The Pittsburgh Teachers Institute Seminar on ‘Reading and Teaching Poetry’
by Alan Kennedy, a text version of the talk delivered at Chatham 11/18/02

(Note: I’ve had to leave out most of the uproariously amusing comments that characterized this talk in delivery, and reduce it to this somewhat dry print form for the convenience of those who couldn’t be there. My apologies for that, and for the occasionally abbreviated nature of the anecdotes which were usually more fully and entertainingly developed on the occasion.)

I was a bad student of poetry, well of literature in general. It was probably novels that I hated most, they being the things that girls read. Certainly in my school, which was pretty rough, good girls read novels, and bad girls hung out with the guys who held up the corner grocery. So it was necessary for those amongst us who were actually good at academics to adopt a disguise of not caring. One day, engaging in role distance, that is being in class but pretending I was really somewhere else, I was for some reason motivated to reach out to a small bookcase standing beside my desk and take out a book and start flipping through it. It seemed like the perfect disobedience: reading a book in English class, how could I be called out on that kind of impertinence? What happened was that I opened the book to the poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins that I’ve given you, The Windhover. (note; you can find this online at: http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/rp/poems/hopkins4.html).  It was some kind of turning point for me. I didn’t really understand any of it, but it knocked me down with its force. Suddenly I knew that language could be muscular; it could contain and transmit power and energy, and therefore pleasure of some kind. What I’m still struck by is the fact that the lines communicated something without their having to make sense. Or, they made sense without my having to comprehend the content.

There are several issues in that little anecdote. When I see students at the university level, they almost never have any sense of the immediate pleasures of language. They all seem to have tin ears when it comes to the music of language. For some reason they haven’t been able to develop their instinctive responses to forceful language. They seem always to be looking for the idea that seems unfortunately to be hidden inside some kind of unnecessarily elaborate language form. Along with the tin ear goes a not well-developed ability to respond emotionally to language. In a college level Milton class I had a prof who spent a lot of time reading the text aloud to us. He would read large chunks of every poem, and would usually read the whole of Samson Agonistes. When he reached the end of Samson Agonistes, and read the lines that end the poem, “All passion spent,” he would have tears running down his face. He clearly had a deep and passionate response, emotional response, to the represented situation. We discovered before long, that he did this every year. Each year he would get to the end of Samson Agonistes and break into tears. Our conclusion was the obvious one: that he was after all a considerable faker, some kind of hypocritical actor, pretending to an emotion just to impress us. We were considerable skeptics about the value of Milton.

Now, however, I think he was some kind of genius at responding. The emotions evoked by literature are, after all, a little bit artificial. We are witnessing a representation, not what you might call the ‘real’ event. But sensibility to language requires us to develop that capacity for presenting emotions in the face of representations, We need to discover what our responses are, and discover how to articulate them.

I don’t want to take time here to go into a lengthy discussion of responses. It should be repeated though that I think the key to understanding literature, any art, life in general, has a lot to do with finding out how to respond, how to connect to our responses, and how to articulate them. In the talk as delivered orally I developed an anecdote about taking a group of college students to the art gallery and finding that while they didn’t like anybody interfering with their spontaneous responses by giving them explanations of what they were seeing, they nevertheless couldn’t articulate a response without such interventions.

Responding is, it would seem, logically connected to being able to perceive. Perceiving is different from merely seeing, or having something in one’s visual plane. By perception I mean a kind of intensified noticing of something, a condition of being consciously aware. For example, in a recent class I was having students discuss Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, and had asked them to take in the production of the play that was running at that moment in Pittsburgh. During the discussion I put of lot of emphasis on the character of Dogberry, the bumpkin constable who misuses language repeatedly, the character who is the center of the comic action, and who is also the focus of the innocent action that brings about the resolution of the crimes being perpetrated by the sophisticated villains. One student admitted to having read the play and not even noticing Dogberry, and it was only during discussion that things became clear. Of course, students who fail to perceive, and fail to respond appropriately, will often be vehement in their denunciations of the value of what they are supposed to be studying. Not only students, but people in general miss too much, and need to learn how to focus and develop their perceptive capacities. Ironically, one of the themes of Much Ado About Nothing is ‘noting’, or noticing.

Now all these things are really connected and centrally related to the tin ear syndrome: connecting our emotional centers to language representations, becoming more perceptive. These are all things I intend to work on in our seminar on how to read and teach poetry.

Poetry began to seem rewarding enough to me after the incident with the Hopkins poem, rewarding enough to merit the work involved in understanding it. Certainly, the effort to understand first would have put me off the pleasures of the immediate response. Indeed, now that I understand the poem better I don’t like it as much as I did at first, or at least don’t like it in quite the same way. But poetry can be difficult.

In an essay on the difficulty of modern poetry Randall Jarrell makes the point that it is not just modern poetry that is hard to understand, all poetry is inherently difficult. Not everybody will agree with that of course, depending on one’s definition of what is poetry and what is not. Jarrell’s definition is somewhat stipulative, if it is not difficult it is not poetry. So, if at least some poetry represents an intensely communicative use of language, then it will require of readers some intensity of focus in order to get it.

One of the first things one can do with poetry that seems strange is make a first guess that the words on the page are spoken by somebody to someone in some context. One can begin by trying to identify the speaker of the words, and the circumstances of their utterance. It isn’t always necessary at first to worry about to whom the words might be addressed.

All of that, the inherent difficulty, the intensity of communication and the possible problems of figuring out the speech situation, might not seem to make things easier, and might indeed make one feel that comprehending poetry is something like figuring out some very abstract philosophical text. So, while I do think that the best parts of our minds get involved in reading complex language forms, I don’t necessarily think that the issue in reading and teaching poetry is an issue of figuring out an idea, or deciphering some content, or message which if properly received will make our lives better. Poems are not meaningful medicines, at least not in the sense that their meaning is their message.

I’m a bit of a Marshall McLuhan fan on this issue, believing in some sense that the medium is the message. At times I like to insist that one needs to read literature as if it meant nothing, that ‘meaning’ is sometimes there but gets in the way of our reading. I like to tell the story of a talk I went to once by a learned colleague who argued that Jane Austen was superior to Charles Dickens because Dickens never developed emotionally or morally, and that Austen’s view of the world was adult and responsible. I happen to be more or less in agreement with that point of view, but I couldn’t resist pointing out that reducing Austen to her values, beliefs, philosophy, meaning, had exactly the opposite effect my colleague intended. If  Austen’s can really be reduced to her beliefs then I don’t need actually to spend the time reading her long works; they become expendable in favor of some shorter summary. So, I like to think of something like a meaning extractor, a reverse turkey baster that one uses to suck out any possibility of meaning before one reads a poem. I do this in the hope that it will foster some better and more direct contact with the real nature of the poetic utterance, and thus lead to a response that one can do some work with.

My approach is clearly focused on developing the individual’s reading ability, and is not immediately focused on issues of poetic technique. I don’t, that is to say, require a lot of study of meter, rhyme schemes, form—or content—as separable from one’s own reading experience. In the seminar, we will consider some of these topics, and consider as well how best to use them in the classroom. The few school textbooks I’ve looked at often seem to want to make the issue of poetic language simple for students by putting the focus on matters of technique and form.. I’ve seen texts that want to define metaphor, that give lots of examples of metaphor, with an insistence that metaphor is at the heart of poetry, and all one needs to do is to learn to recognize the presence of some metaphor to know that one is in the presence of poetry, pure and simple. I tend to think that it’s not as easy as all that.

In my worst moments I tend to believe that there is no entry level at all: it is all about imagination, passion, the mind, life death and the whole damn thing. No easy gradation. It doesn’t help us to comprehend the nature of Blake’s tiger, or to understand why that tiger is burning bright, or why he seems to want to do his bright burning in some place called a forest of the night-- it doesn’t help to have somebody explain to us that Blake is using metaphor and that therefore the words are poetic. That is not a way into the poem, but a way of dismissing it by being reductive.

Consider for example, the poem by Richard Wilbur, ‘The Writer,’ that can be found at this web site: (this poem will be discussed in the seminar so what follows is a very brief summary of my comments in the actual talk; you can find it online here: http://www.poets.org/poems/poems.cfm?prmID=1311)

What the poem requires, if one is to be able to read it at first sight, is a perception of just how ‘poetic’ language, metaphorical language, can fail to be forceful, or accurate, or effective. The poet expects us to be able to sight read his text, expects an alert reader to notice that the metaphor of the house as a ship is trite, reductive, dismissive and even offensive. He makes this point by referring to his own ‘easy figure’, his too ready access to figures of speech and worn out metaphors. He then reflects on the real experience that will help him understand and sympathize with his daughter, the event of the bird trapped in the house. The detailed circumstantial presentation of the event leads to a re-iteration of his feelings, but the feelings are intensified, and powerful, even though expressed in simple direct language. Now, the metaphor of the ‘bird trapped in the house’ is perhaps no less trivial than that of the house as a ship. But Wilbur demonstrates how one needs to use experience, one’s direct response, to re-invigorate otherwise mechanical figures of speech.

So we now have to face the question of what kind of comment one could make about a poem that would help students to get it, since, any reductiveness in the discussion of poetic language misses the point. I think the answer in part lies in recognizing that in reading a poem one is not so much deciphering a strange message as one is performing something like a musical score. There isn’t room to develop this topic here, but it too will be part of our conversations in the seminar. Briefly, reading is liking playing a musical score, and that is why I used the expression ‘sight reading’ above. In musical interpretations we are less concerned with meaning than we tend to be in reading poetry. We do need to notice, if we want to be good performers, just how the various notes work together, need to know something about chords, arpeggios and chord changes. At least, we need to have, and develop, some kind of ear for the language of music. I’m insisting, it should be clear by now, that our students need exactly the same kind of education if they are to avoid tin ear.

At this point, by way of conclusion I briefly referred to examples of poetry from Alexander Pope, John Keats, Thomas Hardy, and invited people to consider how the music of the verse itself can help us discover the subject matter. Again, that is a topic that will be taken up again in the seminar, but for the time being, here are some links that will take you to the poems in question.

Pope: http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/rp/poems/pope11.html

Keats: http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/rp/poems/keats18.html

Hardy: http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/rp/poems/hardy8.html

(I hope these links work, if not try google on you own and I’m sure you’ll find them)

 In sum, then, in the seminar we’ll work on a kind of method, on a way of reading these strangely exciting things called poems. And we’ll consider methods of exploring how they work, and in particular explore ways in which we can focus our perceptions in the attempt to  become one of those on whom, as Henry James put it, not very much is lost.

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