Some Thoughts on Reading, Writing and Teaching Poetry by Chard deNiord

SOME THOUGHTS ON READING, WRITING, AND TEACHING POETRY

In memory of Thomas Lux

It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the best books. They impress us with the conviction that one nature wrote and the same reads. We read the verses of one of the great English poets, of Chaucer, of Marvell, of Dryden, with the most modern joy—with a pleasure, I mean, which is in great part caused by the abstraction of all time from their verses. There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had well-nigh thought and said. But for the evidence thence afforded to the philosophical doctrine of the identity of all minds, we should suppose some pre-established harmony, some foresight of souls that were to be, and some preparation of stores for their future wants, like the fact observed in insects, who lay up food before death for the young grub they shall never see.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Literature holds meaning not as a content that can be abstracted and summarized, but as experience… It is a participatory arena. Through the process of reading we slip out of our customary time orientation, marked by distractedness and superficiality, into the realm of duration… We hold in our hands a way to cut against the momentum of the times. We can resist the skimming tendency and delve; we can restore, if only for a time, the vanishing assumption of coherence. The beauty of the vertical engagement is that it does not have to argue for itself. It is self-contained, a fulfillment.

— Sven Birkerts, from The Guttenberg Elegies

When it comes to poetry, the particular “fulfillment” that Sven Birkerts alludes to in his quote above as the emotional and intellectual reward of reading tends to resonate more memorably than in fiction and nonfiction for its its distilled language, and what W. H. Auden called its “memorable speech.” The rare success of a memorable poem’s verbal magic lies in its execution of mnemonic pleasure, new meaning, and oral music. When a poet writes a poem that rises to all three of these challenges, often largely unconsciously since the unconscious exists so often as the muse’s hideout, she feels she can’t take credit for what she’s written. “I did not write it!” Ruth Stone often proclaimed to me near the end of her life when I asked her about why and when she had written a particular poem. While it is ultimately impossible to explain the compositional mystery behind a memorable poem, the one thing that an enduring poem displays is the happy marriage of emotion to the psyche in lapidary expression that balances the literal with the connotative. Not that this doesn’t also occur in successful fiction, but such verbal economy has always defined the power of poetry for its efficacy in beguiling its reader both immediately and lastingly.
Only a small minority of Americans, 11.7 percent according the National Endowment of the Arts, read poetry. But why? It’s no secret that most Americans don’t have time to read poetry, especially poetry that isn’t immediately accessible. And since the multifarious, often dense, figurative language of poetry intimidates most novice readers and nonreaders of poetry, poetry tends to sit on the back shelves of bookstores and libraries. Most American college students find little “use” for it as a promising vocational subject and tend consequently to believe that there are more important fields of study, especially if they want to find gainful employment. This was my experience observing and teaching myriad undergraduates at a prestigious northeastern college for twenty-two years. Over the past fifteen years, this same attitude among the architects of higher education has led to a less wholistic national curriculum in a course of required courses dubbed STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) that by omitting the A from its original acronym takes the steam out of its pedagogical vision for young American students.
In America’s largely utilitarian culture, poetry tends to be viewed as a subjective literary art without any one instruction manual. Its verbal beauty appeals selectively and often in unwitting ways to Americans as essential, “memorable speech” first rather as an aesthetic art, as one witnesses, for instance, in so many citizens’ admiration and even reverence for the language in that seminal prose poem, the Declaration of Independence. But how to extrapolate from and extend beyond such institutional poetic appeal of a poem like this political document to more everyday subjects? How to instill poetry into America’s psyche as common, transformative language that even the government would celebrate, as, say, Brazil did by putting the picture of the poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade along with one of his poems on its fifty-cruzado banknotes? Poetry must be demythologized as a runic literary art in America if it is ever to reach a national audience in the way Andrade’s poetry has in Brazil if it is to be valued as timeless language that functions, as Andrade wrote as a credo, “to awaken men and make children sleep.”
In thinking about the primary conceit of this essay, I asked myself, If one had to pick an American poem has served for over a hundred years now since its publication in 1923 as an enduring riddle for understanding both the difficulty and immediate appeal of poetry, what would it be? There are many options, of course, but if I had to choose one, I think it would be William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” which descends so tightly:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

When one searches for a correct interpretation of this poem’s single enigmatic assertion, no sensible explanation comes immediately to mind. No sane reader could be blamed for thinking that this poem betrays an aborted assessment of something that needs further explanation. So why then give it any further thought? Williams, unlike Andrade in his credo, leaves his reader in the dark in his best-known poem’s famous ellipsis. Even after close consideration, the poem reads more as an unfinished poetic puzzle than anything else. What exactly was Williams thinking when he wrote it besides saying something incoherent about, of all things, a red wheelbarrow? That’s a more than fair question. One might assume from this poem that Williams preferred a nonsensical proclamation about an unspecified subject’s need for a red wheelbarrow over against any need to make sense of it. The poem’s vagueness and seemingly purposeful disregard for poetry’s “bad name” among many novice readers of poetry has no doubt contributed to poetry’s reputation as being gratuitously esoteric, difficult, and inaccessible. Surely Williams anticipated his American readers’ response to his little poem’s seeming nonsense, but wrote it anyway. However, if one suspected while reading “The Red Wheelbarrow” for the first time in 1923, at the height of Modernism, that more was going on than mere annoying obfuscation, then she would have been correct in suspecting Williams’s intention for this poem to be more of a hint at something that was “so much”—something, in fact, he felt was ineffable, even in poetry. He took a bold risk in trusting his reader to intuit his hint. He had recently read Ezra Pound’s definition of an image as “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” and seemed, in his writing of “The Red Wheel Barrow,” to be viewing his composition of the poem as an assignment almost for illustrating Pound’s affective and intellectual criterion for “the image.”
When readers and students of poetry grasp this implicit definition of an image in Williams’s poetic illustration of it, purposefully incomplete as it is without any explanation of what “so much” actually is, then they grasp the verbal efficacy of the word image, as well as the simultaneous psychic and affective results it elicits. Williams purposefully omitted any explanation of just why the red wheelbarrow is the source of “so much” because he felt the image alone of the “red wheelbarrow” sufficed to imply his vague hyperbole, and also because he didn’t want to compromise the painterly image of the wheelbarrow with any obvious literal reference or footnote. However, it’s precisely this omission of an explanation of the wheelbarrow’s figurative capacity that has ironically catapulted the poem into the worldwide fame it enjoys. So succinct and simple as “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” is William’s poetic demonstration of how an image can trigger the reader’s imagination, both intellectually and emotionally, that it has become a memorable epigram, not just for poets but readers of poetry throughout the country.
This is the poem’s omitted footnote: Williams, a family doctor, wrote “The Red Wheelbarrow” on a prescription pad while tending to a boy dying of tuberculosis. During his vigil, he gazed out the window of the second-story tenement where the boy lived and saw a red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside some white chickens. The reader is, of course, ignorant of this fact when reading the poem for the first time, yet he or she doesn’t need it to understand the electric power of the poem’s imagery to enjoy it. It triggers other scenes and emotions in the reader as well as just sight.
A fascinating follow-up assignment after reading this poem is to ask students what exactly depends on this image, with the caveat that there is no right or wrong answer but rather simply something one feels is important in relation to a vital emotion or thought that this image evokes. When poetry isn’t taught in this pedagogically open way, especially in students’ early curricular stages, they are robbed of one of poetry’s most exciting attributes, namely, its verbal power to transport them from the literal to the imaginative, from the mundane to the transcendent with language that doesn’t even make conventional sense.
So, how to overcome students’ initial off-putting experiences with poetry, as well as devise a comprehensive poetry curriculum for teachers of grades one through twelve? A contemporary language arts curriculum must include poetry as a subject that celebrates and affirms the imagination; it might include reading from such books as Wishes, Lies, and Dreams and Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? by Kenneth Koch, Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg, and Poems and Stories for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages by Harold Bloom if young minds at their formative stages of cognitive development are to develop a keen sense of poetry’s vital aesthetics. The strong American tradition of building a better mousetrap has led to a tendentiously utilitarian, capitalistic culture in which the arts, and poetry in particular, have ranked low in importance on both the cultural and industrial scale. Walt Whitman wrote, “The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he absorbs it.” Perhaps American poets have failed to be affectionate enough toward their country, writing more as critical witnesses, as Allen Ginsberg famously did in his hallmark poem, “America,” than as affectionate bards. But they have also felt largely ignored and excluded by politicians and pedagogues alike, which has had the adverse effect of causing them to become ingrown and rarified, unlike poets in Latin America, Russia, Japan, and Europe, where they are celebrated as gurus and national celebrities. Sit next to a Russian on a bus and most likely he or she, if asked, will recite entire passages from Eugene Onegin. In his recent collection The Republic of Poetry, Martín Espada concludes his title poem with this stanza, which he claims is precisely what happened to him the last time he visited Chile:

In the republic of poetry,
the guard at the airport
will not allow you to leave the country
until you declaim a poem for her
and she says, Ah! Beautiful!

Poetry doesn’t have to be difficult or abstruse, although when it does embody these qualities successfully, as in T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” or even Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” it’s groundbreaking and epiphanic.
Poetry has exploded in America over the past fifty years, largely due to the Internet and the publication of thousands of new books of poetry each year. It’s rampant in advertising and at small presses. And yet it remains largely a secret discipline for a lot of aspiring poets. In an essay I wrote for Plume a few years ago titled “Can Poetry Save America” I observed the following:
Poetry is a transformative language with the capacity to issue passports to its readers for entering transcendent realms of awareness where the mind broadens and affections deepen; where strange associations make striking new sense; where unlike things coalesce in figurative magic; where miniscule details turn into immense particulars; where “language means more and sounds better”, as Charles Wright has claimed so succinctly; where language ends and silence begins; where the sayable defers profoundly to the unsayable.
After writing this, I realized that my attempt to capture the mercurial nature of poetry in any ultimately definitive way was futile. So, what to say when a high school or college student asks me or any poet to define poetry. Perhaps this: “I can’t say, but I know it when I hear, see, and feel it for reasons I can’t, not would want to, describe to you, except in my own personal way. Here’s an example: William Carlos William’s poem “The Red Wheel Barrow”. How about you?” The implication in my question being that one can’t begin to define poetry without reading and rereading it, and then answering, “It’s a magical bird that changes color and appearance in flight as it wings it way into your mind and heart.”

Author: Chard deNiord

Chard deNiord is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently In My Unknowing (University of Pittsburgh Press 2020) and Interstate (U. of Pittsburgh, 2015). He is also the author of two books of interviews with eminent American poets titled Sad Friends, Drowned Lovers, Stapled Songs, Conversations and Reflections on 20^th Century Poetry (Marick Press, 2011) and I Would Lie To You If I Could  (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018). He co-founded the New England College MFA program in 2001 and the Ruth Stone Foundation in 2011. He served as poet laureate of Vermont from 2015 to 2019 and taught English and Creative Writing for twenty-two years at Providence College, where is now a Professor Emeritus. He lives in Westminster West, Vt. with his wife, the painter, Liz Hawkes deNiord.

Plume: Plume Issue #159 November 2024