Date: Thu, 8 Dec 1994 22:57:13 -0500
Subject: JRNL: Poetry on the Margins

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I'm a "poetry person" who has been enjoying this list for a few months now, but finding it pretty fiction-oriented. Perhaps we could begin to launch a discussion of poetry by trying to understand it's current marginalization in the academy. Why do so many people seem either uninterested in, or uncomfortable with, teaching it? It has seemed especially ironic to me that all the recent talk about "the death of the book," the need for new (visual) modalities etc. has not sparked more interest (in the academy, anyway--the poets clearly *are* responding) in poetry's hyperconsciousness of the potentialities of media.

steve shoemaker
university of virginia
ss6r@virginia.edu
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Date: Tue, 13 Dec 1994 11:28:51 -0500
Subject: JRNL: Poetry on the Margins

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Here are SIX Journal responses to Steve Shoemaker's posting on the possible reasons that poetry seems marginalized within the academy. He also made the observation that poetry is far less discussed on T-AMLIT than prose and calls for more discussion about teaching poetry.

RBass

Perhaps because modern poetry has moved away from sound. Little could be sung. Without that rhythmic possibility, I suspect that poetry loses some of its immediate appeal. kick the discussion off, perhaps. cheero.

Adolph Soens
University of Notre Dame
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In response to Steve Shoemaker's note on poetry on the margins, I too think it is curious that academics seem to be shying away from poetry. As I notice it specifically, there seems to me to be a reluctance to teach poetry in conjunction with composition in much the way that there seems to be resistance, at least in some places around the country, to imagine that literature and composition can be taught together. There are too few moments of literature and poetry especially in composition readers. There is a lot of interesting stuff happening in poetry, and it seems to me to offer students, in particular (from my interests) composition students, another way to learn to write by writing about poetry and by writing poetry. I would say the same about fiction and journalism. It seems to me also that many of the old saws regarding poetry and fiction still live on, especially those that represent writing in these genres as requiring some sort of natural talent or creativity.

These notions seem to be strongly held beliefs in public school teaching as well as in the universities. It has also seemed to me to be the case that my freshmen students can be interested in poetry when the poetry presented to them is close to them, close to their language and so on. Generally, I would propose that public school students might be more interested in poetry, along with their teachers, if they began with contemporary poetry and worked their way back in the tradition as they became more familiar and comfortable with reading, writing, and writing about poetry. I suppose there is a moment when traditions are necessary and important to the academic study of poetry for people who want to be poets or literature majors, but I would still argue that the seduction into poetry comes easiest for students from contemporary readings. Partly I understand my position as wanting to create the desire to read and write poetry in with my students. I don't know how to do so with my colleagues who aren't interested. I wonder too if they need to be interested. Although the lack of interest affects students who might encounter poetry, as I have been saying, in a composition course. Right now that's where my interests are. And with various ways of interweaving poetry in composition instruction and into high school courses of study.

Lately I've done a handful of workshops in poetry with high school students and teachers of high school students. The groups I've worked with were enormously enthusiastic but unschooled and just not in touch with contemporary poetry. AWP has a summer program for high school teachers in poetry, and that seems to have a lot of potential. Prospective high school teachers, like prospective composition instructors, don't have much background or experience with poetry. Do you see poetry courses, excluding those workshops usually open only to graduate student majors, being offered in departments around the country? I wonder if anyone has a sense of this, or if we are working simply from our limited personal impressions? I know from examining almost all of the composition readers and textbooks that few include poetry for any purpose.
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Poetry is on the margins because poets marginalized themselves to be romantic, to be rebels, to be outsiders, to be the few elite misunderstood albatrosses who could fly in their own atmosphere but could not walk in bourgeois back yards. It was then taken into the academies and given Boys Town publicity as victim of bad bankers and salesmen. The next thing was that it lost music to the Victrola and plot to the thrillers, metaphor and rhyme to Madison Avenue, in every loss claiming a victory for obscurity and solitude and self-pity. The few poets who could teach, like Dr. Seuss, had to stay out of teaching, which was declared educational only in prose venues, and that prose had to be jargon or it could not be certified educational. Eliot said poetry had to be difficult, and this was used as excuse for making it unreadable. Then an industry of explainers grew up to account for the gap between ordinary readers and what was called poetry. The explainers could not get jobs unless explanations were needed. This meant that the real poetry--that is, what people need and want to read which tells them where they are most deeply hurt and healed, made to laugh and cry, entertained and instructed--is what does not have to be taught, that is, what people actually find and read despite schools and universities. Poetry got into the ivory tower and only the enterprising thieves and ---but I now have to confer with a student about Shakespeare and Milton, so you will all have to correct my misunderstandings on this slender basis, for now.
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I think there are many reasons for the "marginalization" of poetry in the academy--especially if you're talking about contemporary poetry. One is that some of it has become increasingly esoteric, of interest only to specialists who have waded through the many pages of theory that supports is. This was a trend begun by the modernists early in the century and taken up by certain post-modernist poets who follow that strand. Related to this is the retreat from actual life experience and the cerebral nature of some postmodern poetry. It's significant, I think that poets whose work is clearly related to life experience--like Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Bly, Gwendolyn Brooks, and more, are really not marginalized but have very large followings. I think there is actually a hunger for poetry in this country but people are put off by the remoteness of some of the stuff that passes for poetry. I know this position will seem reactionary to some academics, but people want to read poetry that matters--that makes a difference in their lives. Dana Gioia's essay of several years back, "Can Poetry Matter" touches on this. Would be nice to have a dialog here--without ad hominem attacks--about how we can support a poetry that matters in the society and in the academy.
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Part of the current lack of interest in poetry is, I suspect, simply a function of the pendulum swing away from the 30-year hegemony of poetry under the New Critics in American universities. Fashion powers our work as much as theory, and poetry right now is old fashioned as well as less theorized than narrative at the moment.

Jim Kinney
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I like Steve's suggestion that we talk about and perhaps teach poetry more.

I teach in a religious studies department because I got a degree in religion and lit with a dissertation on religion and poetry (and because that's where the job was when I came along). Now I get a lot of work as the outside examiner or reader on English Phd committees--which I enjoy. An observation: with one exception, my colleagues on the English faculty with whom I sit around the table "examining" candidates *never* ask about the particular uses of language in poetry which makes it poetry and not something else. And that exception is nearing retirement. I ask you who read and contribute to this list: what has happened?

Has theory obsession, has multi-culturalism, has historicism new or old, has (God help us) fiction, driven poetry as poetry out of the curriculum? I sense embarrassment among my colleagues in the English faculty, both that they are not teaching it *and* that they are not sufficiently versed in it (sorry) themselves. I may have that wrong, however. Is it there are always so many more important things to do in an English department and in one's career in literary studies? Are there fewer and and fewer in the profession who care about poetic uses of languages because they write or once wrote poetry themselves (or because they know poets and perhaps observe how poets actually work)?

I am a fan of Helen Vendler. I read her with fascination, wanting to see and to describe in poems and poetries what she sees, hears, and describes. Others will have their favorites obviously. Are you going to have to be a little bit nutty or appointed in religious studies to cultivate a view of poetry, as it were, from the inside, asking how poems and poetries tick and how they work? Did poetry go out with the "new criticism?" Why are the new formalisms so inept at imagining the process of poetic making?

I teach poetry every semester: Dickey, Auden, D.H. Lawrence, Blake, Plath, Blake, Millay and Bunting (next semester in RELG 471: Spiritual Autobiography), Whitman, Dante in translation (Sayers). I can never teach it without wanting to attend to the technique in dialectical relation to the mystique. Sorry: that sounds excessively cute, but you get the point.

Kevin Lewis
kelewis@univscvm.csd.scarolina.edu
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Date: Wed, 28 Dec 1994 09:13:23 -0500
Subject: JRNL: Poetry on the Margins, cont.

***JRNL: T-AMLIT JOURNAL***

The original query to this thread also posed the open call for more discussion of poetry on this list (as does Tony Petrosky at the end of his first posting).

RBass

I just read the responses to the original posting. It's curious, I think, to see them as a cross section of responses, taking, as they do, various positions that it seems to me I have heard in my department at one time or the other. They all seem legitimate, serious, but in an odd way they would all, including mine, put off people for various reasons. Maybe it is that there is this atmosphere of critique dominating our reading and writing. I think of something Robert Creeley once said to a seminar I was in in graduate school: "you're all here because poetry is plastic, it's something you can do anything in." I think he meant that it is an open form, a place where traditions can dominate and invention can dominate and the mix of what happens will always, then, contain the tensions that arise from differences. Formalists disparage language poets, language poets disparage narrative poets, abstract expressionists like Louise Gluck disparage so called confessional poets like Sharon Olds. The differences create defense, posture. Now that seems similar to just about anything I can think of that allows difference, and the tensions get hightened, I think, we layer on to the scene the interests and motives of those who don't write poetry or teach it but critique it from various perspectives. So, yeah it seems, as one of the respondents put it, there are a lot of reasons why it is on the margins.

But why wouldn't it be possible to take as a project the reading and writing of radically different kinds of poetry: Sharon Olds next to Ashbery next to Rumi next to Gluck next to Bernstein? Why not let poetry of all sorts exist in the same space and ask students, then, to work on understanding it. We could give them traditions to use to frame the discussions. We could give them at least a sense of difference and a place to both respect it (as those who participate by writing the different kinds of poems do) and work on it. These are the kinds of solutions I am interested in. What we can do to bring our students to poetry.

It seems to me that we could make a huge catalogue of reasons why poetry is in the supposed state we think it is. But that is then a big complaint. Is that a good place for the energy? Maybe to point we can understand the situation of poetry this way, but I suspect the situation varies by location. Bucknell University, for instance, takes poetry seriously for undergraduates with its visiting poets every year, its Poetry Festival, its literary magazines, and its undergraduate workshops. Other places don't do anything near that, but at Pitt, for example, we put a tremendous emphasis on graduate work in poetry. Still other place do so also but with an emphasis on a different kind of poetry. So we learn from this kind of generalized talk, I'd say, that the situation of poetry is not uniform. Ok. So now what?

I'd love to continue the discussion of teaching poetry in various places in the curriculum. Rumi and LaLa and Kabir in religious studies along with Blake and Hopkins along with A. Rich and Phil Levine. Poetry in composition studies. Multi-genre writings that include poetry. Traditions of poetry juxtaposed against other traditions. Any takers?

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I would like to chip in regarding reactions to poetry. I, too, find that even in academe, poetry is viewed with some trepidation or perhaps the notion that it's somehow old-fashioned, that the hot stuff is going on in fiction these days? And certainly many students are petrified of poetry, or think it will bore them to tears.

But the good news is, I have to agree with several other posters who noted having good success teaching poetry, even (or especially?) in composition classes, especially contemporary, more life-based works. I, too, have had this experience. I taught a section on poetry and writing about poetry in a composition class at a community college--mostly to students who had had very little previous exposure to poetry and whose discomfort level with the subject was high. I chose a range, from Robert Frost and Shakespearean sonnets to Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sharon Olds, Gary Soto, and other contemporary writers. I brought in a record of poets reading their works--they heard Hughes and Brooks, as I recall. I tried not to overwhelm them; I wanted them to read each poem several times and pay attention to the language. I modeled this kind of reading in class and assigend them only a few poems at a time to read, though I encouraged them to browse further! Finally, I had students working in pairs or small groups give their reading of the poem to the class, ie make a presentation about what they had gotten out of the poem, what particular problems they encountered, how they came to some understanding with it.

I found this portion of the class quite successful; several students came up to me and told me how they'd never known poetry could be so interesting, or that they could make sense of it, etc. The students also wrote a paper comparing several poems that dealt with the same theme, comparing and contrasting the poems' differing approaches to the theme in terms of language, imagery, tone, etc.

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Re poetry: You know, it depends somewhat on where you look. I don't have the sense (and I could easily be wrong) that poetry is marginalized in courses that focus on contemporary women writers or on Chicano/a writers, for example.

I also think that while Carter Revard's funny account is true in essence, there have always been countertraditions to the deliberately complex and obscure modernism represented by Eliot, et al. Think of Sterling Brown and Langston Hughes, Amy Lowell, Frost, and many of the poets Cary Nelson discusses in REPRESSION AND RECOVERY.

Part of the problem has, I think, to do with the struggle of the academic community to free itself from the still hegemonic New Critical pedagogical tradition, which was, after all, constructed by folks like Ransom, Tate, and Brooks, with predecessors like Eliot very much in mind.

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