Bob's suggestions are very good ones, I think. Song is a wonderful way to approach poetry. For me, the first and most important lesson is pleasure. While one can't dictate the pleasure of others, one can find ways of helping a group of people experience pleasure before they move to more intellectual pursuits, so that these pursuits will always be associated with forms of pleasure. Many, many students I encounter were turned away from poetry because they were taught that it was a difficult art that you analyzed, and that only the teacher knew the right answer to a poem's riddle. Now, analysis is obviously very important to serious readers, and much poetry is indeed difficult, but we forget that our primary job is to create readers, if I'm not putting it too strongly, and trust them to forge their own tastes as they go through life, just as we ourselves have done. So, in an introductory reading course, I will often begin by outlawing analysis and deep hidden meanings. I'll begin with Mother Goose and nonsense verse and songs, riddles and vocables, get my students to memorize 100 lines per course and perform them, and then say, "There, you've got the poem. It's in your head and you've got it." Obviously there's something naive in this method, but I began it in a system where poetry was one component in a required composition course, and I encountered real resistance to it. But I discovered that damned near any student will enjoy getting a laugh or some applause if she or he can recite a poem. I encourage them to use cominc poems, dirty limericks--whatever works. And when they've recited their hundred lines I tell them that they are now qualified to spend an afternoon in an Irish pub--they like that sort of thing.
It's not that I'm trying to dumb down the art--far from it. I'm just trying to start from a place that makes some sense to my students, and them lure them a little further along the path.
When we did the 4th edition of Western Wind, John Nims and I had a year-long argument about whether we should include more song lyrics or not. John was adamantly against it, declaring that his book was about poetry as speech, and that using song was a deception and condescended to students. I still disagree with him, though I let him have his way for that edition. While setting poems to music does indeed create some problems--Auden said that words to be set to music were like footsoldiers to be killed off by the thousands--songs have always had a close relationship to poetry. Think of the lieder tradition in music, for example, and the tradition of the Border Ballads. I even pointed out to John that the title of his book, Western Wind, came from a little song. But to no avail.
I now believe that no one should be given a high school or college degree if they can't recite at least a hundred lines of verse. And I'm not talking about torturing them with old chestnuts that the teacher chooses--within reason, let them choose for themselves the poems they want to memorize and perform. Many students now come to the art from some version of the slam scene, where they see performance from memory as the liberating thing it is, rather than as punishment.
PS--I'm very fond of Frost's great lecture/essay, "Education by Poetry." Can't recommend it highly enough.
[This message has been edited by David Mason (edited January 08, 2002).]
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