And no wonder. Poetry, like math, often makes students feel inadequate, slow, and stupid, particularly when many of their peers seem to be able to effortlessly navigate the ambiguities of poetry. As Sheila Tobias argues, however, this perception is usually incorrect. She describes how a major source of learned helplessness with math is the “widespread myth…that mathematical ability is inborn, and that no amount of hard work can possibly compensate for not having ‘a mathematical mind’” (52). This myth is equally accurate in regards to poetry. Those students who just seem to intuitively understand poetry (or math) are, nine times out of ten, actually putting in a lot of hard work to achieve that proficiency. It’s at least partly a feedback loop: when students consistently receive positive feedback in a given subject, their work often begins to seem fun and effortless, whereas when the feedback is primarily negative, they will be less and less inclined to believe in themselves and continue to work at it. When these patterns of affirmation and negation occur early on in a student’s journey through the school system, the effects can be long-lasting and detrimental. Poetry is not an esoteric pursuit that some people magically or genetically “get” while others do not. In fact, “there is an argument for saying that of all the different forms and uses of language, it is poetry which is the most natural” (Fleming and Stevens 160). I propose that many students find studying poetry difficult because of the social malaise that obscures the form’s natural openness and fluidity with connotations of difficulty, elitism, and uselessness.
This is not to say that poetry is easy. Some poetry is easy, fun, and apparently straightforward (Shel Silverstein’s work, for instance), but some of it takes a great deal of dedication and contextual knowledge to interpret (such as T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”). One of the more unusual stereotypes prescribed to poetry is the supposed existence of something called “Poetry”—a monolithic entity that includes poems of all shapes, sizes, and eras. People uphold this stereotype every time they make generalizing absolute statements such as “poetry is hard” or “I don’t understand poetry.” This stereotype also affects math, but if 1 + 1 = 2 can be both easy and math, simple and profound, so too can Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” be both a poem and a photograph, straightforward and complex. Like any discipline, trade, or art form, poetry is large. It contains multitudes. Stereotypes like this one are at the root of the negative connotations that many students associate with poetry. When conceptions such as “poetry is difficult” (elitist, useless) seep into a nation’s cultural subconscious, it can become very complicated to invite students back to a place of open-mindedness about the form. As with math, the first step to extending this invitation has to be understanding their anxieties as fully as possible.
Many students find poetry so bewildering because the process of determining what counts as a poem and why is often restrictive and mysterious, predetermined by textbook-makers in New York or London. As a result, a very small number of “great” poems have been selected for study, canonized, and examined decade after decade via narrow interpretive approaches. Scholars have observed that many of these poems don’t seem to affect students like they used to. Much of this lessening impact, at least with older poets like Shakespeare, might be ascribed to the difficulty of navigating the quirky syntax and archaic usages of older English (Fleming and Stevens 166). But Gertrude Stein, the eccentric modernist poet best known for her innovative theories of language, proposes that language (specifically nouns) can wear out after a while. She observes how “when the language was new—as it was with Chaucer and Homer—the poet could use the name of a thing and the thing was really there. He could say ‘O moon,’ ‘O sea,’ ‘O love,’ and the moon and the sea and love were really there” (qtd in Isaak 35). By contrast, she thinks that by the early twentieth century “the excitingness of pure being had withdrawn from [literary language]”—largely because it had become too familiar (35). Perhaps “Poetry,” as most students perceive it (through a sliver of the canon) has also become too familiar.
One of the ways English teachers can help their students understand poetry at a deeper level is through defamiliarizing it. This doesn’t mean abandoning Shakespeare, Keats, and all the other dead white male poets; it means creating an atmosphere in which their accomplishments can be more fully and naturally appreciated. We need to broaden our approach to teaching the traditional poetry curriculums in ways that smash apart “Poetry” into all sorts of interesting little bits that students can then taste and appreciate in new ways. This means leading students away, wherever possible, from approaching poetic interpretation as a mindless calculation, putting in whatever effort is necessary to “guess what is in the teacher’s head” (Fleming and Stevens 162). One option in this regard is to encourage and affirm their natural responses to poetry through reflective free-writes and a heavy emphasis on hands-on creative writing. Another popular strategy is to close-read the lyrics of a song to draw out the connections between poetry and some of the more familiar aspects of mainstream culture. The work of intelligent hip hop artists (Talib Kweli, Queen Latifah, Afu-Ra), singer-songwriters (Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Bob Marley), and spoken word artists (Rives, Taylor Mali, Gemineye) can serve as extremely potent cannon fodder for demolishing students’ toxic preconceptions of the form. Poetry anxiety gets caught between a rock and a hard place when students suddenly discover they’ve been effortlessly enjoying poetry their whole lives.
Of course, this strategy has its limits. Just as language and specific poems can lose “the excitingness of pure being,” so can teaching methods. If students encounter overly excited English teachers trying to yank aside the lyrics-are-actually-poems curtain year after year, they’re bound to eventually become a tad less responsive. If approaches to teaching poetry begin to seem tarnished, that is likely because they are forced or artificial in some way—what math theorist David Stocker might call “Pizza Party” poetry. He argues that “we must distinguish between using things in the world around us to do math upon [slices of pizza, coins, etc.], and using math to understand the world around us” (48). In the same way, teaching poetry should never just become about linking poetry to things like hip hop or spoken word to make it seem trendier to students. Poetic inquiry, whether via Shakespeare or Mos Def, needs to take place as part of a broader development of critical literacy skills: close reading, critical thinking, debating, philosophizing. Kathleen Nolan dreams of a “mathematics classroom that begins by challenging the often invisible normative and regulatory aspects of…mathematics” as a discipline (214). What might an English classroom that challenges this anxiety-producing monolith called “Poetry” look like? Above all, we need to urge students to take a step back and ask critical questions about poetry: What is it? What are its limits? What does it look, sound, and feel like? Use the awkward experience of watching b.p.nichol and The Four Horsemen try to enact something called “sound poetry” as a springboard for discussion. Perhaps students will struggle less with reading poetry if they can begin to see that the letters on the page are not nearly as fixed as they may appear.
Works Cited
Fleming, Mike and David Stevens. English Teaching in the Secondary School: Linking
Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge, 1998. Print.
Isaak, Jo Anna. The Ruin of Representation in Modernist Art and Texts. Ann Arbor, Michigan:
UMI Research Press, 1986. Print.
Nolan, Kathleen. “Mathematics in and through social justice: another misunderstood marriage?”
Journal of Math Teacher Education (2009): 205-216. Web.
Stocker, David. “Math that matters: putting ‘pizza party’ math to rest.” Our Schools/Our Selves
(Winter 2005): 47-56. Print.
Tobias, Sheila. Overcoming Math Anxiety. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 1993.
Print.
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