Chesapeake
Meanderings (formerly The Fisherfolk Philosopher)
Vol. 1, No. 3 -- May 16, 2003
Teaching poetry as an outlaw and heretic
BY ALLAN ROY ANDREWS
ANNAPOLIS, MD --
Were
I permitted to do so, I would teach my high school students nothing but
poetry, not only during the month of April but throughout the academic
year.
As I write this reflection in the wake of National Poetry Month in the
United States--April--I recognize teaching nothing but poetry sounds a
bit
heretical, even to the literati among my teaching colleagues at the
private
Christian school in which I teach.
High school English and Journalism, along with “Creative Writing,” are
my assignments as defined by the curriculum for 9th- through
12th-graders,
and, frankly, there is much poetry that can be taught under the rubrics
to which I’ve been assigned. My English-teaching colleagues and I
make forays into the worlds of British, American and international
poetry.
For these poetic opportunities I’m thankful.
But it isn’t enough.
We live in an era that masks and hides its poetry; in a time that
disdains its poets; in a culture that dispatches poetry to the margins
of consciousness generally classified as “nice” but not truly
relevant. Poetry, while seemingly tolerated and accepted as a
tradition worth visiting, appears
to our culture as hopelessly irrelevant. To be sure, there is a
subculture of poetry, mostly associated with the academic world, where
poetry slams
and literary readings abound, but these fit better into entertainment
calendars rather than into mind-shaping cultural movements and events.
In our world, finances, wars and personal relationships come and go
with meteoric speed. The slowness that poetry demands often is
perceived as ill-fitted to a modern mind. Poetry’s structured
meanings often
are seen as needlessly convoluted. For many, poetry--like its literary
cousin, theology--has nothing to say to a post-modern world.
Unfortunately, while many thinking Christians would balk at saying
theology is irrelevant, they join the cultural mentality that relegates
poetry to a category akin to dodos or unicorns.
Many educators, even those who love and teach literature, would begin
to see problems with my suggestion that modern secondary instruction
focus
only on poetry. College preparatory curricula demand disciplined
lessons in critical prose analysis, fact-finding, vocabulary and
grammar as well
as in a variety of writing styles and genres of literature. Our
curricula are driven by an academic competition that cannot permit
students to slow down, pause or take time for reflection in the midst
of their studies.
This is where my notion of teaching only poetry becomes a bit
radical. I endorse the words of contemporary Hispanic poet and
teacher Alberto Rios, who in an interview called poetry an “outlaw” and
noted that the art of
poetry is “almost heresy.” His words are best quoted:
“And that’s in some sense what makes poetry exciting. It’s outlaw-like.
It’s almost heresy. It’s saying, ‘Don’t go forward. Stop for a moment
and understand where you’re standing. Just understand this moment.’”
Poetry makes us stop. Its brevity and its artistic presentation
are to be savored and not raced past. Almost every teacher and
textbook of poetry that I know suggests that poems must be read at
least three times. I’d say at least five times, but that’s not
the point. Good poetry
should be read unceasingly, a suggestion akin to the Apostle Paul’s
admonishment concerning prayer.
In the driving, hectic, achievement-obsessed world in which I live and
work, brevity is known prominently in ads and sound bites.
Savoring
the lines of a good poem simply does not fit easily into a world
occupied
with Instant Messenger, video games, calculators, cell phones, reality
TV,
put-down comedy, lacrosse Moms and competitive athletic
scholarships.
There is no contemporary equivalent of Bart Simpson quoting poetry;
there
is no Bill Gates of iambic pentameter.
The poet and critic Robert Bly once curtly concluded that Americans
haven’t grown up and are still singing nursery rhymes. Newspapers
long ago
gave up publishing poetry with any regularity, generally suggesting it
lacks
news value (Contrarily, The New York Times this year began
running
poetry in its Sunday magazine once more). Aptly, poetry is an
outlaw;
it has become a form of heresy among the techno-economic worldviews
that
motivate much of modern culture.
Even in the evangelical Christian world in which I work, poetry largely
is disdained unless it runs toward greeting card verse with some sort
of evangelistic
witness to a sinful world or chronicles the sinner-ego emphasis of a
contemporary
praise chorus. Check the popular literature of contemporary
evangelical
Christianity. I can’t recall the last time Christianity Today
published a contemporary poem (in any of its stable of publications) or
that
World magazine interviewed a working poet. This seems a
rather
disjointed phenomenon, given that The Bible, the book on which
evangelicalism asserts its rootedness, contains vast sections of poetry
in its Old Testament. And some of Christianity’s most
theologically rich poetic words crop out
of the New Testament.
To be sure, there are Christian poets at work; however, their forum of
expression lies in obscure little magazines. There are not many
homes
with copies of Image or Christianity and Literature on
the
reading stand. There are not many graduates of Christian schools
looking
for creative writing scholarships. Even in the wake of the
so-called
evangelical publishing boom of recent years, poetry gets little
attention.
The commercial success of pretribulation apocalyptic literature has not
translated
into more widespread exposure for poetry. Christian educators, I
fear,
have mishandled badly the importance of poetry in our lives.
Don’t read me wrongly; I’m not trying to be a Luddite calling for a
return to pre-technological education (or to pretribulation education,
for that
matter). The famous poet W. H. Auden once made that mistake when
he
claimed the camera and the internal combustion engine had become the
bane
of modern life. What would he have thought of plasma TV and
NASCAR?
Nor am I on some pop-cultural crusade to have our culture recognize and
appreciate
the poetic voices hidden in rock music and rap (instructive though this
might
prove). This path, I think, may represent the poetic immaturity
that
Bly identified with America.
Rather, I’m calling for recognition of poetry’s power to shape the mind
and spirit. Therein lies the “outlaw” nature of poetry that Rios
perceives. Poetry, I’m arguing, may be our culture’s neglected
path to knowledge and wisdom. Poetry is the arena of philosophers
and world-shakers, not
the stuff to be banished to the “Kids Korner” like some ersatz Sunday
School
materials.
When I began teaching in a public institution many years ago, a
colleague who taught philosophy insisted that his students read
regularly from an
anthology of poetry. The instructor had no interest in rhyme,
meter
or any of the traditional elements associated with poetry; he wanted
students
to grapple with ideas, and he found the most accessible grappling was
with
those who wrestle with words--the poets.
A journalist colleague of mine once told me that as a youth he read
everything he could find written by Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg and e.
e. cummings. Their poetry had a tremendous influence on his life,
he said, especially
during that critical search for identity that marks the transition from
adolescence to adulthood. Unfortunately, he confessed to not
having read poetry in several years.
This exposes a problem in our teaching of poetry. We treat is as
a canon of wisdom that all must be exposed to in youth, but we neglect
its
power to challenge and shape our current thinking and opinions.
The
conventional wisdom seems to suggest we outgrow our need for poetry
once
we’ve moved beyond nursery rhymes and the so-called schoolboy poets, or
once
we’ve been force-fed Britain’s bards and poet laureates.
Or perhaps we fear poetry’s power.
When a group of poets scheduled to read at the White House earlier this
year were dis-invited because they suggested they might read words of
protest to policies of war, we may have witnessed an unwitting nod to
the power
of creative poetry. Can poetry actually influence political and
moral
decision-making?
You bet your sweet sonnet it can! (And, by the way, the nation’s
press that so diligently reported the dis-inviting of the poets made no
effort to uncover what the poets planned to say. Their poetry
couldn’t
possibly have news value, the editors must have decided.)
Last year, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, Ruth
Walker made a gentle plea for a “marketplace for poetry.” She
said, “
. . . I somehow want to connect Shelley's reference to poets as ‘the
unacknowledged legislators of the world’ with Jefferson's preference
for newspapers without government over government without newspapers.
Would we be more wisely governed if we had more poetry in our daily
papers?”
Walker points to a power in poetry beyond art.
In Rios’ words, poetry can force us to stop and understand where we are
standing. Furthermore, in the analysis of former White House
press secretary
and PBS documentary journalist Bill Moyers, who in his book The
Language
of Life called poetry “the most honest language I hear today.
“Poetry is news,” Moyers asserted, “news of the mind, news of the
heart.” So powerful is it, Moyers said, echoing Walker’s
conviction, that “democracy needs her poets.”
My conviction holds that poetry is a way of knowing, an epistemology,
for those with a philosophical bent. Poetry knows the mind and
the heart in ways that science, technology and economics cannot.
Just the other day, Margo Jefferson, writing in the New York Times
Book Review, said under the headline “News from poetry”:
“As for the question of poetry's role in the public realm, why does the
United States seem to be the only country in which artists still argue
about whether politics can coexist with aesthetic complexity? It
can. And poetry can be the only sure conduit to emotional truths
that politics has done its best to shut down.”
One could easily substitute education or religion where Jefferson wrote
politics. (One could easily substitute economics or journalism or
science or social science, as well.)
Just to set the classroom record straight: Is there a better way
to learn vocabulary than to be exposed to great poetry? I think
not. The syntax and punctuation of poetry demand an understanding
of the structure of English sentences. One can learn an immense
amount of grammar from studying poetry--and lots of other stuff taught
in textbooks, too.
___________________
Allan Roy Andrews teaches in the high school at the Annapolis Area
Christian School in Maryland. He can be contacted at
aandrews@aacsonline.org