Barbelith Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing

ah--please may I add my own whacks to the beating of this dead horse? (I like it because it is bitter, and because it is, actually, the dead horse I rode in on.)

some american universities seem to have a decidedly touchy-feely approach, where the students sit around and respond to things in a hugely subjective and ill-informed way, with the most 'moved' responses getting the highest marks.

I'm not sure where this impression is coming from, ginger--maybe you had a bad course?--but my impression, from teaching 20 years in a variety of American institutions, regulalry teaching poetry in my classes, and working with probably a hundred or more poetry teachers who have studied at many institutions, is that this is not accurate as a generalization of American univesity poetry classes.

It is, from my point of view, more often what students sometimes think is what's going to go on in a poetry course ("there won't be much reading and we can just come in and talk about whatever we want and nothing we say will ever be 'wrong'"). But very rarely is this the approach that teachers take, and those students are disappointed.

Virtually no American students actually read poetry outside of the occasional course requirement--although many claim to write it. So they'll come to a poetry reading course, and claim that a poem can mean absolutely anything, because we all read differently. So if it says "Rain" and I happen to think about a jackhammer at that moment, then well, to me, the poem's discussing a jackhammer. More likely, death--(the sort of "well, when in doubt,..."). Or, particularly, if it's by a female poet, it's probably surely about insanity. More specifically, "Diving into the Wreck"--"well I think it's about going into an insane asylum," I was told. I've been told this about many poems.

The second wrong idea that people who don't really read poetry is roughly akin to what seamus was arguing. That it's almost a foreign language, and you can't possibly understand what it means by treating poetry like, well, language, and assuming that it is working with (or playing with) any of the rules of "normal" language--grammar, etc. You cannot assuming that a poet is, as Wordsworth should have said, a person speaking intimately to other people.

The job, these readers feel, is to discover a poem's "deep hidden meanings" by a kind of rigid analysis that's supposed to excavate out those meanings, but ultimately, usually misses the point. "What Eliot is trying to say," they'll tell me. Eliot, of course, having failed miserably, obviously... These readers feel stupid in front of poems, and I don't totally blame them.

Yes, poetry is highly structured and it repays, often requires, slow reading, and re-reading, but it is first and foremost language, working with and playing with--sometimes against--basically the same rules that "normal" language uses. They're written for an audience, they're written to communicate and maybe transport readers and or listeners. That's, to me, the place to start. Then, it is important to realize that much poetry is about play, playing in language. Even when it's also about big serious topics, lurking around the edges. ...

Here's one of my favorites on this theme of reading...

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.

from The Apple that Astonished Paris, 1996
University of Arkansas Press, Fayetteville, Ark.

Billie Collins is always better than I expect him to be. I really didn't want to like him, but I do.

Recommend me some poets