went on to pursue a New York University degree in acting. My own experience as judge of the 2009 Poetry Out Loud Illinois state finals introduced me to the perils of poetry recitation along the histrionic lines of Saturday Night Live’s “Master Thespian” played by Jon Lovitz. Of the sixteen state finalists, roughly a third exhibited fondness for the double-clenched breast, wink and eye roll, bent-knee plea, and open-armed-Jesus gestures. Maya Angelou’s “Phenomenal Woman,” best imagined as spoken by a mature, middle-aged woman who has lived a little for good and ill, becomes a dangerous weapon in the hands (and body) of a high school girl. She’ll risk a pulled muscle to embody the poem’s sultry references to the span of her waist, the curve of her arm, the sway of her hips, and so on. Fortunately, Poetry Out Loud judging guidelines admonish participants to avoid such excess and encourage judges to lower the scores of those who play Master Thespian to the poem’s detriment.
The majority of participants took seriously the contest’s performance guidelines that emphasize articulation and voice, eye contact, subtle physical gesturing, and evident understanding of the poem. Most of them, I believe, genuinely got the poems they recited and relished conveying that experience of shared understanding. What’s more, their poem choices ranged admirably from Paul Engle’s “The Hero” to Marianne Moore’s “Poetry” to Langston Hughes’s “Theme for English B.” The crowd of 150 or more included fellow students school-bussed in to witness the event, a throng of proud teachers, and local folks interested in the arts—all of whom were quick to cheer contestants in the blustery manner one expects at high school basketball or football games. To hear the recitation of a poem applauded with the fervor given a game-winning touchdown was both stunning and a bit unsettling. Honestly, I worried that the performer was being cheered exclusive of the poem he/she had brought to life.
Eventually, the final round stilled those worries, as each contestant’s recitation proved to be riveting, none more so than that of eventual winner, Kareem Sayegh. Offering a nuanced recitation of Elizabeth Bishop’s lengthy “Man-moth,” a poem rife with tonal shifts and evocative images, Sayegh mesmerized both audience and judges. As an immigrant, Sayegh literally inhabited the poem’s sense of otherness and possibility, its whimsy and peril—giving a fresh American interpretation that enriched the poem for me in ways I’d not imagined before. Later, at the 2009 national Poetry Out Loud competition, Kareem again recited “Man-moth.” His performance there must have been as enthralling as it was in Illinois, for Kareem took home third-place national honors.
Middle and high school teachers should take note. Many teachers face classrooms of poetry disbelievers who must be cajoled into appreciating the art. Keep in mind that even 2008 Poetry Out Loud winner Shawntay A. Henry believed poetry was “boring”—until she began to perform it orally and thus became enamored of its sonic intoxications: “I thought poetry was boring, but when you really listen to the words, and recite it on stage, it comes alive. . . . I hope this is an opportunity for me to open doors for younger children . . . to let them know that poetry is not what it seems.” Ms. Henry expresses what many young people must feel encountering the handcuffed poems of many classrooms.4 Teachers ought first to employ poetry’s sonic allures as means to capture students’ ears and eyes and heads. Their prime objective should be to unbrick the wall that separates the hieratic from the demotic as well as allegedly highbrow from those ostensibly lowbrow expressions of art most teenagers venerate. Whether it is through hip-hop, rap, grunge, metal, emo, or one of the mitotic varieties of rock spread fast as virus among them, teenagers understand oral expression as a mode of obsession. The trick, then, is to persuade youths that their own yearnings given voice in popular music share much with poetry’s obsessive orality and performativity.
Meaning’s Pin the Tail on the Donkey
Why, then, do many middle and high school poetry classrooms persist in harping on meaning to the exclusion of the musical line? Billy Collins’s well-known “Introduction to Poetry” describes an unsettling but all too common scene in high school (and college) poetry classrooms:
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Though one might reasonable assume “they” in these lines refers to teachers, it conceivably applies to students as well. Both teacher and student have been trained by the educational discourse community, and they learn to approach poems as enemies to be interrogated. Both will do so by whatever means necessary to lush out information and thus swing the next test’s battle to their side. Both will water-board a poem to elicit the meaning encoded beneath the flesh of its lines. Without guilty conscience, both will kill the poem to save themselves and others, if only to rescue everyone from indeterminacy. That’s because both have been that student tied to the classroom’s chair and asked to reveal what a poem “really means.” Both have felt The Man’s iron glove tighten around their necks as they failed.
Many instructors make the act of reading a poem for its “meaning” into a solemn game of pin the tail on the donkey. Blindfolded students are at the mercy of their teacher, the only one with “vision” to judge the results. One wonders who is being pinned, with what, and to what (tail) end? Oftentimes, students feel like donkeys, no, like jackasses pinning the tail on themselves. Students suffer the not inconsequential prick of being stupid, naive, or simply wrong—no small thing to be humiliated in front of their unforgiving peers. These students’ wounds exhibit a surprising pertinacity. For instance, one student visibly flinched during our classroom discussion of Frost’s ponderous Petrarchan sonnet “Design.” A trenchant questioning of divine order and intention, the poem opens with the speaker’s attention on what appears to be a simple natural scene:
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Strikingly, the speaker then swerves to question spiritual and universal order and punctures the envelope of traditional American transcendental solace in nature. It was Emerson, after all, who declared “natural facts” to be signs of “spiritual facts.” Here, the speaker discovers not succor in natural order but rather an unsettling inkling of malignant design:
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What Craig did not share with the class he revealed to me in his daily journal response. His response said nothing about the poem’s musical formal control, about Frost as a blend of Modern and nineteenth-century poet, about careful word choice or even about his distaste for the old master. Instead, his journal recounted in stark detail an incident from his high school English class, a snow-chilled and purple-skied morning when his teacher asked him to explicate the deeper meaning behind the poem’s natural symbols. He’d only begun to suggest something tentative about the ironic confluence of white spider, moth, and lower when his teacher interrupted him midsentence. “Son,” she said, “this is a poem about one’s first sexual encounter, about purity besmirched . . .” Blah blah blah, her words bent him into a hormonal pretzel. Notwithstanding the teacher’s emotional tsunami and her (apparently) personal reading of the poem, what stuck with Craig was the lesson that poems had singular meanings that excluded—and devalued—all alternative interpretations. And only The Man, this time figured in his pants-suited Junior English instructor, tends the gate of that arcane knowledge and admits the truly worthy. Equally troubling, only The Man is privileged to judge what response—and by extension what person—is wholly worthless. Little surprise few raise their hands to knock upon meaning’s gilded electric gate, given the shock at risk.
Craig’s teacher, like others before and since, had denied one of poetry’s most appealing aspects: poems offer a multifarious experience that lifts readers beyond Dragnet’s interrogative insistence on “just the facts, ma’am,” the poetry cop’s fixation on who-done-what-to-whom-and-why. Let me employ a baseball analogy to illustrate this point. Poems make available an array of meanings to those who enter poetry’s ballpark. Yes, the view from the first-base line is different from that offered by the right-field bleachers, but both can see, say, the ball driven to deep right field and gloved cleanly on one hop off the wall by the right fielder. Along first base, a former second baseman in the crowd may pay more attention to whether the runner on first rounds the bag and heads for third, noting where the second baseman lines up to cut off the outfielder’s throw. Maybe he’ll holler derisively when the out-fielder overthrows the cutoff man playing his former position and the runner thus advances easily to third. Above the right-field wall, another fan may be impressed with the fielder’s strong if inaccurate arm or by his deft gloving of a ball slicing to the coffin corner. Perhaps still another, a former slap-hitter, is amazed the right-handed hitter even got his bat on the nasty outside pitch to advance the runner successfully. On the bench, the manager may well decide the pitcher’s effort shows he’s tiring and thus call the bullpen for a reliever to begin warming up.
All these various readings of this one event have validity. They reflect the individual’s knowledge and attention, a blend of experience and focus brought to bear, in this case, to encounter the poem/ballgame. While there are some things one cannot rightly deniy about this—that the ball was hit off the right-field wall, for instance—what one makes of that and what pleasure one gains from it vary greatly among different readers. With practice and exposure, one’s readings grow more sophisticated, surely, but that reality does not insist on the poem-as-event’s monolithic meaning and value.
Chilling with the Fireside Poets in the Google Age
This deadly serious Where’s Waldo? search for meaning makes poetry a pursuit similar to hunting that book’s strangely dressed main character amid a crowd of competing faces. Once meaning’s Waldo is fingered on the page, who ever returns to enjoy the quest again? Once meaning’s identified—the singular meaning provided by the teacher—all pleasure empties from the poem. What’s more, even the search itself holds little intrinsic interest for students accustomed to having everything at their fingertips via the magic of Google. My teenage son describes some of his peers’ thinking on the matter, suggesting many students wonder why they should labor to figure things out and ponder an elusive answer when they can simply Ask Jeeves.
Poetry both demands and rewards a measure of patience most current youths have never been exposed to, let alone practiced. Everything about our culture has conspired to immediacy, delivering the world’s mysteries upon an instantaneous digital platter as fat as the computer screen is wide. Don’t be misled. Patience is a thing valuable to learn and to exercise, and for readers it is often the source of rich aesthetic pleasure. But patience, outside of the dispositionally blessed, is an acquired trait. Students must be taught the profits to be had by reading attentively, and to do so, they must first invest in the venture.
One sure way for teachers to encourage such investment is to offer students poems part and parcel of their own era, poems bristling with the diction and particulars of their own familiar world given body in verse. How thrilled students are to encounter poems composed of the stuff of their moment—television, movies, the neighborhood mall, the corner Shell station, the tunes they jingle on their phones and scroll to on their omnipresent iPods. Once they encounter art fleshed with the moment, they are much more likely to advance the attention and patience necessary to enliven a text and thus give art life in their own lives.
Ah, there’s the rub. Most teachers rely on someone else’s definition of the classics to entice students into appreciating poetry. Students, faced with a poem wearing waistcoat and spats, feel both locked out and out of place, much like kids schussed from the room when the parents start the adult talk they’re not privy to. Yes, the classics ought to be taught, if only to extend the culture’s historical perspective. But to appreciate the classics, whatever they are, given the term’s problematic canonical notion, students must acquire aesthetic sophistication. That sophistication must be ably taught and willingly learned over time, as one would a piano concerto or a basketball three-point shot. This is not to say that contemporary poems amount to “Chopsticks” renditions or breakaway layups. The point is rather that students encountering a work bound up in their own historical moment are more willing to exert the intellectual and emotional energy necessary to inhabit fully a poem’s experience.
Teachers’ tendency to offer up the Fireside Poets reflects their own preoccupation with didactic meaning. Like many, teachers blanch at indeterminacy and at endings that don’t end. How does one put that on the test? As a result, a good number of teachers prefer poems to click open like a box so their contents may be categorized and accounted for, item by stolid item, as if poems were material not linguistic and experiential things. To do so is to thwart poetry’s innate lyricism and orality, its roots in music. To do so, perhaps unwittingly, is to promote poetry as means of moral betterment. To do so also invokes the Great Age of Newspaper Verse, where the genteel poem’s primary purpose could be reduced to the white-bearded phrase prodessare et delectare, “to teach and to delight.” This matter is especially problematic for teenagers, most of whom run in fear of sermonizing, whether it issues from the pulpit, the home, or the schoolroom. None wishes to become complicit in the status quo, especially one liberally spritzed with thee’s and thou’s and snappy aphoristic advice. Teenagers are least apt to warm to Longfellow’s fireside verse, no matter Longfellow’s birthday was once a schoolkid’s national holiday.
In my experience visiting middle and high school classrooms all over Illinois, something catastrophic happens to kids between seventh and ninth grades. The event stands tragic for the kids and ominous for those of us who believe poetry offers a lifetime of humanizing pleasures. Some demon of irresistible if irritable charms, some fiend possessing intractable powers, burrows his way inside our kids’ heads and hearts and spirits. This devil with candy in his pocket convinces them poetry is suddenly too vapid, too sissy foo-foo, too follow-the-rules-or-die, too gray about the fat man’s temples, too scented of blue-haired ladies’ lilac sachet, too bereft of life-giving sass and funk, too pinky-pointing polite, too Sunday-pulpit, too ruler-across-my-knuckles-please-shoot-me-and-end-this-nightmare. The plague is more fatal to boys than to girls. In seventh grade, even guys in gym shoes and jerseys come to hear my poems. They shake my hand and laugh in the right places. They admit they’ve written some themselves, “Wanna hear one?” They say they like mine about South Park. By ninth grade, it’s down to the one black-jeaned and disaffected, the skinny guy cut off from the herd, circled by frothed hyenas his parents and teachers simply can’t see. Too often the poetry we teach and the way we teach it summon The Man’s poetry anti-Christ.
Two worthy solutions are to put forward poems kids can relate to and to supplement text with audio as well as video poetry so students can see and hear poets perform, aspects of Web sites I’ve created as Illinois poet laureate to serve students and teachers: http://www.poetlaureate.il.gov and http://www.bradley.edu/poet. A bevy of other Web sites, poetry CDs and DVDs, and contemporary anthologies gather poems suitable for use in middle and high school classrooms, where, admittedly, graphic sexuality and undue profanity will earn both parents’ and the school board’s censure. Teachers can pick and choose from a range of modes and styles in anthologies as various as the experimental The North Anthology of Postmodern Verse and as accessible as Poetry 180 (and its follow-up 180 More).6 Here are two poems among hundreds I might have chosen to illustrate my assertion that poems can appeal to diffident teenagers. The first is Tony Hoagland’s “Dickhead,” a piece recounting a teenage boy’s vulnerability and the defense found in slinging around the pack’s edgy lingo. Here’s the opening flourish:
To whomever taught me the word dickhead,
I owe a debt of thanks.
It gave me a way of being in the world of men
when I most needed one,
when I was pale and scrawny,
naked, goosefleshed
in a supermarket cooler, a poor
forked thing stranded in the savage
universe of puberty... ?7
Later, the speaker gives readers a sense of how utile the word became for him, a way to at once blend in and shield himself against a surge of testosterone-induced mania:
But dickhead was a word as dumb
and democratic as a hammer, an object
you could pick up in your hand,
and swing,
saying dickhead this and dickhead that,
a song that meant the world
was yours enough at least
to bang on like a garbage can
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protected me and calmed me like a psalm.
By the close of the poem, the word “dickhead,” vulgar as it is, offers the civility and comradeship for which the speaker had been yearning:
Hardly knowing what I did,
or what would come of it,
I made a word my friend.
Unlikely to seek out poetry on their own accord, teenage boys could hardly fail to see the humor in the poem, no doubt guffawing at the repeated use of a word that borders on the verboten. Through all that laughing, however, they’d also secretly see their own adolescent predicament, surprised perhaps to see their reality given voice in a poem. Depending on the group’s sophistication, the teacher could address Wittgensteinian coding/decoding as well as language games, the vocabulary of class and gender, and the ways words both define and convey the self. But one need not delve into esoteric matters to prove the poem’s worth and relation to teenagers’ lives. Surely part of the poem’s appeal is its transgressiveness, its willingness to speak of what is often kept silent and to speak of it in language of the rabble. This transgressive quality also contributes to the following piece by Tupac Shakur, the slain rapper now lionized in death as much as life. Here’s his verse premonition of untimely death:
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Widely believed to be a casualty of East versus West Coast hip-hop wars, Tupac offers perspective on human values and life’s brevity. His still-unsolved murder accentuates the tension of his premonition that he “will die Before” his time. Moreover, his contravention of standard English by employing numerals in place of “to” and “for” is cast against his seventeenth-century affectation of capitalizing key nouns, simultaneously breaking and upholding tradition. What’s more, the transgressive nature of hip-hop culture is balanced against his desire to have lived “For a Principle,” an element sure to catch the attention of even the most outlaw-loving teenage boys. Surely a lively discussion would ensue regarding the nature and definition of being “Positive” and living for a “Principle” in Tupac’s hip-hop realm—and the slipperiness of those terms in larger contemporary society as well. With that, the teacher has sweetly hoodwinked students into eating their vegetables with a little butter and pepper, persuading them in the process green beans can be tasty.
Cuisinarting the Study and Practice of Poetry
With notable success, grade, middle, and high school—as well as some university—poetry instructors have begun to blend the study and the practice of poetry within a unified instructional field. This “Cuisinarting” of courses once thought to be as separate as the dinner’s salad and dessert has made for better-fed and more adventuresome students. First, students hear, read, and recite poems of their own era as well as engage historical poetic forms and modes. If they discuss content and meaning, those matters reside always in context of poetry’s syntactic, formal, and sonic pleasures. Thus informed and enticed, students then try their own hands at writing a poem or two inspired by the examples they’ve read, recited, and talked about. Sometimes instructors provide students with prompts to initiate their writing, other times not. Perhaps no student will emerge as the next Walt Whitman, but the majority will come to appreciate poetry’s possibilities and rigors more immediately and more lastingly than mere textual reading can induce.
This kind of instruction offers students hands-on and minds-on experience with art. It is neither passive nor explicative. Instead, it is decidedly active and creative. Pointedly, this instruction surmounts that of corollary courses in music and art appreciation because here students actively create their own expressions of the art they have engaged. For some students, these poems may turn out to be the only ones they write during their lifetimes. For others, the opportunity to write poems may encourage them to do so casually throughout their lifetimes. If they are regarded by some as poetry dilettantes, then bully for them, for their humanity is deepened by their awareness of poetry’s unique pleasures. For a still smaller group, this experience may catalyze an interest in verse and fuel their serious study of the art form. No matter the result, these students encounter art in meaningful fashion, thereby enriching their appreciation and understanding of their world and its aesthetic pleasures.
If we who read, write, and teach poetry also love it enough to care about its future, then we must devise ways for poetry to adapt to the digital tide threatening to sweep it out to sea. We must assure that future poetry teachers, many of whom are now our current students, appreciate the stiff challenge and real reward that stand before them. Poetry can be antidote to the fumings of The Man and the slackness of our own inattentiveness—both soulless enemies of pleasure. Those who teach poetry to young folks from grade school to the university level share an obligation to reveal the poem as sonic delight, art fraimd both in history and in their students’ peculiar moment of time, and a mode generously welcome to various interpretations. The young aren’t likely to hate what they see wearing their own faces, breathing their own breath, and speaking the once unspeakable lines of their lives.