from The Novice Class: On the Practical Uses of Outside Poems
I always use outside poems in workshops, no matter the level, but in a novice class I find them especially useful for introducing basic vocabulary and craft elements. In my first workshops, I used to hand out a list of definitions: tone, enjambment, assonance, etc. Now I prefer students to notice the potency and sharpness of “I drop my rosary/it scurries away like a scorpion,” [1] before I even bring up the words image or metaphor. In my experience, close group reading of some well-chosen poems (as many as possible, and mostly contemporary) is the best way to begin freeing students from several common and, to my mind, discardable assumptions about poetry.
Beginning students especially are often in a rush to “interpret,” or decode a poem, to define it in (regrettably) rigid terms. It’s not their fault, given the way they probably learned literature in high school: I too had teachers that treated poems like algebra, solving for x via a set of symbols (raven = death, lamb = innocence) or facts about the poet’s life (Emily Dickinson was a spinster, so clearly…). Most people who didn’t study poetry past high school likely still subscribe to the theory that each poem contains a secret meaning, either symbolic or related to the author’s life, and if you can figure it out, you pass the quiz. This is why students will hurry right past the initial subject in their rush to decipher the poem’s message.
Of course, I’m not suggesting that poetry is or should be meaningless. I believe it should always, as Dana Levin says, have something at stake, but I do try to encourage students to settle down when it comes to interpretation; to forget, for awhile, about what their tenth-grade teacher called “the theme” of a poem. While it seems counter-intuitive to many beginners, focusing on craft―on how a poem is made, picking it apart, in fact―is far more useful than arguing about what the poet may have meant. It also better informs their own writing.
In practice of this, I often start a class by reading a poem aloud; the students have copies. I ask them to listen closely and to underline or otherwise note a few phrases or lines that most intrigue them. I pick these poems carefully: they always include strong imagery and probably some sound device(s) other than rhyme―perhaps unusual subject matter, or a distinct tone: they should, in other words, have craft elements that can be clearly discussed. The language should be mostly clear syntactically, but any larger message less so.
In my last workshop for beginners, a community event in Santa Fe this last July, I used Joseph J. Capista’s “The America Crow and the Common Raven.” It’s in the second person: a rich, layered complaint against the eponymous birds. Among the speaker’s grievances:
We have asked you to forget your perfect, lopsided
eggs. You have not. We can tax neither your broods
nor your beaks, full of obits and the silk of sweetcorn.
Cigars you pilfer from hats at the track are known
to burn barns. Hear? Barns have burned. Caw, cronk.
You shake your rage wings and out falls rainwater.
A number of students underlined phrases from this section. Some responded to the amusingly officious tone of “We have asked you” (sounds like my HOA, said one, to laughter); others the tragicomedy of pilfered cigars and barns aflame, or the superb image “obits and the silk of sweetcorn;” still others responded to the pure lyricism of “You shake your rage wings and out falls rainwater.” And as usual, with whatever poem I use, the more we talked about the poem the more they liked it; at length noticing the assonance, the form, the repetition throughout, the effect of the first line: “Murder and unkindness, murder and unkindness,” etc.
I work hard to achieve that moment: the moment when they get energized about a poem, excited enough to talk over each other (oh, sorry!―no you go); when they notice more details (read craft elements) and are simply allowed to point out how cool or moving this or that phrase/line is― saying, so often, I don’t why but I love― (fill in the blank). This flush of peak engagement is a good time stop the discussion for a second and ask them “So what’s going on here? What does it mean?” Usually (after a slightly affected pause), I’ll ask them “Does it matter?” But in this last class, as if on cue, one student asked: “How important is it that I don’t really know what it means?”
I hear other questions in this question: Is it okay I don’t know what the poet was thinking? That I can’t solve, analyze or consume it? Do I have permission to just enjoy or even relish it? Or to dislike it? When they start to detach from the status of it all; when they stop viewing poems as sacred, as finished and sealed as sarcophagi―that’s progress.
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The fixation with meaning can also complicate their own writing. The rush to interpret in reading becomes, in writing, an urge to decide on the (larger) message, or what the poem will come to mean before it even begins.
This, too, is understandable, and based on a kind of truism. When you ask the beginning student “What is poetry for?” they will generally echo Wordsworth’s theory of spontaneous outflow even if they haven’t read it: “For expression,” they’ll say, or “To express myself:” And why not? They signed up for this workshop in part because they want to speak. I’d even venture they want to speak in a specific way, a performative or ritual way (for that is indeed how some students approach poetry), and I don’t really have a quarrel with it.
Students in all kinds of workshops: college, conference and community alike ―are frequently very frank about personal details and opinions, and naturally those are subjects they want to explore: My experience of unrequited love was in fact an opportunity for growth, for example, or I am enraged and in despair that my country is becoming an authoritarian state. But no matter how worthy the subject, we know that any work that begins with a stone-set purpose is likely doomed, inviting cliché, didacticism, boring syntax and other transgressions.
I’ve always found this passage by Richard Hugo helpful, not least because when I read it aloud to students, they respond well to Hugo’s straightforward advice and folksy tone:
…if the triggering subject is big (love, death, faith), rather than localized and finite the mind tends to shrink. Sir Alexander Fleming observed some mold and a few years later we had a cure for gonorrhea. But what if the British government told him to find a cure for gonorrhea? He might have worried so much he wouldn’t have noticed the mold. Think small.[2]
One way to help them to think small, of course, is to engage them in exercises that focus on craft, and those are most effective when grounded in discussion of an outside poem. I might, for example, ask students to write a short image-heavy ode to something they find repellant (usually they choose insects or political figures) ―shortly before that, we’ll have read and discussed Yuself Komunyakaa’s “Ode to The Maggot.” Or I’ll ask them to write about a terrible job experience in a prose poem format, after we’ve discussed David Lee’s “Loading A Boar.” Assigning unexpected, “unpoetic” subject matter helps distract them from pre-determined themes or stock phrases they might otherwise use. I don’t say this unkindly: many novices initially write in cliché because they think that’s how poetry is supposed to sound.
That’s perhaps my chief goal as a teacher: to coax them away from supposed to―to show them alternatives so that their work becomes more interesting. I want them to find new ways to write; or even better, find ways not to write, by which I mean giving up any fixed idea of what the poem will eventually come to say. In poetry, meaning is usually not best judged consciously. The conscious and critical mind is for craft: getting the best line break, elucidating connections or emulating someone else’s syntactical rhythm. I want my students to trust that at another level the unconscious will always do its job, a little engine of power and mystery sputtering along undisturbed―
With thanks to Elizabeth Jacobson
Often I ask them to consciously imitate a section of someone else’s poem, replacing each noun/verb/adjective with one of their own; but keeping with the syllable count. They get so focused on the details that they forgot about meaning.
good to focus on pure sound. In this last class we didn’t have time to discuss another poem I brought, and when I read it aloud, just so we could hear it, they really heard, they practically sighed with pleasure.
You get the idea. The should read other poets, and a large variety of them.. At the very least you’ve introduced them to something new…
I’ve found poems with a very pronounced attitude are good for this: Nina Cassian’s “Ordeal,” for example or [ ].
With Thnaks to Elizabeth Jacobsen
If you can get a student to really follow their ear, you’ve done well.
understood intuitively but had never articulated, like the way you might have perfect grammar but can’t say what the [blah blah subjuctive is]. Some students will understand this on an intuitive level
[1] Eduardo C. Corral, from “Testaments Scratched into a Water Station Barrel”
[2] From The Triggering Town: Lecture and Essays on Poetry and Writing (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979).
