Poetry Round Table

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Comment by Kathleen Jensen on September 27, 2009 at 2:08pm

One thing I repeat all year is this: if something is hard, it does not mean that you're stupid. The question I ask is: when/where does the poem get hard? That's the part that we have to struggle with and the part that yields the most interesting thought and discussion.

Comment by J. D. Wilson, Jr. on September 27, 2009 at 8:27am

I rarely understand a poem and that is why they are fascinating to me. This is of course more true of some poets than others, Eliot, for example, more so than Frost. Still Frost operates at levels at times that are elusive. I think it is often more important to try to understand what in a poem makes us feel the way it does than to look at the words and try to figure out what the poem means solely on the basis of the language it uses. What emotions does the poem evoke and what is the poet trying to tell me by evoking those emotions? I mean, what does "Tyger, tyger burning bright in the forest of the night" mean? The literal meanings of words do not tell us much, but the images and the emotions the images evoke tell us quite a bit.

But I've just finished reading an article on Jung's "holy grail" and may not be thinking rationally. Still, I think poetry often insists we approach it through an avenue that intersects the rational and the irrational. What I find especially meaningful about poetry is that it often requires me to live in my head and my heart, my emotions and my intellect simultaneously if it is to be understood. I do not know, however, how helpful this is to the teaching of poetry. And it certainly does not mean a poem can mean whatever you want it to mean.

Cordially,
J. D.

Comment by Daniel Sharkovitz on September 27, 2009 at 3:53am

Jim,

You asked:

What questions do you ask when you read a poem, especially one that resists your initial efforts to understand it?

Great question. For some students, especially those trained in the theory that when a poet writes a poem, she stuffs meaning into the poem and tries to hide it so that students will later have to "find" it, I find this an especially important question. When this happens in the classroom, I ordinarily use this sort of moment as an opportunity to discuss the meaning of meaning. What is meaning? Where does meaning live? And so on. We explore divergent student interpretations of other things including poems, including scenes from Hamlet. (For more on this see my Hamlet Explorathon on my website under 11 AP ENG, General Information.) Another weblink that helps students think about the meaning of meaning is at http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/04/schizoillusion/. Be certain to watch the spinning mask video located a bit into the article.

I also teach students some of the approaches to interpretation grownups often use so that they can apply those later. (For example, I have a short essay that offers an archetypal analysis of Sponge Bob.)

Following this sort of exploration, many students are more willing to venture out and risk developing interpretations of difficult poems. Plus they have more of the skills and knowledge to do it.

Dan

Comment by Sara Bauer on August 20, 2009 at 7:56am

I insist that the experience of poetry begins before we begin reading it. So, I ask students to consider what I call the architecture of the poem. Sometimes, we can quickly identify form: sonnet or sonnet-like. For free verse, we find that often, the structure of the poem DOES communicate the topic or the stance of the poet/speaker to some extent. I think it's also important to acknowledge that our interest in and patience with a poem is, in large part, due to the way it appears on the page. One student actually said, "Oh, see, here are all of these long lines close together without any stanza breaks and I'm feeling claustrophobic already." Wow. So, we tried to strategize ways of accessing inaccessible poems -- especially important to AP students who could be faced with anything on the test.

Comment by judy5ca on July 5, 2009 at 5:10pm

I love the concept of the poem "resisting" my understanding. That's a notion I will gladly take to my students. Thank you for giving me a new perspective.

Comment by Monika Rose on July 4, 2009 at 1:06am

In the first few lines of the poem, a problem is presented by the speaker -- following that will be ramifications of that problem or examples of how it plays out, like bits of glass in a kaleidoscope seeking a pattern to collapse into. There will be a list of aspects, with each item explored in magnification or minutiae. Then, when the poem begins to implode and one thinks that a solution is eminent, the last line opens up the subject in a mini-explosion, pretending to be closure but actually taking the reader into worlds beyond the original problem.

Comment by D. Ivy on June 29, 2009 at 2:20pm

I have found that having the students identify all the pronouns and their antecedents to be tremendously helpful. It is the third activity after speaker (persona) and situation. We circle the pronouns first, then determine the antecedents.

Comment by Rita Chapman on June 20, 2009 at 2:01pm

I think most poetry asks us to look at something in a new way, from a slightly different perspective, with some interesting "this" in mind. When I read a difficult poem, I always ask the poem what it wants me to consider. Once I have that, I can then move on to how it wants me to consider that thing, what it wants me to conclude (if it does) about that thing, etc.

But that's my personal approach -- I start a little bit more simply with the kiddos -- I have a great poetry inventory from Charles Bernstein that I use quite a bit as a way "in" for them -- it's just a checklist of figurative language, themes, sound elements, etc. that they mark up as they listen to me read the poem a couple of times. (I think I pulled it from The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame lesson plan area... neither it nor the poetry of war lesson plan is there anymore... I think he's gotten more protective of his stuff in recent years.)

Comment by Gary Anderson on June 19, 2009 at 6:20am

Here are the big ideas I emphasize with sophomores:

Persona: What do you know or infer about the speaker of the poem?

Tone: What is the subject of this poem? What is the author’s attitude toward that subject?

Form: What do you notice about the form of this poem? How does the form reinforce the content?

Patterns: What repetitions or patterns do you notice? These can be words, phrases, sounds, rhythms, or ideas.

Movement: Can you divide the poem into sections (like an orange) and label each section with a one or two-word title? How does the poem build itself; how does it move from “delight” to “wisdom”?

Comment by Bev on June 18, 2009 at 11:54pm

I start by having students read the poem over several times and then I read it aloud. They mark any words they don't know and we discuss them. I ask them what they "notice" about the poem and this usually launches us into a discussion and brings up other topics. At some point, we do a SOAPS on the poem which helps us enormously - more questions come up and thus, more discussion. Little by little, we begin to unfold the poem and meaning begins to appear.

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