Kathleen Graber and Susan Wheeler, National Book Award nominees for poetry in 2011 and 2012, will be reading at my reading series on Sunday in South Brunswick, with an open reading to follow.
Sunday, May 5 @ 2 PM
South Brunswick Library
110 Kingston Lane
Monmouth Junction, NJ
Contact: 732.329.4000 x7635
email: arts@sbtnj.net
Hank Kalet, otherhalf@comcast.net
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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.
The U.S. Department of Labor released its preliminary job numbers for the month of April this morning, and the news is moderately good:
The United States economy created 165,000 jobs in April, slightly more than forecasters had estimated, pushing the unemployment rate down modestly to 7.5 percent, the government reported Friday.
After starting off strong in 2013, the economy has been showing signs of weakness more recently, prompting experts to warn of a third consecutive spring swoon.
April’s rate of job creation compares with an average of 168,000 jobs added per month in the first quarter this year and 209,000 in the fourth quarter of 2012. Before Friday’s announcement, experts on Wall Street had estimated that 140,000 jobs were added.
So why am I feeling pessimistic?
The answer is simple: The sequester — a Washington-created crisis born of gridlock and a failure to understand the principles of economics — looms large, with economists like Diane Swonk, chief economist for Mesirow Financial in Chicago, telling The New York Times that
the economy would be showing much more momentum if it were not for the combination of higher payroll taxes that went into effect in January, as well as the process of automatic spending cuts known as sequestration that began to bite last month.
“What’s the biggest drag on the economy? The government,” Ms. Swonk said. “If the government simply did no harm, we could be at escape velocity.”
Without the impact of federal cuts and higher taxes, Ms. Swonk estimates, annual economic growth would be close to 4 percent, above the 2.5 percent pace she is expecting in 2013.
In The Washington Post, the jobs report was seen as good news.
“This is a good report,” said John Silvia, chief economist at Wells Fargo. “There’s a lot of strength… It’s good for the economy. It’s good for people’s income.”
The stronger job growth suggests that the federal budget cutting “does not mean recession,” Silvia said. “It does not mean a dramatic slowdown.”
That’s a huge stretch. The vast majority of cuts associated with sequestration have just gone into effect, with most of the harm being done to those already in need. We are about to witness a scaling back of federal aid to the uninsured and to those in poverty — even as Congress has managed to keep business fliers in the air.
As the government pulls back — as it spends less on everything from defense to aid to the poor — it also is taking money out of the economy at a time when the economy needs every dollar it can get, whether it be from the private or public sector.
Of course, the sequester is not really the problem — it’s the mindset behind the sequester that has continued to mire the nation in stagnation. And that is what we must call it. While we have continued to add jobs, we do so at an anemic pace — one that not only has not gained back the jobs lost during the 2008 meltdown, but has no chance at keeping up with population growth. Overall economic growth is glacial, wages are frozen in place for most, and the only people who seem to be doing well are corporations, which are raking in record profits but not sharing them with the broader workforce.
At the same time, we have bought into the false promise of austerity — the idea that we can slash government spending and trigger growth. There is no historical precedent for this happening during recessions and much real-life evidence to the contrary — Japan in the 1990s, the current state of the Eurozone and England, etc.
Rather than look for ways to trim government and deal with a deficit problem caused primarily by the revenue lost to mass unemployment, we should be looking for ways to invest in rebuilding the nation and aid those slammed the hardest by the economy’s punch.
Rebuilding schools, roads, bridges and other public infrastructure, expanding energy conservation measures and investing in green sources, rehiring teachers and police officers, and providing a strong social safety net will help create jobs and will put money in the pockets of those most likely to spend it.
We will not turn the economy around by pretending that the jobs held by public employees do not matter or that the things government spends money on are superfluous. We have to be smart in what we spend our money on (we already give the oil and gas company’s too much money, for instance, and we cannot abide by wasted resources), but we have to spend it.
Repeal the sequester and repeal the austerity mindset that has led us down this dark and dangerous road to stagnation.
Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley signed legislation today making Maryland the 18th state in the country to join the civilized world and banned the death penalty.
While, on the surface, this may appear to be a national trend — as Think Progress points out, “Maryland is the sixth state to eliminate the penalty in as many years” — it is not exactly the kind of trend we may want to see. Maryland — technically a southern state, but really more of a Northeastern liberal one — is part of a cleaving in which liberal states are ending capital punishment and the South and Southwest are going the other way.
Again, from Think Progress:
Florida just passed a bill (not yet signed into law) to speed up the death penalty, with legislators saying, “this is not about guilt or innocence,” while Mississippi is slated to execute an inmate next week without having tested available DNA from the crime scene.
It is a two-Americas thesis that has nothing to do with economic prospects and one that does not bode well for attempts to unify our politics.
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| Kathleen Graber |
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| Susan Wheeler |
Time Off has a story today on the South Brunswick poetry series — which I am now dubbing “Poetry at the Crossroads” to play on the township motto “The Crossroads of Progress.” Sunday’s reading, the last this season, is going to be a big one with 2011 National Book Award nominee Kathleen Graber (who served as my MFA mentor) and 2012 National Book Award nominee Susan Wheeler.
Send me an e-mail.
