Riddles of Form – One

Beginnings

Q: Why do you want to write a book about poetry?

A: As part of my teaching in a High School I am expected to teach poetry as part of the curriculum. Over the past ten years I have experienced an increasing sense of disjointedness between what I teach (what I am obliged to teach, what I feel I should teach, what I think would work with a class) and what I read and think about during the rest of my day.

Connected to this is an ever-increasing hostility expressed by a class whenever poetry is mentioned: groans, complaints, “that sucks”, etc. .

Why is this? Putting aside normal adolescent reluctance to start a new piece of work, poetry in particular – not the novel, not drama – arouses such extreme feelings. What is it about poetry that is so off-putting?

I think that this response is very revealing not just about current adolescent attitudes towards a genre of literature. I think it goes wider – to students’ attitudes to literature in general; to the current approaches to teaching poetry in the classroom; to teachers’ own experiences with poetry; to cultural traditions that have been established concerning poetry, what is/is not worthy of being taught (the ‘cannon’ as such); to the tradition of Practical Criticism within English studies and the examination system I.A. Richards being especially siginificant here); to the uneasy relationship between the academic reading and study of poetry and the poets who are actually writing; and – moving broader still – to how poetry functions within ‘our’ society (by which I take a Western, 21st Century, post-industrial, consumerist society as my model) and attitudes towards Otherness, alternative ways of thinking and living and speaking.

*

A typical scenario:

The teacher enters the room with a bundle of photocopies of a poem. The sheets are distributed. The teacher (or a student) reads the poem out loud. The students are instructed to prepare the poem – using dictionaries, perhaps a guiding question or two. They work individually or in pairs.

After a given amount of time – 15 minutes to half an hour – the teacher attempts to draw out the students’ understanding of the poem. The usual procedures are in evidence – ambiguity in terms of vocabulary (a secondary meaning is used as a key to a secret level of the text), imagery, form, tone .... the list is well known.

Depending on the group, the poem, the time of day, the teacher’s approach, so the discussion becomes animated – perhaps one student ‘clicks’ with an aspect of the poem and leads the class off at a tangent. Alternatively, the discussion sags, the teacher steps in and drives the students through the poem.

The period is nearly over. There is a hasty attempt to draw the strands together, to give a ‘reading’ of the poem. The teacher asserts a dominant reading: ‘what the poem is really all about’, ensuring also that key learning objectives have been covered. An essay is assigned – or not. The students leave the room. Next class (Physics, Geography, P.E.). A dim memory remains of the poem. In a week’s time there will be another photocopy to be handed out.

So what’s wrong with this? (Although I am fully aware that one can only do so much given scheduling and syllabus requirements, the ability and enthusiasm of the students, and the teacher’s own energy and competing demands upon their time.)

First, the way that the poem is given as an isolated example. The class contact with the poem begins – and ends – abruptly. There is little opportunity to set the poem within cultural or biographical contexts, nor within the work of the poet or a wider generation. An impression is created that poems exist as little islands of language or like free samples of perfume in magazines. Tear off and sniff.

Second, the implicit assumption of a ‘correct’ reading. The teacher will strive to focus the different opinons, abitrate between valid and invalid ideas. And, typically, an attempt to state what is the subject matter of the poem (with other features such as imagery and language being secondary and contributory). The “This poem is about” model.

Third, the expected development of reading in terms of students’ incompetence and the teacher’s competence. That meaning will be gradually revealed. The power structure within the classroom is unchallenged. (Poem as Strip Tease model).

Fourth, the assumption that the poem has something to hide. Meaning lies buried ‘within’. The poem as treasure map model.

Fifth, the use of procedures – effectively a toolkit – knowing that the ability to spot features and label them will be rewarded. The poem is like an ornithological field trip – there’s a simile! I’ve seen an example of assonance!

Sixth, little opportunity for the students to engage in ways other than intellectually with the poem. The poem has become – as such – a kind of crossword puzzle.

Seventh, and perhaps most damagingly, the overriding impression is that poems exist for classroom – and, by extension, examination – analysis. It is as if poets write poems simply for students to write essays or obtain grades.

And so what would be alternative methods?

*

Interlude

There was a period of time when he would spend evenings in a basement flat in a room surrounded by shelves full of books. In another room a small child lay sleeping. The child did not belong to him. The books did not belong to him. He felt an interloper, a trespasser. Among the books some were familiar, many were not. He did not dare take a book from the shelf. It did not feel right. It was not his right to do so. In fact, it was many years before he could buy and read with a clear conscience several of those books which he remembered seeing. In that room. On those shelves. And a child sleeping.

*

Listening to Walt Whitman

reading ‘Song of Myself’ as both an inspiration and great corrective. Inspiration in terms of his self belief and the way certain lines encapsulate key ideas I want to explore. Corrective in terms of Whitman’s optimism and sweep of vision – who, other than Blake, in the English literary tradition gets close? I think Whitman has to be one of the key writers for this project – who yanks (pardon the pun) poetry out of the classroom and connects it back into LIFE.

/1/

I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease ... observing a spear of summer
grass.

(poetry working outside of ‘normal’ attitudes towards time profitably spent. the importance of rapt attention: the particular, the seemingly ‘insignificant’. a new – and truer – sense of leisure.)

/2/

I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

(WW’s poetics of contact: skin, fingers, ingesting, consuming, embodying – versus abstraction and intellection. An uninhibited poetic erotics - & O’Hara afterwards).

...

Have you reckoned a thousand acres much? Have you reckoned the earth much?
Have you practised so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun .... there are millions of suns left,
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand .... nor look through the eyes of the dead .... nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.

(WW dismantles the entire educational literary examination structure. the intellectual arrogance, greediness & presumption of the ‘clever’reader – but who misses what is essential. a ‘true’ reading of the poem involves the cosmos itself. direct contact with things. contradiction & Zen-like paradox within WW’s thought: you read the poem to be ‘awakened’ to why the poem cannot tell you what is essential. wider spiritual teachings of abandoning the ladder you climb upon. becoming courageous – think and act for yourself!)

/5/

Loafe with me on the grass .... loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want .... not custom or lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valued voice

(again, seemingly paradoxical – a poet denying words, rhyme, music. rather, WW goes for the erotics involved in language – reminds me of something by Barthes – the grain of the voice? a timbre, the impossible to replicate, body and ‘soul’ united. beyond words).

/6/

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? .... I do not know what it is any more than he.

(classic transcendentalist philosophy – the child knows & systemized education unlearns. the so-called ‘weak’ student often reads a poem with uncanny insight)

...

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues!
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing

(for WW poetic Voice is inextricably connected with political Voice – the true meaning of Democracy – and lost in current US/UK practice. opens the political dimension of the argument)

/13/

In me the caresser of life wherever moving .... backward as well as forward slueing,
To niches aside and junior bending

Oxen that rattle the yoke or halt in the shade, what is that you express in your eyes?
It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.

(Franciscan tendency in WW’s thinking?– and a so far unaddressed aspect: poetry and ecology. poem: Nature – and a revision of nice safe readings of Romanticism.)

/14/

The wild gander lead his flock through the cool night,
Ya-honk! he says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation;
The pert may suppose it meaningless, but I listen closer,
I feel its purpose and place up there toward the November sky

(great quote for the ‘riddles of form’ in nature ‘speaking’ a secret language)
...

Scattering it freely forever

(Derrida & dissemination! WW’s male erotics of sowing seeds in the minds of his readers)

/16/

I resist anything better than my own diversity,
And breathe the air and leave plenty after me,
And am not stuck up, and am in my place

(great for sections on poetry & breath: Ginsberg is the logical connection here – but also Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’)

/17/

These are the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me,
If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing or next to nothing,
If they do not enclose everything they are next to nothing,
If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing,
If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.

(“riddles” of course. also the paradoxical nature of WW’s teaching: I am saying nothing new – you know it already. also an anti-commodification of knowledge – who can rightly argue for copyright on ideas?)

/18/

Do you guess I have some intricate purpose?
Well I have .... for the April rain has, and the mica on the side of a rock has.

(again, the secret language of form. I bet Coolidge would love these lines)
...

This hour I tell things in confidence,
I might not tell everybody but I will tell you.

(intimacy. another theme – how a poem, a poet, enters your life – if you wish. to counter attitudes of “this has nothing to do with me” or “this poem doesn’t speak to me”)

/20/

What is a man anyhow? What am I? and what are you?

...

And I know I am solid and sound,
To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,
All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.

(human anatomy – the skeleton – genetic ‘writing’ – DNA – a pun on sound (?) and Cage’s realisation of the impossibility of silence as we ‘hum’ with life. poetry as gnosis.)
...

/21/

I am the poet of the body,
And I am the poet of the soul

(begging the question whether for WW there is a distinction?)

- more to come -