Sherry Chandler

So Long Understanding Poetry

Hello Poetry and Pedagogy, subtitled The Challenge of the Contemporary (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

I grew up with the New Criticism and actually rather enjoyed its close analysis of tropes and forms. I am, I guess, in the minority. It seems to have been, according to Barbara K. Fischer, all down to the New Criticism that poetry has been hidden away in the broom closets of English departments:

Despite sporadic resurgences, poetry has for several decades occupied a marginalized position in English departments, where fiction and popular culture have become the preferred objects of analysis. The New Criticism, with its heuristic approach to analyzing a poem’s tropes and formal construction, left a generation of students with a distaste for the seemingly clinical task of “explication”—the dreaded homework assignment. Meanwhile, New Critical aestheticism—its emphasis on the poem as a self-referential objet d’art, isolated from politics and the conditions of its making—was set up over and over again as a straw man for the arguments that comprised the revolutions in critical thinking of the 1970s through 1990s. As poststructuralists, New Historicists, and many others challenged the New Critical paradigm, they also demoted poetry as the privileged object of literary study.

Of course, Barbara Fischer isn’t the first critic to spurn Brooks & Warren. Kenneth Rexroth and those other poets of the San Francisco Renaissance weren’t so fond of them either.

And, fickle thing that I am, though I enjoyed them, I guess I won’t cry to see them go, though Robert Penn Warren is sort of considered the grandfather of Kentucky poetry. I am fast understanding that life isn’t a progress but a wheel and no idea is ever the pennacle past which no one can climb or completely discredited amd dead. Not all ideas that come back around on the wheel are wonderful ideas but that’s not exactly relevant here.

Thus, according to Fischer:

The contributors to this volume [Poetry and Pedagogy] reinstate poetry to the discussion where it belongs—not a site of lyric seclusion, but right in the midst of a complex evolution of ideas about literature and literary language, the place of literary forms in the political sphere, and the cultural weight of creative work.

…Nonetheless, as these writers propose new pedagogical paradigms suited to new poetries, they wisely resist the now-familiar oppositional stance to the New Criticism, which Harryette Mullen observes would be “flogging the ghost of a dead horse.” If any teacher of poetry today, with whatever aesthetic bent, encountered a student who had actually read Understanding Poetry, he or she would rejoice.

So neither Fischer nor the contributors to this book actually spurn Brooks & Warren. Instead they incorporate them. How very modern! And certainly I can rejoice in this approach:

The question that is posed to students throughout the examples given in this book shifts from “what does the poem mean?” to “how do we release or expose the poem’s possibilities of meaning?”

I remember my son’s experience in high school, junior English. Assigned an essay on “Stopping by Woods…”, he wrote a fine essay that took into account the structure of the poem, the word choice… Living with a poet did influence him in his thinking. But he got excited about the poem, interested in what made it work.

And then he got a failing grade on the essay because he failed to regurgitate that which the teacher had told him the poem meant: it is, in so many words, a poem about the suicidal impulse. Oh, of course, and we don’t have to think about it any more.

This incident, however, I took to be a failure of the teacher’s pedagogy, not a failure of New Critical methods. Looking at it now, I suppose I’d have to admit it was a failure of New Critical methods that had fallen into the hands of some one with no imagination or real love for poetry.

So if we can introduce a method that lets students and teachers think, I’m all for it.

Though at least one pedagogical tool mentioned in this review will never make into high school classrooms in Paris, Kentucky.

The point, however, is not that poetry needs to be dumbed down, that is, made “accessible” — though I think there might be an argument for “clarity” as defined by Claudia Emerson.

However, I think this school of pedagogy may be in opposition to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s notion of the poet as a sort of wise seer. Contrast Emerson:

The sign and credentials of a poet are, that he announces that which no man foretold.

to (I think) Alan Golding in Poetry and Pedagogy:

Any ‘I’ from whom one has something to learn must be in conversation with an unsettling mélange of ‘others.’

Someplace in here I should have said something about Language poetry but I suggest you read the whole review from the Boston Review. It’s called Into the Language Lab. I will, however, share one more nugget to which I add my amen:

Yet the editors acknowledge from the outset that “while there has been a tendency to see Lyric and Language as two groups warring over dominance, the actual picture is much more complex, full of numerous divergent poetries.”

It is in this gray and complex area that I think I find myself as a poet.

Link via Silliman’s Blog.

Possibly related posts:

Poetry Out Loud

Frye on Poetry and Religion

Internet Poetry Archive

2007 Kentucky Poetry Out Loud Finals

2006 Pulitzer for Poetry

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