Introduction to Poetry

Introduction to Poetry
Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

I usually don't go in for poems about poetry, but in this case I make an exception because Collins migrates toward a more salient question than what a poem should be--he asks and answers how we should read it. I think this is a pretty important question to ask when reading anything; it speaks to why people continue to write and read poetry. It answers the perennial question of the value of literature by suggesting that poetry reflects experience. Collins' imagery makes a poem a sensory experience, mingling aesthetic sensibility with experiential narrative. The union of imagery and narrative allows a poem to relay deeply significant emotions.

As a kind of instruction manual on reading poetry, the poem would work well as the first poem in the book. I think it would be a good start to getting kids to think about imagery in structured way--instead of going straight for the meaning, they need to identify things. Once they've got a sense of what's going on in the poem, they can figure out how those things work together to create a holistic theme. The idea of "meaning" also offers entree into the concept of the "center" that I intend to address with the other poems. The idea that poems could have a multiplicity of meanings will be important when trying to destabilize meaning in later works.

My intention with this poem, then, is first to engage students in identifying images. When they have done that, they should be able to show how the images appeal to the senses (auditory, tactile, visual) to suggest that the goal of a poem is to engage the senses. Finally, I'll ask about the concluding image and how the satirical phrase "what it really means" denies that a poem has a "real meaning" as opposed to many meanings that arise of its presentation of sensory images.

1) Identify three images in the poem. What senses do these images appeal to? Why would the author choose to appeal to so many senses in his poem?
2) What is the tone of the concluding image? Why might the author choose such loaded words to describe reading a poem? How do you think you should read a poem? How does the author think you should read a poem?
3) Given the author's description of how to read a poem, why do you think there are so many different kinds of sensory appeals in the poem? What does a poem "mean" in light of these appeals?

The first question should allow the students to get a grip on the figurative language and realize that the author is engaging many different senses. The second should orient the student to how not to read a poem. The instructor should highlight the contrast between the two sections of the poem to spark discussion about how to read a poem. The final question should begin to bring up the idea of "meaning", how it is created, and how it is reinforced with language. Specifically, thee instructor should bring up the idea that poem's may represent an experience rather than a substantive meaning. Reading a poem, then, may be less about a means to an end than a way of exploring a topic. The conclusion does not represent a hard and fast truth, but a potential way of thinking about or responding to the world.

Targeted CCS Standards for Project

I reviewed the Common Core State Standards for reading literature in the 9th and 10th grade. At this level, student are expected to "cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis" of texts, as well as "analyze how authors choice's concerning how to structure a text...create...effects." I think these are skills that are necessary for my intention of broadening cultural perspectives to work; students need to interact with the text on a level that allows them to form judgments about authorial choices. With that in mind, I've chosen two of the standards to highlight. According to this document, students at the targeted level should:

2. Determine a theme or central idea of a text and analyze in detail its development over the course of the text, including how it emerges and is shaped and refined by specific details; provide an objective summary of the text

6. Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in the text, including figurative and connotative meanings; analyze the cumulative impacts of specified word choices on meaning and tone (e.g., how the language evokes a sense of time and place; how it sets a formal or informal tone)

I believe these standards allow me to accomplish my goal for a variety of reasons. First, I can integrate the two to show students how figurative language is used to develop a central theme. Second, authorial choices in structure and figurative language will allow the student to determine biases or cultural proclivities. In "The Second Coming," for example, the Christian language clues the reader in to the author's Judeo-Christian heritage, which creates a context for the work. The kinds of changes this author suggests, then, represent a destabilization of his Christian moral center.

My real challenge at this point will be leading the students through the reasoning using the questions. I need to ask questions which first identify the particular element I wish to isolate before launching into questions of authorial choice, structure, and figurative language.

Common Core Standards Curriculum?

Having put a few feelers out about my last blog post, I heard from English teachers that my reasoning is logical and would lead students toward the conclusion I want them to make... if those students are college freshman. In an effort to take this project in the direction I want, I'm reviewing the Common Core Standards and figuring out what students "can" do at various grade levels. When I have a more solid understanding of the skills I can expect students to have at various levels, I can do more to target my questions. I'm thinking high school freshman would be a good place to start--they're impressionable enough that ideas will stick, and hopefully if I lay this out for them correctly it'll be a way of thinking they'll carry into future classes.

I intend to spent the next day or two reviewing these standards for freshmen and picking out skills they should have. I can target those skills in my questions while integrating a queer theoretical perspective.

I also intend to look more closely at Bloom's taxonomy, an articulation of levels of thinking (see an image here: http://www.techlearning.com/article/8670).

Specifically, I want to pick out application and analysis. If I can alert students to the presence of a simile for example, I hope I can take them up another level and force them to analyze why an author would choose a particular simile, what cultural or social proclivities might have prompted that choice, and how we can question why those choices might influence perspectives.

I'll have a more extensive list of skills I want to tap into after I've read the standards (for interested readers looking for more info, it can be found here: http://www.corestandards.org/).

Yeats: The Second Coming

The Second Coming
W.B. Yeats (1919)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The above poem, included in The Norton Anthology of Modernist Poetry and considered an excellent of example of modernism, contains some of the very imagery I seek to engage in my work. Readers will notice the apocalyptic imagery, as well as the allusions to Christian doctrine and eschatology, and decide that the poem is about the end times. Given the date of its writing, it moreover can be read as a modernist response to the devastation in the wake of World War I. The second stanza's "lion body" with "the head of a man" recalls the beasts straight out of Revelations in the Christian Bible, which, when juxtaposed with the "rough beast" slouching toward Bethlehem, suggests the end of an era and the beginning of a new.

This reading, while cursory, is widely accepted. An alternate reading is accessible as well, however. The idea of the "gyre" and the expansive sense of the first stanza evoke fear in the speaker's tone. When "things fall apart" and the "center cannot hold," civilization as we know it comes crumbling down, rent apart by the velocity of change. Yet, for those of us on the margin, this kind of change might not be the dreadful event the speaker depicts. The "twenty centuries of stony sleep" that "were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle" suggest the birth of Christ as the most recent transformative event in this grand sense of human history, establishing a moral center to redeem the human race for its manifold sins. While the destruction of this Christian--not even Judeo-Christian--belief might trouble the Christian speaker, it this kind of event that social activists seek to throw the center off kilter, realigning sociocultural ethics to support inclusion of a once-marginalized group.

The destructive imagery, then, leads to a generative space where we can define new rules and new mores. The danger in this idea, of course, is that complacency might lead to the same kind of tightly controlled order that had to be destroyed to effect change. A paradox like this evokes many questions, including some I'd like to include in a section of my work on "The Center". Here are a few I'd ask for this poem:

1) Consider the violent imagery in the poem. Choose on such image and identify what, exactly, is being destroyed. How does the speaker's choice of imagery and diction clue us in to what change the speaker bemoans?
2) What can we say about the speaker's cultural proclivities and how that might alter his perspective of "the center" being destroyed? Might a different speaker represent this kind of change in a different light?
3) We know that WWI was followed in two decades by WWII; the speaker did not know this when he wrote the poem. If we take the poem to be a modernist expostulation about new warfare and the decimation of humanity it allows, what kinds of different "centers" might the speaker be discussing? In light of more recent history--nuclear nonproliferation pacts, the rise of humanitarian rules in warfare--how might the speaker's perspective have changed, if at all?

I think the above questions help to identify the idea that the speaker has a particular perspective he or she brings when writing a poem, a "center" on which he or she grounds beliefs and fears. The high drama of the poem's imagery makes it easy to see the first suggested reading, about war and destruction. However, because of its inherent drama, it is also easy to deconstruct assumptions about the poem's meaning, using perspective to show how the author might have simply been afraid of change.

What the World (of Education) Needs Now

A confluence of experience led to my interest in this project--an investigation of ways to "queer the curriculum"--but the foremost among these is undoubtedly my love of literature. The now famous documentary "Waiting for Superman" depicted a number of troubling problems, but the most resonant of these to me was the hard fact that my generation will be the first in decades to be less literate than the preceding generation. The implications of this statistic--as they relate to the achievement gap, to the future of the American economy, to America's dominance in global politics--trouble me as they would any citizen engaged in making his or her country a better place. Their resonance with me, however, was slightly more personal. How, I asked, could someone miss out on the ideas, the emotions, and the cultural significance of the works I treasure so much and study so intently?

In that question, I found something of my answer--what if the ideas, emotions, and cultural significance of these works simply aren't valuable or relevant to those who are forced to study them? I've heard my father say loudly he never read another classic of American literature after being force-fed The Scarlet Letter, and I can come up with plenty of anecdotal evidence that his experience with that novel is not uncommon. The ethos of the distinctly American Protestant work ethic and Puritan moral system aside, what is the intrinsic value of a Puritan woman from colonial America publicly castigated, what referent does that novel have in a world that has been through the sexual revolution?

The answer, of course, is that the novel has plenty of value from a variety of standpoints, particularly a feminist investigation of power structures in colonial America. The operative word in the above sentence being "standpoint," I have come to consider how centrist American literary curricula has become. Even so-called "multicultural works" like Things Fall Apart are taught with an ethnocentric, imperialist bent--a fact less surprisingly if you consider that the vast majority of teachers are white and female.

My response to my original question, then, is not a hackneyed sermon about the value of literature or the importance of the written word to Our History--but instead an investigation of how to make the monolithic Our (Literary) History into a proliferation of stories, relevant to their readers and utile in combating the growing achievement gap. My ulterior motives of inspiring in students a love for the medium of the written word just happens to dovetail nicely with the statistically, politically sound goals of improving student achievement.

So I begin my work, grounded in the principles of Queer Theory. My investigation is not sexual, but instead one which seeks to identify and pierce the "center" which imposes order on literary curricula. Once that is accomplished, I will compile a series of "canonical" poems and show how they can be made relevant by tying them to inquiry-based learning with the goal of opening up multiple culturally and linguistically relevant stories. Along the way, I hope to hone my close-reading abilities, expose myself to issues in curriculum development, and assemble a workable anthology of poems with readings that violate the "normal" interpretation and open up literary possibilities.