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  #1  
Unread 01-06-2002, 03:33 PM
Richard Wakefield Richard Wakefield is offline
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I would like to hear from others who have taught poetry. The whole notion of teaching people to appreciate poetry often strikes me as hopeless, yet I've been working at it for over twenty years and, if my students' testimonials are any indication (some of them given AFTER final grades were assigned!), I've had some success now and then.
How much poetry do your students already know?
How much do they know ABOUT poetry?
What poetry seems to get to them most often and most powerfully?
What do you hope to accomplish in teaching poetry?
Richard
PS Next year for the first time I'll be teaching the Bible as literature. I'd also appreciate hearing from anyone with experience in that heavily fraught endeavor. If there's much response, we can start a separate thread.
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  #2  
Unread 01-06-2002, 05:07 PM
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RCL RCL is offline
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Richard, interesting questions. I'll be back on the teaching issue. If you haven't seen Northrop Frye's two books on The Bible AND Literature, I highly recommend them: The Great Code and Words with Power, both Harvest Books. His emphasis is on how it influenced writers, but in the process he does some amazing structural and image analysis--some of which influenced about six of my poems, including "The Word," "The Trees's Tale," and "In His Self-Image."

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Ralph
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Unread 01-06-2002, 09:57 PM
Robert J. Clawson Robert J. Clawson is offline
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Richard,

Are you asking about teaching students to write poetry or to read and appreciate it?

Have you any specific age or grade level in mind?

Bob
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Unread 01-07-2002, 02:42 AM
Clive Watkins Clive Watkins is offline
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Hello, Richard!

Like you, I spent a large part of my career (after starting out as a lawyer) teaching poetry within a wider brief for literature and language.

Would it be of interest to widen your last question - "What do you hope to accomplish in teaching poetry?" - to ask why we should be concerned to teach poetry at all? What would be the consequences of not teaching it?

Clive Watkins
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  #5  
Unread 01-07-2002, 02:23 PM
Richard Wakefield Richard Wakefield is offline
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It's gratifying to have had several responses to a topic that seemed a bit outside the aegis of this forum.
Ralph, the Frye books are now on my reading list. Thanks.
Bob, I'm thinking mainly in terms of teaching college students to read, hear, and even perform poetry. In my experience, the biggest problem to overcome in teaching people to write poetry is their unfamiliarity with poetry, so maybe the two issues boil down to one.
Clive: I like your suggestion that we ask what the consequences of not teaching poetry would be. I'm torn between what seems the obvious answer (No consequences whatsoever) and the answer that acknowledges my ideals (A more impoverished life). In a way it's like teaching anything: One has to teach as if the subject is the most important thing in the world, and yet if he believed it without qualification he'd probably go nuts at the thought that many students get nothing and that all of them get less than he believes they need.
There is a fairly strong link back to the main topic of this forum. As a critic I take it as my responsibility to teach my readers something about poetry in general, in addition to telling them about this particular poet's work. Even those readers who know more than I do don't necessarily know all that I do, after all; we can learn from people who know less than we do.
RPW
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Unread 01-07-2002, 08:57 PM
Robert J. Clawson Robert J. Clawson is offline
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Richard,

I haven't taught a class in literature since, oh, 1967 or so, and that was for high schoolers.

Since, I've taught fourth graders and adults, all volunteers for what I was offering, so they came with interest.

I would think that on the college level when it's time to teach poetry within the literature unit, you might lure them in with popular song, which they have heard. You might start with some simple stuff, then move to the more complex work of writers such as Paul Simon and Randy Newman. Paul Muldoon might have written something on his use of pop song lyrics. I know he's paid debt to them in his edition of Ploughshares. I've always found The Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby" a moving lyric. Bob Dylan might have some good stuff. Maybe go back to Cole Porter, Harry Warren, further to the Wobblies, Woodie Guthrie, Leadbelly, to, who knows, that tune Bunny Berrigan played, "I Can't Get Started With You."

Alan Sullivan was a songwriter. He might have good advice on solid "pop" song lyrics that would work in a situation where students THINK they're unfamiliar with poetry.

Where then? Perhaps stay awhile with the lyric, maybe have them sing some Campion, Herrick, and Burns. Bring them to an understanding of poetry being a "pop" entertainment before TV, before records, before radio, before print.

I should think that you could manage getting into the lyric that way. Narrative, I think, would be easier. Some very popular TV narratives these days are quite compressed and well-written, mostly on HBO: The Sopranos, Oz, Six Feet Under. Have them watch an episode or two, then read some, say, Damon Runyon or Stephen Crane...you know, a couple of wicked weird stories. Then introduce the more compressed form of narrative poetry, another kind of story telling.

I don't know if you'd have time for all of this, but I think that if they're not familiar with poetry, you can quickly persuade them that they may be quite interested in its values expressed in another guise.


Bob
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Unread 01-08-2002, 08:54 AM
David Mason David Mason is offline
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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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  #8  
Unread 01-08-2002, 01:44 PM
Robert J. Clawson Robert J. Clawson is offline
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[quote]Originally posted by David Mason:

"For me, the first and most important lesson is pleasure."

Absolutely.

Bob
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  #9  
Unread 01-08-2002, 02:08 PM
Richard Wakefield Richard Wakefield is offline
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Bob and David: Thanks to both of you. I agree that pleasure is the place to start, and if I'm doing it right it is also the place to conclude. I've used song lyrics with some success, especially folk song lyrics, and when I've insisted on memorization most of the students have responded with surprising enthusiasm after the initial groaning.
The thread about the Williams poem got me thinking about all this again. That poem in particular, whatever else can be said about it, does a lot of harm when inflicted carelessly upon neophyte readers. It panders to the notion that poetry is obscure and that only the informed instructor can explicate it. Of course, that's not entirely the poem's fault: lots of people who teach literature (or anything else) like to use their classrooms as stages for acting out their own intellectual vanity. It's right and good to make sure the students realize that you know more than they do; that's what they're paying their tuition for. But as William James pointed out over a hundred years ago in his "Talks to Teachers," all knowledge builds upon what we already know, and the new knowledge has to somehow "fit" in order to be acquired at all. Seems obvious, but we often go ahead as if it could be otherwise.
The Frost essay is a wonder and has long informed my own teaching, albeit often clumsily due to my own limitations.
Many thanks.
RPW
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  #10  
Unread 01-09-2002, 07:56 PM
Tom Tom is offline
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[This message has been edited by Tom (edited January 30, 2005).]
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