By Tom Hansen
Reprinted with permission from California English (Summer 1997).
For many of our students, poetry is dead because, ironically, they fail to see it as a body. Instead, they think of it as a meaning to be figured out, a puzzle to be solved, so they can finally know what the poet was "trying to say" -- as if those poor pathetic poets were forever doomed to write only what they never quite mean and to mean what they never actually write.
This struggle to discover meaning becomes acute with that distinctly modern poetry created by Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and their contemporaries and heirs. Attempting to make sense of their works, students go symbol-sleuthing and meaning-mongering in the mistaken belief that a poem, like a math problem, has a right answer. Perhaps four out of every five of our students exhibit this Right-Answer attitude toward poetry. The rest of them believe that anything in a poem can symbolize just about anything not in the poem because poetry "means whatever you want it to mean." Opposed to the only-one-right-answer attitude toward poetry, this infinite-number-of-right-answers attitude is deceptive: appearing to embrace all possibilities democratically, it denies all possibilities, for what can mean anything actually means nothing.
These two opposed attitudes are based on the same misconception about poetry -- about art in general. The misconception: that what we get from art is meaning, and that having got it, we have experienced a work of art. In fact, the opposite is true. The more diligently we pursue meaning to the exclusion of all else, the less we experience a work of art, because the pursuit of meaning alone blinds us to the obvious: all art is physical. All art has a physical body. The way to "get" art is to take its body into our own, to vicariously live the total sensory experience it presents. Only then can it begin to mean anything to us. Thus, physical apprehension (from apprehend, to seize) precedes intellectual comprehension. If physical apprehension is vivid enough, it may even eliminate a need for intellectual comprehension. This body-centered approach to poetry works even with such "difficult" modern poems as: Eliot’s The Waste Land (1962), Stevens’ "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" (1978), and Williams’ "Red Wheelbarrow" (1966).
THREE DIFFICULT MODERN POEMS
Nearly twenty years ago, after half a dozen years of trying and largely failing, to explain The Waste Land to my various American literature classes, I quit teaching the poem, convinced that it was too hard for them to learn and for me to teach. About ten years later, while half-heartedly looking at some music videos my twelve-year-old son wanted me to see on MTV, I realized the obvious: The Waste Land is hard to teach simply because, being a work of art, it is not accessible to an approach that is primarily intellectual. If it were a song, instead of trying to explain it, we would make a music video of it. It would play on MTV. Our students -- the same ones who don’t "get" modern poetry -- would see it and get it and even like it. Instead of failing to comprehend it, they would succeed in apprehending it. Here is a stanza they would instantly apprehend:
A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells. (48)
Like a particularly disturbing dream we can neither understand nor forget, these lines fill us with foreboding: something apparently apocalyptic is happening or about to happen. How do we come to this realization? Not by discovering the meaning of these lines, but simply by receiving what they send. They are more physical than we have imagined because imagination requires image-ination, and we have forgotten -- in our pursuit of the meaning of this elusive and allusive poem -- to imagine to ourselves, and therefore to appropriate as our own, the physical body of experience it hands us.
Because we teach poetry by focusing on meaning, The Waste Land is frustrating: there is so much that must be said about it. Stevens’ "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," on the other hand, is frustrating because there is apparently so little one can say. The poem consists of thirteen brief haiku-like fragments in no discernible order. Like a recurring motif, the word blackbird occurs in each of them. In many of them the blackbird seems to be a physical presence, a center of focus around which a brief scene is sketched. But what does the poem mean? Are there really thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird? If we make the mistake of trying to answer these questions for our students, we drive the wedge of meaning (and not just generalized meaning, but The Teacher-Authorized Meaning) between them and the poem. Instead, they should be encouraged to enter it, to walk about in it "Among twenty snowy mountains" where "The only moving thing / Was the eye of the blackbird" (92).
Whatever else "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" is, it is first and foremost a richly physical poem. But it is written, of necessity, in words; and words, of course, have meanings; and once again we find ourselves on the merry-go-round of meaning, trying so hard to catch the horse just ahead of us -- "A horse is a symbol of instinct, right?" -- that we forget to enjoy the ride; soon after which, we forget even having taken the ride. And why not? We were not physically present -- not really -- during any part of the ride. No wonder the memory of it does not stay with us.
Artists whose medium is not language do not have to contend with this specter of meaning. Not to the extent that literary artists do. When a painter paints a picture of a red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the white chickens, we like its homeyness and know -- without having to think about what it means -- that we "get" the painting. But when a poet says, "so much depends," we scratch our heads and knit our brows and purse our lips, as if to say, "I don’t get it, and I don’t like it." We respond to a painting physically (the immediate experience) but respond to a poem intellectually (the underlying meaning). Intentionally or not, we teach our students to do the same. They read a poem in search of The Meaning, certain that it is there somewhere, certain that we teachers know exactly what it is, certain that we will sooner or later quit being coy and tell them, and certain that they will never have to wonder about (or read?) the poem again.
To combat these certainties, we need to extricate ourselves from the role of Keepers of the Meaning, and to turn poems over to our students. Any activity we devise, as long as it motivates them to explore their own way into a poem until they begin to experience it imaginatively, will serve this purpose. There are hundreds of such activities. Many of them seem simple -- elementary, even. Most are fairly commonplace. Nonetheless, they work. Here are three.
THREE SIMPLE BODY-CENTERED APPROACHES
Draw a picture of the poem
One way to do this is to have a student volunteer to draw on the chalkboard any visual element the class finds in the poem. The less artistic ability the student has, the better the drawing will be, because it will illustrate, starkly and without any infusion of "artistic style," the highly visual character of many poems. More than that, having a student at the chalkboard, ready to draw whatever the class suggests, stimulates students to look actively at the poem.
Approached this way, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" ceases to be puzzling. Students finally stop wondering what blackbirds symbolize and start doing what Stevens so clearly directs us to do: looking.
Just as otherwise puzzling poems can become obvious when drawn on the board, so, sometimes, do previously obvious poems -- for example, Robert Frost’s "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" (1929) -- reveal a puzzling depth. After noting all the specifics, both those present in the poem (horse, sleigh, "I", road, woods, snow, frozen lake, and the like) and those named but not actually seen in the poem (the absent landowner, his house, the village, the person or people to whom "I" has promises to keep, and the like), a class is sometimes able to stand back and begin seeing things they don’t ordinarily think of as being visual: that "I" is physically isolated; that except when interrupted by fear of discovery or call of duty, "I" has little inclination to move down the road in either direction toward the human community; that "I" is transfixed by the dark, dense actuality of the woods being slowly annihilated by snow. No wonder Frost’s critics, over the years, have suspected great depth beneath the surface details of his poems. The depth is there, all right: on the page, in those surface details. All one needs to do is to see: to take in, through the senses, the experience Frost presents.
Make a video of the poem
Even a brief five- to ten-minute video of a simple poem takes a long time to complete, and the actual making of it allows little opportunity for the give-and-take of class discussion. A less time-consuming, more student-interacting approach is to have the class informally script an imaginary video. Although the final product will never be seen, the script must be detailed enough so that anyone reading it can easily "see" the poem projected on that mental movie screen we call the mind’s eye.
Poems presenting a moment of stasis, like "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," can be more fully visualized if they are drawn on the chalkboard, but kinetic poems ask for this imaginary-video approach. Viewed as a series of shifting images never at rest, such poems are often more reader-friendly than they seem to be when we try to extricate a meaning from them.
Stevens’ "Domination of Black" is a good example. In it a number of disparate images experienced earlier in the day -- "The colors of the bushes / And of the fallen leaves," "the leaves themselves / Turning in the wind," "The color of the heavy hemlocks," "the cry of the peacocks," "The color of their tails" 8) -- come to mind as "I" sits staring into a fire at night. But they don’t come back as a succession of separate images. Kaleidoscopically, they fuse with and call forth each other as the flickering flames, reflected on the walls of the room, seem to swirl about, recalling the way the fallen leaves had swirled earlier in the day. This kaleidoscopic-surrealistic quality begins gradually in the opening stanza, climaxes in the powerful second stanza, and comes to an open-ended resolution in the concluding stanzas. All this is visible in the poem, right there on the page. Students see these things for themselves once we get them to actively look.
Perform the poem as if it were a play
Some poems -- Housman’s "Is My Team Ploughing?," Reed’s "Naming of Parts," and to a lesser extent Frost’s "Home Burial," for example -- are dramatic dialogues that easily lend themselves to performance. Others -- such as Pound’s "Seafarer," "Sestina: Altaforte," and "River Merchant’s Wife" and Eliot’s "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1962) -- being dramatic monologues, also lend themselves to performance. In a broader sense, nearly all poems are dramatic monologues -- even those in which character does not seem to be present.
Williams’ "Red Wheelbarrow" is a good example. The poem has four stanzas, but students typically concentrate on the last three, entirely ignore the first one, and then complain that the poem seems to be lacking something. What it lacks, when the opening stanza is ignored, is that all-important statement of value. But dramatizing the poem -- acting it out as if it were a play -- foregrounds the stanza ordinarily overlooked: someone somewhere is doing something, even if only standing and looking and ruminating, and is moved to speak these words. That is, although the image of
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens (277)
holds no value for most of us, it matters greatly to the speaker of this poem. That "so much depends" tells us that this is more than the objective little imagist poem we had supposed it to be.
Acting out the poem necessarily objectifies the mis-en-scene -- the immediate surround in relation to which character defines itself -- and in this way highlights character and value.
These three ways of exploring poems by involving students actively in the exploration are elementary. They, or variations of them, have been around for a long time. Such longevity is a testimony to the fact that they work. They turn classrooms into participatory -- and necessarily chaotic -- democracies in which students, without realizing it, begin to teach themselves and each other.
WORKS CITED
Eliot, T.S. 1962. The Waste Land. The Complete Poems and Plays: 1909-1950. New York: Harcourt. 37-55.
_______. 1962. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." ibid. 3-7.
Frost, Robert. 1972. "Home Burial." Robert Frost’s Poetry and Prose. Ed. Edward Connery Latham and Lawrence Thompson. New York: Holt. 26-29.
_______. 1930. "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." Collected Poems of Robert Frost. New York: Holt. 275.
Housman, A. E. 1965. "Is My Team Ploughing?" The Collected Poems of A.E. Housman. New York: Holt. 42-43.
Jung, Carl G. 1972. "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry." The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP. 63-83.
Pound Ezra. 1926. "River Merchant’s Wife." Personae. New York: New Directions. 130-131.
_______. "Seafarer" ibid. 64-66.
_______. "Sestina: Altaforte" ibid. 64-66.
Reed, Henry. 1988. "Naming of Parts." Literature: Structure, Sound and Sense. Ed. Laurence Perrine. New York: Harcourt. 546-547.
Stevens, Wallace. 1978. "Domination of Black." The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. N. York: Knopf. 8-9.
_______. "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." ibid. 92-95.
Williams, William Carlos. 1966. "The Red Wheelbarrow." The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams. New York: New Directions. 277.
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