Shared Voices
by  teach,  1st July 2001.   

This is a presentation I gave in Taegu, Korea, on teaching poetry to reluctant students.

Note: If the Korean characters in this article do not appear as they should, click on View, Encoding, More, and Korean to see them as they should appear.

I’m going to take a chance. In my creative writing classes, I make it a requirement that my students take a chance every day. I don’t ask them to cross a downtown street in Seoul while blindfolded. Instead, I tell them that if they always drink their coffee with cream and sugar, then try it one day with just sugar. If they always eat strawberry ice cream, then try chocolate. Writers must take chances. Every generation of poets wants to do something new. Frost wrote Frost. Eliot has done Eliot. What can a new writer create that hasn’t been created before? Writers are in trouble when they ask the question, “Can I do this? Can I get away with this?” The greatest writers break the rules. And maybe we teachers need to break rules too.

I am going to read a poem to you. If I do a poor job of reading it and fall flat on my face, I will have done so not for my lack of effort but instead for the language difficulties of reading in a second language.


서 시

죽는 날까지 하늘을 우러러
한 점 부끄럼이 없기를,
잎새에 이는 바람에도
나는 괴로와 했다.
별을 노래하는 마음으로
모든 죽어 가는 것을 사랑해야지.
그리고 나한테 주어진 길을
걸어 가야겠다.
오늘 밤에도 별이 바람에 스치운다.

I could practice reading this poem every day for the next ten years, and I would still never be able to say uroro like a native speaker. I almost did not read this poem today for that reason. Poetry can be intimidating. It can intimidate teachers and students both. I have often walked into my classes and asked my students how many of them hate poetry. I have seen as many as 90% of the hands in the room go up. They tell horror stories of how poetry has been taught to them, of how it confuses them, and how it has nothing to do with anything in today’s real world. The most frequent complaint is voiced as “Why don’t poets ever say what they mean?” They express fear at not understanding the poems and of being tested on something they do not understand. How do we teach a subject so unpopular? How can we translate our love of poetry to our audience? This is a challenge that all of us face.

I don’t know if I do anything differently in my classes than any of you in this room. I can only offer how I approach dealing with these problems above. My teaching situation is different from that of most of my fellow teachers. I teach in a nontraditional classroom. I have done this for about 17 years. I have taught at an inner-city community college, behind the walls of a maximum-security prison, onboard US Navy ships with planes landing and taking off above our classroom while we were deployed to the Indian Ocean, and alongside the DMZ with helicopters passing overhead and humvees roaring down the road outside our windows. My students range in age from 18 to 60. Most of them work full time as active-duty soldiers. I have had them come to class straight from field exercises, wearing muddy combat boots, rifles slung over their shoulders. However, I also have students who are more traditional. Many of my students are recent graduates from the Department of Defense high school on base. I also have the husbands and wives of military members in my classes, of whom, many are studying English as a second language. In addition to them, students from the international community in Seoul often take classes with the University of Maryland. This term I have students from black America, white America, Hispanic America, and Asian America, as well as Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Guam, the United Arab Emirates, Nigeria, Belgium and France. It is a joy to teach in such a multicultural environment. My students learn to embrace the beauty of difference.

However, this very cultural mix that makes it such a joy to teach in these surroundings also brings with it problems. Socioeconomic background, weak high-school training and second-language difficulties are all aspects that present problems. Thus, the first thing that I set out to do is to remove the fear. One may ask what specifically causes their uneasiness. Some of the reasons are obvious. They are first afraid of not being able to understand the poems and of being required to understand them in class discussions and on exams. We can easily humiliate a student by asking him or her what a line or image means exactly, and then correcting the student in front of everyone else. Being absolute about meaning is often the worst thing we can do. It is the ambiguity and multiple interpretations that give poetry its beauty. A poem is a window. Each of us walks up to that window, but what each one of us sees upon looking out depends on what we bring to that moment.

As William Stafford says in his poem “The Gift,”

Time wants to show you a different country. It's the one
that your life conceals, the one waiting outside
when the curtains are drawn . . .
It's a country where
you already are, bringing where you have been.

A poem will always have a surface meaning, but often, perhaps most often, perhaps always, another meaning will dwell beneath the surface, and this meaning can be different for each one of us. A person who has lost a parent will read a poem about death in a different way than someone fortunate enough to still have both parents living. A poem of life in poverty will be read differently by someone who is affluent as opposed to a person who has lived that life. To take away one’s interpretation when a poem is working is an injustice to the poet, the poem and the reader. It steals the poem’s beauty. We should never do that.

When we begin our readings, I tell them not to worry about what a poem means. I tell them that poetry is as much about language as it is anything else. We learn to hear the music in the words themselves. Poets like E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Theodore Roethke, with their use of approximate rhyme, are wonderful for this. We learn to play with Cummings. Take the poem “In Just-,” and divide the class into two sections: “far” and “wee” Have one-half of the class whistle when you read the word “far” and the other group whistle when you read the line “wee” They will laugh and feel at ease.

In Just―
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman

whistles far and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it's
spring
and
the
goat-footed

balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee

We then move on to other Cummings poems, working the sounds. I tell them that the secret to understanding Cummings is to not try to understand Cummings, to just feel the meaning. We discuss felt knowledge. What I have found is that once I tell them they don't have to figure out the poems, they want to. As we read without worrying about what the poems mean, the students always start to wonder on their own what the meanings are. When that happens, we just pick up the ball and run with it.

Then it is time to bring in outside voices. I don’t teach just from the text. I will bring in poems by the same author but ones not included in our textbook. Cummings has written some wonderfully erotic poems for which the students ALWAYS ask for copies. The Williams poem “Danse Russe” is another one they enjoy.

If when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,--
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
“I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!”
If I admire my arms, my face
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,--

Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household.

The students always say the author is “crazy,” and at the very least, bizarre. That is our opening into what the poem is really talking about. We look at the images in the poem. What time of day is it? Sunrises are beginnings; sunsets are endings. What kind of dance is it? It is not a pretty or delicate dance. This opens an avenue for looking at the symbols in the poem. Our discussion then moves on to the uniforms we wear when we “prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet,” to quote Eliot. We also take a close look at assonance in this poem, the splendid rhymes of the long e sounds in “sleeping” “baby,” “Kathleen” and “shining trees,” his exquisite use of “mist” and “disc” and “shades” and “say” This poem sings. We study how Williams gives us this music. A nice set includes this poem along with “This Is Just to Say” and a closing with “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Put the latter poem on the board and ask them what they see. Let them search, and then coach them a little bit to reveal its subtlely hidden structure.

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.

This poem can spark a lot of interest. Once it is on the board or an overhead projector, just stand there and let them look at it for a while. I have had some students actually grow angry at the poem. I’ve often heard them say, “I could have written that!” or “It doesn't say anything!” However, someone will always see a part of its hidden structure. Often, I have heard a student say, “It’s four little wheelbarrows.” This leads into a brief discussion of the shape of poems. Our literature text has a short section on such poems. We then look at the number of stanzas and words in each stanza. It has four couplets with four words in each stanza, and two times four is eight, the number of lines we have in the poem. Each couplet has three words on the first line and one word on the second line, providing the wheelbarrow image. The syllable count runs with a 4:2, 3:2, 3:2, 4:2 pattern as we read through the stanzas. We talk about the subtlety of the poem's form. Williams puts structure into the poem and then makes it invisible. The music is there, layered upon this subtle framework.

With Roethke, his wonderful poems of sadness and madness work well. He is an engaging poet to work into a set with Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, with a little dash of Robert Lowell, W. D. Snodgrass and George Starbuck thrown in. Starbuck and Plath signed on for a workshop under Lowell once they heard that Sexton was taking the class. They did not sign on because of who was teaching it but for who was sitting in it. Once a week after every class, the three students would go drinking together at the Ritz Hotel in Boston, where the two ladies would discuss their fascination about death as they sat munching potato chips and drinking martinis (Sexton, “Bar Fly” 6-7). Later, when Plath took her own life, Sexton wrote two fascinating poems in response. I find it worthwhile to read “Wanting to Die,” which tells the “Why” of suicide, and then another poem dedicated to Sylvia, which was written earlier in Sexton's career, a piece titled “Sylvia’s Death.” Often the lives of the poets will make their writing work in the class. A line from Sexton to Plath echoes a subtle warning, “If you're not careful Sylvia, you will out-Roethke Roethke” (Sexton, “Bar Fly” 10)” It seems they both did. Sexton took her own life eleven years after Plath. Ironically, their deaths share a common vein, Plath on her knees with her head in the oven and Sexton sitting in her car in the garage, the engine running and the door closed.

We talk about writing from the unconscious and the price a poet pays for following that route. Sexton, Plath, Lowell and Roethke all suffered bouts of madness, they paid a terrible price to create the works of beauty they left us. I once asked a colleague who teaches psychology why we see so many casualties among the poets. He said that no one knows but he personally felt that “anyone who thinks that deeply about things has to become depressed.” This often leads to an engaging class discussion.

Sexton is an important voice to represent another direction we need to go in to make our classes relevant to our students. Sexton is a notable feminist figure. She writes on topics that are not polite, that women should not write about according to the social values of her time. She writes about abortion, masturbation and menstruating at age 40. In today’s world, where women are continually seeking equality in the workplace as well as the household, a voice such as Sexton strikes home. Our students appreciate her honesty and courage. They understand her frustrations. In her poem published in 1962, “The Abortion,” she says,

Somebody who should have been born
is gone.

This poem neither defends nor condemns abortion; instead it explores the feelings of a woman alone after she has encountered this experience. Many of our students, in their private lives, have explored the same questions that this woman asks herself in the poem.

It is important to involve our students' lives in their studies. We need to bring in poems of gender, ethnicity and sexual preference. As I said earlier, my students come from a multiplicity of backgrounds. They need to find themselves in the poems we read. One of my favorites along this line is “La Guitarra” by Federico Garcia Lorca. The poem appears in our text in both Spanish and English. This is a rewarding poem to work in two voices. I will have a Hispanic student read a line in Spanish, and then I will read the same line in English, our voices echoing one another. Last term, a student suggested that he read it all the way through in Spanish and then have the English version read. This worked well too. Often by this time in the course, I can have two students read the poem for its beauty of sounds while I stand on the sidelines and listen. My purpose is to awaken their voices and their ears, to make them want to feel the words on their tongues. Roethke says that a generation growing up on television is tone deaf. We need to cure that deafness.

Poetry is a shared voice. It shares the pains and joys of life, the frustrations and comforts, the defeats and the victories. Poetry talks of those things that every living creature shares. And that is what we need to do in our classes. Poems such as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” work so much better with shared voices reading them. Open with a brief discussion of the theme Eliot’s poem explores, and then take a few minutes to explain the references with which most of our students are unfamiliar. Next, divide the number of lines in the poem by the number of students in the class. Read it aloud together. It takes the mystery out of the poem and reinforces our awareness that it is a poem of a subject we all share. We will all grow old and leave this earth one day. With the Stevens poem, have 13 voices read the 13 stanzas. Call out stanza one and ask, “Who wants it?” Let them pick the ones they want to read. Shared voices, shared experiences, shared visions. This is what poetry and teaching are all about.

I opened with a poem by Yun, Tongju. I have searched for an English translation of the poem. In my efforts, I have found three, and all three are different. I have asked many of my Korean friends to translate it into English for me. I have not found two people yet who agree on what the poem means. I have asked scholars, professional translators and those who love poetry. If I am having this much trouble finding agreement on the poem, then imagine how much difficulty our students who are just starting out with poetry are having. Thus I have decided to close this discussion with my own translation of the poem.

Prelude

Until the day I die, I wish to
look up at the sky, untainted by shame.
But even the wind in the leaves
brings me pain.
With a heart that sings beneath the stars
I will love all dying things,
and I will walk the path that has been given to me.

Tonight again,
the winds sweep across the stars.

I taught my first classes as a student teacher under the guidance of Joe Lizowski. I was worried about whether I could do it. In fact, I was scared to death to stand in front of a group of students. He told me, “David, you don't teach college. You don’t teach English. You don't teach the book. You teach people.” Those are some of the most important words anyone has ever said to me. We teach people. I have to stop and remind myself every now and then.

***

Works Cited

Cummings, E. E. “In Just--.” 100 Selected Poems. New York: Grove, 1954. 5.

Eliot, T. S. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” The Waste Land and Other Poems. New York: Harvest-Harcourt, 1962. 1-9.

Litz, A. Walton, and Christopher MacGowan, eds. The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams. Vol.1. New York: New Directions, 1986.

Sexton, Anne. “The Abortion.” The Complete poems: Anne Sexton. Boston: Houghton, 1981. 61-62.

_____. “The Bar Fly Ought to Sing.” 1966. No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews, and Prose. Ed. Steven E. Colburn. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1985. 6-13.

Stafford, William. “The Gift.” The 1991-1992 Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. Ed. Bill Henderson. New York: Pushcart, 1991. 103.

Williams, William Carlos. “Danse Russe.” Litz and MacGowan 86-87.
_____. “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Litz and MacGowan 224.

Yoon, Tongju. “Prelude.” Sky and Wind and Stars and Poems. Kwang Guk Kim, ed. Seoul: Mi Rae Sah, 1980. 11.