One thing that continues to intrigue me is the number of high school boys who publicly admit to being attracted to poetry. According to my nonscientific observations, most of the schools I visit seem to have more boys than girls in their writing classes, and I definitely get more private "will you read my poems?" requests from boys. The Vida statistics show that men dominate submissions, acceptances, and reviews; yet the adult writing workshops I've attended and taught are uniformly dominated by women. At the Frost Place teaching conference, we're beginning to see a shift toward a more even gender split; but Baron and I still marvel at the sight of male teachers who admit to caring about poetry. The disparities here are puzzling.
Yesterday's class was a joy: a handful of smiling, chattery, bright-eyed teenagers dressed in AC/DC shirts (they were pretending to be Beats; you figure it out) who talked easily with the adults in the room and asked interesting questions. One thing I love, love, love about teaching poetry is the way that a pattern of regular group discussions about poems can extend beyond intellectual discourse. It can be a way of teaching students the skills of civil engagement: with friends, with teachers, with strangers, with adversaries.
Most of the students asked personal questions about my writing history, what's bad about being a writer, stuff like that. And then, toward the end of the period, one boy mumbled, "I have kind of a stupid question." It turns out that this was his question . . . and I paraphrase because I didn't write it down at the time, though I wish I had: "Novels are so big and full of stuff and have overarching themes, so why do poems matter if they can't compete with a novel that includes everything?"
This is such a huge question--a worry that constantly preoccupies me, as a contemporary poet who is staring down the tunnel of western literature. Poetry used to be the genre that told the big story: the Iliad, Paradise Lost. But since the rise of the novel in the 19th century, poetry has stepped back, reinvented itself, rarefied itself. Poets are no longer striving to be Homers and Miltons.
So there's no clear answer to a question like his. What I ended up saying to the students was that poems can touch us quickly and swiftly in ways that novels cannot: comparable, perhaps, to the way a song moves us. I know that this is a facile answer. It doesn't take into account the many varieties of poems, the many varieties of readers, the many varieties of moments. But that's why this question shook me up: because there is no good clear explanation as to why a poem matters, to why any art form matters. Yet, of course, it does.
The student who asked this question was not challenging me for proof; no one was trying to make me defend poetry in any way. It was just a question, and the students seemed to comprehend what I was trying to say in my stammered reply. The song analogy particularly touched them because teenagers understand the powers of music--how a song, for no obvious reason, penetrates to the heart's core. But I wish I could have articulated--for them, for myself--some kind of solid reasoning, if only because the ambiguities of art are what put it at risk for annihilation. If I can't list 10 rational explanations for why a poem matters, how can I convince a school principal not to cancel a writing program? And yet those 10 rational explanations have nothing, in the end, to do with why reading a poem can change a life.
11 comments:
What a thoughtful question the student asked! I agree that "reading a poem can change a life" and, as Kim Rosen says, "save" one.
Thought I'd share with you Roger Rosenblatt's comments about writing:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/2011/02/roger-rosenblatt-answers-your-questions.html
a poem allows you to put a thought or feeling under an emotional microscope and then fiddle with the focus until you can absorb it or it can absorb you.
As one of my boys said,,,paraphrased you just open up your head and there is a poem.
Hmmm. I think it is time poets take back the epic. Novels are gorgeous, but they are created around rules. I love poetry for how it breaks rules. I feel lucky to have smart students to teach us how lucky we are to live with poetry. Thanks for the post.
"Take back the epic!" Maybe we should get T-shirts printed, Nicelle.
And thanks for the link, Maureen. You have such a talent for digging stuff up.
Ruth, even while I was in the classroom, I thought of you. I knew you would love the sight of these kids working their brains around the ineffable.
Poetr,math and music have ever so much in comman. I feel that they develop the same brain regions.
Something went wrong with my math development, however. . . .
the poetry, math, music was me..silly Blogger didn't record my name. I missed the arith. piece, but I am a fairly competent math student.
hi dawn, i stumbled upon this thread, and wanted to add that it isn't since "the rise of the novel" that poetry--and i think you mean verse--shifted away from longer narratives. songlike or shorter musical as opposed to longer narrative poems have been a major part of poetic practice for as long as we've made poems. my teacher, derek walcott, who is a wonderful lyric poet, has worked hard to create substantial narratives like The Schooner Flight that do some of what your young questioner thought to be missing from poetry. and the line of verse writers going back can be shown to have created a legacy of longer narratives, some of which, until 16th century and even after that, were more popular than prose narratives. walcott emphasized in his classes as he was writing Omeros that the great gift of larger narrative (like epic, or the novel) is its capaciousness, and bahktin would back him up, i think, in his theory of the dialogical imagination. your young questioner is putting his finger, i think, on a failing of imagination current in too many contemporary verse writers, who see the craft as limited to song or to brief epiphanic stories. we can do more, verse can do more, and it has for millenia, and when we take it back (put on those tee shirts, for we will take it back, these things run in looping cycles, just like there will once again be a vibrant verse theatre) longer narrative will itself be enriched by the kinds of language we'll bring to it.
Thanks so much for your comment, Daniel. I'm not sure how "poetry" and "verse" differ in scholarly connotation, but I'm sure your terminology is more precise. I also do know that the long poem is not dead; I write and publish them myself. But the long narrative poem is no longer our culture's major form of literary story telling, as these high school students clearly recognize; and I do believe that the flowering of the novel in the 19th-century was a important element in that shift. I haven't read Bahktin, and I'm not sure what you mean by "dialogical imagination," so I'll have to take your word on those. But as far as the importance of pushing ourselves, as poets, beyond "song or brief epiphanic stories," I'm right with you.
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