I want to pass along something by Timothy Donnelly, the poetry editor of The Boston Review. Donnelly was one of the poets manning the helm of the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet the Blog this month and he offered a series of posts/essays on what he calls “quasi-unintelligibility.” His most recent focuses on Wallace Stevens, but really attempts to get at what I think is a problem we have teaching poems.
Wallace Stevens, he writes, “always disliked explaining” his poems.
He disliked reducing them to single authoritative readings that pretended to render them completely intelligible. He didn’t think a poem should be completely intelligible, as we have seen, but rather, as if in a bid to retain its particularity, its non-fungible whatness, the poem should be endowed with that which surpasses paraphrase, and should defy full absorption into our intellects.
The poem, essentially, should be more than just a prose argument broken up into lines. It has to exist on many other levels and can — as with so much of what Edgar Allan Poe wrote — be little more than musicality or image. Great poems often do more, but the point is they don’t have to.
I had the chance for the first time to teach a composition class — composition II at Middlesex County College, which is a class on rhetoric and argument. Unlike most schools — at least, that’s what they tell me — we use a literature-based primer, a textbook that features fiction, essays and creative nonfiction, some drama and a lot of poetry. The chance to teach an interesting array of poems, along with some classic and also obscure stories, made the class more than just a dry effort at teaching students the basics of making an argument.
But it also posed some serious challenges. As you can see from Donnelly’s point about Stevens, poems are not especially suited to this kind of approach — yes, the sonnet has a rhetorical structure, but the best poetry finds a way to inhabit the space between sense and sense, meaning it must both prick the senses and stretch the boundaries of simple meaning.
Students, however, are rarely taught this. Most have been taught by well-meaning high-school English teachers whose job it is to “analyze the poem” and help students arrive at its true meaning. This, of course, is bunk — what is the meaning of Blake’s “The Tyger” and why do we assume there is just one? And why do we assume that the poem’s meaning is its most important feature?
This brings me back to Donnelly’s essay. It seems, he says,
that when we talk about poems in our seminars, in our essays, in our reviews, and even in our workshops, we so often prioritize their thought-content, grappling with what we think they mean and not with finding words for how they make us feel, or not with expressing our disinterested appreciation for the way they were constructed.
He doesn’t discount meaning. Meaning, he says, “plays no small role in the overall value of the poems we love best, let’s be honest, it is their skeleton.”
But since meaning is the component of a poem’s value most easily discussed, or perhaps the one that seems most appropriate to discuss in an academic environment, much of what makes a poem a living thing goes unnoticed, unarticulated, left soft and unrewarded. I think this is a problem.
Part of the issue is that we have created “poor readers of poetry” and we maybe asking them to read “impoverished poems,” to use Donnelly’s language.
That makes a lot of sense to me. What happens when you present poetry to students who have little experience with it aside from high school is one of two things. Either they plan to tune it out or they read too much into it, assuming that they must come up with fanciful explanations for passages they may not at first grasp. To address this, I’ve found that I have to take the poems back to their basics and remind the students that they can read what is there literally, that they should revel in the sounds and sense of the poem, and that they should follow their instincts. When they think or feel something after reading a poem, they need to know that what they think or feel is generally valid. Our job as teachers, I think, is to avoid interfering with their engagement with the poem. We can add the analytical framework — make them consider what in the poem may make them feel the way they do and to get them to talk and write about it — but we should resist the urge to impose from on high a “right” reading that will narrow their connection to the work. That is counterproductive and will only continue to drive students away from the wonders of poetry.
Hank Kalet 