What is Poetry?
Posted on January 19, 2007
Filed Under Teaching |
That’s what I asked my Intro to Lit students on Wednesday. They had read the Norton Introduction to Literature’s exposition of the subject, but the five or six students who have replied so far haven’t taken much cognizance of what the Norton’s editors say. Instead, they seem to be channeling some kind of cultural knowledge.
Note: The link goes to a student weblog & comments from non-students won’t be approved, but I’d be interested in reactions from readers of this weblog here in this space. Here is a post from earlier this week dealing with, among other things, some of the problems raised by blogging with students. [Note within note: I've just discovered that the way I've got things set up, comments here show up as trackbacks on the student blog. Not sure how I feel about that. Of course, I don't have to let them through. I think I'll ask my students Monday what they think, but I lean toward keeping the student weblog for students. Later: Comments here will stay here & will not show up on the student blog. They have enough to think about without getting involved in meta-conversations right now.]
Comments
2 Responses to “What is Poetry?”
Stumble it!
The nostalgia for the ancient days of form is quite interesting, especially since I doubt the student who feels this way reads ancient poetry in the original languages. It might be fun to show the students that modern poetry can also be elaborately formal (Zukofsky?). As for the rest of the comments, the main themes are experiental and subjective.
As for the Pound poem (”River Merchant’s Wife”) I don’t sense (from various comments) that the students realize that that poem is a translation. Hence there is an “ancient” poem, written by Li Po in a highly formal stucture largely invisible in the translation, and a modern poem, in free verse, but at a moment when Pound is actually working toward the invention of this particular form of free verse.
There is also a teaching opportunity in the fact that there is a narrator (the woman waiting for her husband to get back), an author (Li Po), and a second author/translator. I noticed students distinguishing or not distinguishing between these levels to various degrees. At one level, responding experientially to the speaking voice as “author” of the poem.
Jonathan, I agree with your observations. And to be fair, though I talked briefly about the Pound poem as a translation, I did not spend much time talking about it as a Chinese poem. I did spend a bit of time trying to situate it culturally in a period of arranged marriages, long journeys without was communication etc. And it was, quite literally, the first poetic text some of these students have ever been asked to respond to beyond an “I like it / don’t like it” level. I have begun to build on their subjective responses by beginning to talk about the differences between poets & poetic speakers & in fact they did quite well today in class with Marge Piercy’s “Barbie Doll” & Ethridge Knight’s “Hard Rock Returns from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane. I do find it fascinating that stuff they seem to grasp in class often disappears when they post a comment.