Because I have been enjoying Maureen McLane’s My Poets and because I have decided to do a Pulizter Poetry Project I thought I would write a little about my personal history with poetry by taking a cue from McLane. It turned out to be a longer post than I usually write but I hope I have done well enough that you don’t mind the length.
McLane has a chapter in My Poets called “My Impasses” in which she talks about learning to read poetry focussing in particular on points where she was at an impasse, a place of wanting to “get it” but not being able to. It is such places, she believes, that one learns the most:
I return to these early impasses in reading not simply to indulge in autobiographical meanderings but rather to suggest the important function of impasse in experience. For where my understanding failed and my rudimentary critical tools broke down, I was forced to reckon with the impensé of my relation to poetry. To make visible my presumptions: this is what breakdowns and impasses allowed.
And it is true, isn’t it, that when we wrestle with something, in this case poetry, we learn not only about the thing with which we are wrestling, but also about ourselves. Perhaps more than any other kind of writing, we come to poetry with a lot of baggage. By baggage I mean assumptions about what it is and how it is supposed to be read and that it is hard, a lot of work, that symbols and metaphors and all the tricks of poetry are puzzles that must be solved. I shouldn’t generalize so much, but it has been my experience that the way poetry is taught in school is a major contributor to the baggage. I carried around my share of that baggage for years and it has taken me even more years to whittle it down to the size of an overnight case. Oh the damage that well-meaning educators can do!
I retain the fantasy of the Platonic reading of a poem, against which all instantiated readings are mere shadows flickering on our shared, half-illuminated cave.
The Platonic fantasy is the largest piece of baggage handed to students by their teachers. My early experience of poetry was that it was fun, Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein, rhymes and made-up words and silliness and sometimes something serious. But then came high school English.
The teacher stood in front of the class reading out pieces of the poem and asking if anyone knew what it meant? Sometimes a student, brave or stupid or both, would hazard an answer and most of the time is was “wrong” or only partially right and the teacher would tell us the “correct” answer. Poetry was always taught to me as though there was only ever one way to read it and the teacher always knew the right way, the answer, the Platonic reading. It served to make me afraid of poetry because I never, or rarely ever, “got it.”
But I still liked poetry, just usually not the school sanctioned kind. At home my sister and I worked on trying to memorize Poe’s “The Raven” for fun and every Christmas Eve I would recite from memory for my sister, who held the book in order to gleefully correct any mistake, “A Visit From St. Nicholas.” T’was the night before Christmas when all through the house… My sister loved Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and had me held her memorize it which meant I picked it up too.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
These poems told stories. They made sense. And even if there were hidden symbols and meanings it didn’t matter, only the story mattered. Plus, they rhymed and were fun to say aloud and felt good in my mouth. They were the poems that kept me from hating poetry.
Because then came college and professors and their Platonic readings. Not once did any of them hint that a poem might be read in any other way than the one they told us. I wonder why so much literature, especially poetry, gets taught this way? I became an English lit major not because of poetry but because of novels, because I liked to read and like so many before me and so many after, I was under the impression that classes would be like a big book group.
Even though I wasn’t interested in poetry and avoided it as much as I could, it still reared up and forced me to take notice. I had to fill my schedule one semester and a class on the Romantic Poets seemed the lesser of the evils that were left. Coleridge was a Romantic, maybe it wouldn’t be bad.
I spent the semester mostly not getting it.
I am fascinated by the threshold where one hovers, not getting it yet wanting to get it…. I have found this vale of unknowing yet wanting-to-know to be a fruitful vale, a dwelling place worth sharing-pondering.
But I wanted to get it so badly that once in awhile, in spite of the professor, there would be a glimmer. The final exam for the class involved having to memorize a 160 lines of poetry and then going to the professor’s office and reciting it to him. I was good at memorization. I memorized Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey.” And something strange and unexpected happened.
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
And I did begin to see.
And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
The unfamiliar thoughts and emotions of the poem snuck in when I was memorizing the words. They felt good. And somehow they opened a little window.
The movie Dead Poets Society came out and it dawned on me that in spite of what teachers and professors said, there was more than one way to read a poem. I realized that there is more to reading a poem than looking for the symbols and metaphors and secret meanings.
Have you reckoned a thousand acres much? Have you reckoned
the earth much?
Have you practiced so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin
of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun…. there are
millions of suns left,
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand…. nor
look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres
in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.
(Walt Whitman, Song of Myself)
By no means did poetry suddenly become wonderful and amazing. I was still scared of it, just not as much. But I understood that there was something there that I liked, something deep and moving that stirred my heart and stimulated my mind. Nonetheless, when poetry came up in classes, I still spent most of my time not getting it.
One must be gentle with one’s former self, one’s students, one’s current muddles, with anyone honestly trying but not getting it.
And then it came time to take my senior seminar and the one I wanted to take on novels was filled before my registration time even came up. I signed up for the only thing I could, a seminar on Adrienne Rich, a poet I had never heard of. I was terrified. A whole semester of poetry and I had no idea what to expect.
And on the first day of class the professor read.
And it turned out that
The shock of the new is not only a modernist mantra or an art-historical slogan but an ever-present potential charge, if you are a teacher, a student, a baby, or peculiarly receptive to opportunities for derangement.
Not only was I a student, but I discovered that semester that I am peculiarly receptive to opportunities for derangement. From all the years of mostly not getting poetry but really wanting to something had finally worked loose and I found myself caught up and swept away – deranged.
Every poet the professor mentioned, ever poet Adrienne Rich mentioned in her various essays, I kept track of on a list and started looking them up at the library, began looking for opportunities for derangement.
I am not by any means an expert on poetry but I am no longer afraid of it. There is still poetry that puzzles me, still poets that I don’t get. But
A wild patience has taken me this far (Adrienne Rich)
And I know that
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you. (Whitman)
Last year Bookman had an audiobook of T.S. Eliot reading “The Wasteland” and when he told me he was going to listen to it I thought, good luck. I had had bad experiences with Eliot. He was one I did not get and I was sure that Bookman was definitely not going to get him. But he did and he loved him and he listened to that poem in his car over and over on his way to and from work. And once when we were running errands he had cued it up to just after the beginning, to a part he really liked and made me listen:
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us
And it was beautiful. Yes! This is true, this is experience I know. And I was reminded that one does not have to get the whole poem and all its many nuances in order to enjoy it.
What we can also say is that certain works become readable (or newly or differently readable) under certain conditions; they take up their place not exactly ‘in the true,’ as Michel Foucault describes the epistemic reconfiguration of the human sciences, but rather ‘in the readable,’ which is to say the receivable.
Bookman had found a way into “The Wasteland” and shared it with me. I don’t have the whole poem yet, but that does not matter, I have parts that ring out and know that eventually, someday, the entire poem might sing.
Q: How to read?
A: ALOUD.
Q: What to do?
A: LISTEN to aficionados read those poems or works they are committed to. Some revelation will surely be forthcoming.
It is also good, if possible, to listen to the author read her or his own poems. The internet is a great place for poetry. YouTube is filled with videos of poets reading. Poets.org often has recordings of poets reading as well. LibriVox is also a good place to go for audio poetry. Public domain works read by volunteers means the people who read poetry are ones who love the poems.
I often find myself reading poems aloud, especially if I am at an impasse. Speaking the words is a different experience than reading them and my brain wants to make sense of the words and will often find a sense when I read aloud that I did not find when I read silently. Reading a poem to someone else, sharing what you have found, can be a moving experience. Bookman and I frequently read poems or parts of poems to each other and I find that the emotion in the poem is amplified when I read it to him and sometimes I have to stop reading and collect myself because it gets to be so overwhelming.
In sharing my impasses with you I hope to offer encouragement to those who are hovering on the threshold of getting it but not getting it. You are so close! Don’t give up! And for those who read poetry once in a blue moon or always mean to but never seem to get around to it, I hope you are encouraged to return to your favorite poet or discover someone new.
To everyone reading this, I invite you to take advantage of the opportunities for derangement that poetry offers.
no sudden revelation but the slow
turn of consciousness, while every day
climbs on the back of the days before:
no new day, only a list of days,
no task you expect to see finished, but
you can’t hold back from the task. (Adrienne Rich “Turning”)
Oh, what a great post. I agree with you about the importance and pleasure of reading poetry aloud, and also your point that it isn’t necessary “to get the whole poem and all its many nuances in order to enjoy it.” Yes, yes yes! Not every poet, or even every poem by a favorite poet, is going to resonate with any given reader—but even in poems that I find prickly and difficult, there is often something, some image or some turn of phrase that appeals. And sometimes that small something can provide a way in/a way to engage more deeply with more poems. And sometimes it doesn’t, but that’s OK.
Heather, thanks! yes, yes! poetry is just like fiction in that we don’t like every poet and even favorite ones sometimes have work that we don’t like. I used to think I was supposed to like all of it and there was something wrong with me if I didn’t. Ha!
You soared passed “well enough” to awesomely marvellous! Your posts on Adrienne Rich and Maureen McLane have opened the door to poetry again for me. Not only that, you’ve led me to engage with it in a different way than before. Thank you doesn’t seem quite enough! – By the way, with excellent timing there’s another very good review of My Poets in the NYTimes today: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/books/review/my-poets-by-maureen-n-mclane.html
Lokesh, you are so kind, thank you! I am glad to hear that you are re-energized about poetry. I had been in a bit a funk since Rich died earlier this year and, while still sad, exploring new to me poets has helped bring back the excitement. How could I have missed that review of My Poets? Thanks for the link! I like how they call the book subversive. I must agree.
Thank you for sharing this. I don’t have a definitive answer to your question as to why schools teach in such a manner as to suggest that there is only one way to ‘read’ a poem, but I can make one suggestion based on experiences of my own and that is to do with the exam system. Educational establishments are judged in large part by the results they get, the number of pupils that get to top universities, the number of undergraduates that achieve the highest classifications. Teaching those students the ‘accepted’ versions is one way of ensuring this happens. And, it takes a brave teacher to go against this system because your own performance, your own value to that establishment, is going to be judged on the results your students get. In theory, this ought to become less of an issue the higher up the educational ladder you climb, although that isn’t always the case, in part because marking the work of thirty students who have had different thoughts about a poem, assessing whether they are a true reflection of each individual student’s response to the text or just a load of woffle from someone how hasn’t read the work at all (and believe me, I’ve met some very sophisticated wofflers) takes time the system simply doesn’t allow you.
When this discussion comes up I always think of my final English report from secondary school which read “A’s work varies from the excellent to the eccentric.” To do this day I am convinced that it was my “excellent”, i.e. toeing the line work, that got me my ‘A’ level and my “eccentric”, i.e. original thinking work, that got me my PhD.
This is a terrific post. A big point for us all to get is that is technologically based and rational/commercial based societies poetry is going to be the language that gets both marginalized and exclusified. Orwell says somewhere that poetry is the least tolerated of all the arts. I am like many in being a bit scared of poetry (I certainly don’t read current poets) but I don’t feel like just giving up on it. At school poetry was taught by an English teacher who really cared about language and literature but the whole culture was probably more receptive to rock lyrics and poetry was seen by me as arcane, irrelevant and guilt-inducing (in not “getting it”.)
Looking back I wish we had something like the terrific anthologies of Seamus Heaney/Ted Hughes which really give poetry some of its charge. Poetry is something no reader should let himself/herself do without!
Heaney/Hughes anthologies are The Rattle Rag and The School Bag both Faber and both higly recommended for any reader. At school our anthology was The Poet’s Quair which was OK and had a lot of Scottish poetry in it from Henryson (who is superb) to Muir. The content was OK but the presentation and arrangement was uncompromisingly dour and forbidding with Tam O Shanter looking just as inacessible as Spenser or Pope. It was poetry to pass exams to.
Ian, thank you! It is odd, isn’t it, that when a society needs poetry most is when it gets pushed further and further to the margins? I think Orwell has a point. Poetry, more than most art, makes us look and see things that we might not want to. I am glad that though you might be a little scared of poetry you aren’t willing to give up on it! School poetry anthologies can be deadly. My secondary school texts were dreadful. In college most professors used Norton anthologies which are quite good and I still have. That Adrienne Rich class though (and other poetry classes that followed) helped me break away from anthologies because they required the actual poetry books. And so began my poetry collection
I’ll have to see if the library has the Heaney/Hughes anthologies. I am curious to see what they have done.
What they did was in Rattle Bag (ostensibly for children) was too arrange the poems using the opening lines alphabetically rather than chronological order or thematically. They drew on an exceptionally wide range of material – translations; american poetry; nonsense verse and many other things. It has an organic, living feel about it that was certainly unusual in 1982 wheen first published.
The School Bag, published in about 1997 is less sparkling but still extremely interesting. In this book each major poet gets just one selection and this leads to some interesting choices! There is a complete scene from King Lear to represent Shakespeare. The other innovation is the very generous helping of Irish, Welsh and Scottish poetry in the anthology. I remember an extrordinary poem, Malcolm Mooney’s Land by WS Graham which is just one of those really suggestive poems that you know you will never finally “get”! Your post reminded me of these books which I haven’t looked at for quite some time- I will go and dig them out!
Ian, those do sound like interesting anthologies. And what a bold and different way to organize a book by opening lines like that! One poem for each author in School Bag allows for lots more of a selection. Would love to have been a fly on the wall as they decided what one poem to use!
Alex, and thank you for you wonderful comment. It helps put things in perspective and leaves me feeling some sympathy for teachers and professors who appear to be caught between a rock and a hard place in many respects. And in the US where so many schools are now putting in place merit pay for teachers based on how well their students pass those tests, I doubt they will be teaching anything but the “accepted” readings which really is too bad for all involved. as for your school report, I love the “eccentric” comment!
What a exiting post. There’s much in it I’d like to react upon, for now just two reflections.
“ I am fascinated by the threshold where one hovers, not getting it yet wanting to get it…. I have found this vale of unknowing yet wanting-to-know to be a fruitful vale, a dwelling place worth sharing-pondering. ”
I totally agree. I also feel that ‘getting it’ is the moment the poem comes to meet me halfway.
“Reading a poem to someone else, sharing what you have found, can be a moving experience.” I often feel as long as I am reading in silence I am trying to establish a relationship. When reading aloud expression takes over from analysing and also the distance created by my brain disappears.
Cath, thanks! The “vale of unknowing” is both a fruitful and scary place though, isn’t it? I mean there is always the uncertainty of whether we will be able to understand, whether we are up to the task. I like how you put getting it as when a poem comes to meet you halfway.
Oh yes, I like what you say about reading aloud. I heartily agree with you!
This is a good post to read before I head into a semester of teaching literature — we won’t study poetry until later in the semester, but I do want to remember throughout everything we study that it’s not my job, really, to tell what THE meaning is. I do try to encourage students to come up with their own interpretations, and although I want to give my own interpretation(s) too, I hope it comes across as just another possibility. The thing I really want to teach is how to read carefully, not how to come to one particular interpretation.
Rebecca, I would have so loved you as a teacher! I’ve always thought class should be about learning to read carefully as well but in my experience that got lost in the teacher’s “correct” answer. I hope your class goes well!
Well and don’t you know it, I think I’m picking up The Best of New Writing On The Web blog that I ran a couple of years ago with another blogger. Must remember this post when it goes online again! And my copy of My Poets arrived in the post this morning. You see what happens when you enthuse about a book?
I never got poetry and we hardly did any in school. Just an incredibly long and seemingly dull poem called The Eve of Saint Agnes. I would have been happy to talk about what it meant, even if there was only one right answer offered. We just read through it and I was none the wiser. I was a poetry virgin essentially until I was 19. And then Rilke came along. Ah those halcyon days! I realised that there is a great deal of poetry that doesn’t do much for me. But there are some poets: Rilke, Yves Bonnefoy, Paul Eluard, Sylvia Plath, who blow my mind. Just not much in between indifference and passionate love for me!
Litlove, aw, you are so kind! I am so glad you got a copy of My Poets! I hope you like it. Your Eve of St. Agnes experience sounds dreadful! How wonderful that you discovered Rilke and he rescued poetry for you!
You could be me, OR, I could be you. This pretty much sums up how I feel and my poetry trajectory. I agree with you re the words in the mouth. There are poems which come back to me again and again because of the words in the mouth … Particularly those by Hopkins and, yes, Eliot, whom I’ve always loved for the tone and the words, even if some meanings escape me. I have that Wasteland app … And blogged it. Great app.
Is it in Tintern Abbey that Wordsworth talks about “that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude”? Or is it a different poem, or poet!
So much more to say but will stop here. Great post!
Whisperinggums, does that make us doppelgangers? Separated at birth?
I do remember your post about the Wasteland app. I am gradually coming to like Eliot, his words do have a good feel in the mouth. The “inward eye” is from “I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud” which is also a marvelous poem and much shorter than “Tintern Abbey.” As much as I have a fondness for Wordsworth, after awhile his poems all begin to run together.
Oh silly me … I should have known that. Of course it does. Thanks for minding me.
Doppelgängers could be it!
Pingback: My Relationship to Poetry | Tales from the Reading Room
Hello Stefanie, I came here after reading litlove’s terrific post which made me feel so much better about my relationship with poetry and now I’ve read yours too, which is just tremendous! I don’t know why I have always believed that I HAD to like and understand ALL poetry, when I don’t believe that about novels.
I had never thought that it wasn’t necessary ‘to get the whole poem and all its many nuances in order to enjoy it’ but I think it’s true. I’m just burbling away now but yes, you have encouraged me to go back and read poetry and not feel like a lesser person if I don’t ‘get’ it. I can’t thank you enough!
Helen, thank you for you wonderful and kind comment! It’s strange how we think about reading poetry so differently than novels, isn’t it? And then we carry that baggage around with us, and oh, is it ever so heavy! I’ve felt the same as you in the past and still have difficulties but it gets easier and easier to let it be ok. I am so happy you are encouraged to read poetry again! Please let me know if you make some wonderful discoveries – poets, poems, etc. I am always looking for things to add to my poetry shelves!
I also came over from reading litlove’s post, and wanted to thank you for such a thought-provoking post. I had flashbacks when you talked about that sudden transition from the early fun rhymes to the sudden seriousness, yes/no, right/wrong world of secondary school. I agree that it’s a difficult, alienating way to read poetry, and I’d also add that it’s unrealistic to expect twelve-year-olds to grasp ALL of the complex allusions and metaphors contained in great poetry. I think that probably contributed to a lot of the fear I’ve had of reading poetry.
I’m starting to read more poetry as I get older, and I’ve got used to the fact that it’s OK not to get everything. I love TS Eliot, for example, even though I’m sure I miss 90% of his erudite references. But I read something like “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time” and I just feel a shift inside me, a gateway to understanding that prose can rarely provide in such instantaneous fashion.
I also need to make a conscious effort to read differently – with novels I’m a very quick reader, but with poetry I need to slow down and reread several times and swirl the words around on my tongue for a while. As I learn how to read poetry, I’m enjoying it more, but I still don’t have the confidence to judge or analyse poetry in the same way I analyse prose. Still, maybe one day…
Thanks for a wonderful post that really made me think about my relationship to poetry!
Andrew, thank you for you wonderful and thoughtful comment! It is unrealistic to think that 12-year-olds or even 15 or 16-year-olds will be able to grasp all there is in great poetry. Heck, sometimes this 44-year-old is still left with a big question mark. I always like to hear someone say he is reading more poetry than in the past. It is very encouraging and gets me even more excited about reading poetry myself. It is definitely something that needs to be read differently than prose. I like that it makes me slow down since much of my day is spent go-go-go. That Eliot line you quote is marvelous, btw! And I know exactly what you mean about feeling a shift inside you when reading something that resonates. For me I call it “poetry stomach” because I can feel it in my abdomen at the core of my body when a poem or line strikes the right note for me. Keep reading poetry and I am sure that you will eventually feel confident judge and analyze it!
I’m not even hovering near a threshold of almost getting poetry. I’m still too afraid to really try but fear I won’t get it. I’m just not sure where to start with poetry–what I’m supposed to feel or learn or understand. I remember studying poetry in high school–the teacher would tease out meanings, which I think I would never (at that time anyway) ever be able to get. I just need to dive in I think–eventually you are going to really inspire me to do so!
Danielle, you are closer to the threshold than you think. Start anywhere. start with a poem you have read and read more by that poet. Then find out who that poet likes and try them out. Jump in with both feet, you’ll eventually learn to swim, promise
I used to be afraid of poetry and intimidated by it. I think it must go back to my school days when there only seemed to be one right answer about what the poem was about and I didn’t want to be wrong about it. My son started writing poetry a few years ago and I love reading his and realizing that I can take whatever I want from it and while he has a meaning in mind it doesn’t mean that what I think it means is wrong if it doesn’t match his. Wonderful post and very inspiring.
Boarding, thanks! What is it about school that makes us afraid of poetry? So glad you’ve been able to overcome the fear through your son’s poetry. I think that is pretty awesome!