Conversations on Poetry Teaching Poetry as Literature > Conversations home < > Teaching Poetry as Literature < > Teaching Poetry as Creative Writing < > Video: How a Poem Works < General tips 1. Babies have to crawl before they walk. Poetry is at base musical. Many students have no background in nursery rhymes and simple, metrical songs. No matter what age the students, it is fun to start here. Begin with the most metrical, rhyming, musical poem possible. Have everyone sing “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” if you think you can pull it off. Students will laugh, but they’ll like it. If you have time, try Alfred Noyce’s “The Highwayman, ” the Robin Hood ballads, sea shanties, the Pied Piper, other narrative poems. Don’t hesitate to stoop to Robert Service poems. Admit to yourself that you like that stuff, too. Make sure the plot or music is very strong. Then read an entirely different, free-verse poem, to show that poems can do many things. 2. Start collecting poems. Look for light verse and mildly satirical verse—James Reeves’s Prefabulous Animals, Ted Hughes’s Meet My Folks, T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, the silly verses of Spike Mulligan, Ogden Nash. Look for poems with a strong streak of individuality—many high school anthology poems are generic, safe, and just plain boring. Look for poems that have some “bite.” Little lovely, singsong-y verses about violets and spring lead students to believe that poems are Muzak, not part of the artful complications of being human. 3. The appeal of most modern poetry depends on the sympathetic chord it strikes in the individual reader. What is readily seen and imaginatively felt by one person is incomprehensible or dull to another. A major part of teaching is exploring varieties of interpretations, responses and opinions, however subjective, which the reading of a single poem evokes. To read a poem is to experience it, not just be able to paraphrase it and describe its metrical patterns! The poem has to live, or all is lost. It is not necessary to “analyze” every poem read in class. Random ideas: 1. Learning poetry is cyclical. We keep returning to our roots (above). Compare William Blake’s “The Tyger” to “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” in rhythm, meter, syntax. 2. Introduce a poem with title removed and have students suggest one. Later, talk about the one the poet chose. 3. Give the students just two lines (significant ones) of the poem. Ask them what they think is going on, based on the cue words. Then try to reconstruct the poem, line by line, based on the pupil’s own cue words. Then look at the differences between the students’ poem and the original one. Or give out the poem with some words missing. Have students fill in what they think might be best in the blank spaces. (This is a good way to teach parts of speech, too—“fill in a noun here, an adjective here, etc.). Then look at the original. Ways to Teach Sound (some suggestions, stolen from various sources) Rhythm Have students write a two-line poem with one line that sounds heavy and one that sounds light. Each line should have only one main image. Talk about the relative stress or duration given to the syllables, words, lines. Have students write two-line poems with lines of arbitrary length. Then have them write lines having an equal number of syllables. Compare the time it takes to say the lines. Rhyme Often students get so absorbed in rhyme that it takes over the poem. Talk about some sample poems: How does rhyme enhance meaning and the reader’s ability to remember a poem? Emphasize other sound devices, such as repetition of consonants, vowels, and words. Point out the way these are used in poems. Alliteration Have students practice alliteration by writing tongue twisters. The classic example is “Peter Piper.” Point out the funny effect that alliteration sometimes has. Other Sound Devices Have students write lines with repeating vowel sounds (assonance) or suggest that they choose three words and write a poem, repeating those three words or words that sound like them in every line. Line Breaks and Titles Show examples of prose contrasted with poems of different lengths and with different line lengths. Photocopy some rhymed and unrhymed poems with line breaks eliminated and have students decide where each line should end. Try dividing lines in different places. What effect does that have? Memorizing poems In class one day, have students memorize a short poem such as Williams.’s “This Is Just to Say.” Ask for volunteers to recite. Note substitutions and trouble spots, lapses of memory. Talk about why they occur and how the changes effect the poem. Ask if rhyme helped, if there is rhyme. Get students to slow down in their recitation: use a stopwatch and give them a minimum time. Ask what the speaker is like. Get them to recite in different voices—an old man, a child, etc. FIVE CONCEPTS YOU CAN HOPE TO UNTEACH 1. Poetry is High Culture. One danger in this is that art of certain cultures may be disparaged when a distinction is made between “high culture” such as great books and opera, and “low or mass culture” such as folk songs and dances of a particular ethnic group or region. Also, if poetry is only for the “cultured,” it gets taught as if it were a mysterious brand of medicine: “Although you may not like or understand it, or find it relevant, it is GOOD FOR YOU.” Students hear: “Poems are above you. You aren’t cultured enough, yet, to ‘get’ them.” 2. Great Poetry is All About Generalities. Young writers need to be reminded that the art of Shakespeare and Whitman and Faulkner—although it speaks to all of us—had its roots in the particular, in people and places. Students must not confuse universality with generality—or they will fill their own poems with platitudes about the human condition and the vastness of the cosmos. 3. Poetry is Essentially a Puzzle or a Hidden Message. Because poems use symbol, metaphor, irony, paradox, and also because many of the poems in anthologies were written a long time ago, students begin to believe that their task is to root out the “hidden meaning,” or buried “message” which can be paraphrased, if they are successful. Some poems can be paraphrased, some not. Language is ambiguous—and some poems have multiple meanings. The real point is that a poem is more than the prose meaning cloaked in poetic ornament. It is an experience—not a puzzle to be solved or a message to be delivered. 4. Poems Can Mean Almost Anything You Think They Mean. Students often say, “I can interpret the poem any way I like, because a poem is about feelings that are universal.” There is enough truth in this to cause a teacher trouble! Fortunately, though, poems are made of words, and words have very specific, particular meanings. If a teacher works closely enough with students to identify exact meanings of words, note punctuation, note word choices, and so on, a number of off-the-wall “interpretations” can be eliminated. (But of course there are a number of angles from which to see any good poem.) 5. Free Verse is Like Stream of Consciousness—A Writer Just Puts Things Down in Whatever Way the Subconscious Dictates. It is a lot easier for the teacher to demonstrate the “art” in a poem written in a traditional form—so students often believe that free verse is really “free.” They need to be shown the artful choices the poet had to make—the choice of line endings (why here and not there?), of words (why this one and not that one?), stanza breaks (why here and not there?), of material included and excluded (why begin the poem here and not there? why end this way and not that way?), and particularly choices of sound and rhythm—which include all of the above.