Introduction to Poetry or Why I Am Not an English Teacher

No! Wait! Oh, my goodness. I don't know where to start.

I know you think you don't like poetry.

It's too foo-foo -- a fuzzy poodle clipped into topiary.

It's too obscure, too much naval-gazing. No one, besides the poet who wrote it, can understand it. Or, for that matter, gives a frak.

And even people who like poetry, don't like this modern stuff. Half the time it doesn't even rhyme.

Beginning in elementary school, I wrote poetry. Even got some of it published. Had to give up the getting published part though. Too expensive.

That was in the days before cell phones when you had to pay long distance to call any prefix outside your area code and even most inside it. The phone prefix in the U.S. is the three numbers immediately following the area code. (For those of you too young to remember, prefixes once had names like Windsor which was dialed 946 and Melrose 635, etc. In old movies phone numbers began with the prefix 555, because there was no prefix 555 and that just gave one less reason to get sued. Some things don't change.)

Also, if your poem were published, payment generally consisted of two free copies of the issue your poem appeared in.

All this meant that if my poem was published, I had to pay long distance to call all my friends and relatives to tell them the good news. AND buy extra copies of the issue my poem appeared in, because I had friends and relatives who wanted to see it themselves. Then there was the expense of snail mail because not all my friends and relatives lived within easy driving distance.

But I digress.

You notice I said I gave up the getting published part. The writing of poetry I continued for a very long time. It was my way of understanding myself and the chaotic world I lived in. I read other people's poetry for the same reason.

A good poet pays attention to each word, asking if that word is the right word. A good poem, while it uses the exact word, also leaves room for the reader to bring to it their own experience. Room to understand the poem in their own way.

When I went to college, I thought I wanted to be an English teacher. I loved poetry and prose in all their forms, rhymed, free verse, form poems, fiction, nonfiction, plays. I would be surrounded by literature. I would spend my days sharing what I loved with my students. Lunch conversations would expand my own reading opportunities by exploring the literature my fellow teachers read and loved. What better way for me to make my living? And I would have time to write.

Life and reality changed everything. I eventually got to within something like four credit hours of a teaching degree in English. And I couldn't face the possibility of a lifetime of lunches with English teachers.

That said, let me share with you a poem by Billy Collins, who was an English teacher. Probably the kind of English teacher I would enjoy having lunch with. He is described by Wikipedia as "a Distinguished Professor of English." Among many prizes, awards, and honors, he was Poet Laureate of the United States 2001 - 2003.

Introduction to Poetry 

by Billy Collins

                                     I ask them to take a poem
                                     and hold it up to the light
                                     like a color slide

                                     or press an ear against its hive.

                                     I say drop a mouse into a poem
                                     and watch him probe his way out,

                                     or walk inside the poem’s room
                                     and feel the walls for a light switch.

                                     I want them to waterski
                                     across the surface of a poem
                                     waving at the author’s name on the shore.

                                     But all they want to do
                                     is tie the poem to a chair with rope
                                     and torture a confession out of it.

                                     They begin beating it with a hose
                                     to find out what it really means.


And that, dear friends, is why I am not an English teacher.

Style vs. Story -- an essay

Jackson Pollock,

image from westpacificview.com

My husband recently finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy. If you’ve been following my blog very long, you know I’m a big fan of those three books. My husband is not only widely read, but well-read so I value his opinion.

The Border Trilogy? He liked them. After he got past McCarthy’s style.

McCarthy does not use standard punctuation. For someone who not only knows the basic rules of punctuation, but respects the role of rules in controlling chaos, this can interrupt the flow of the story.

Much of McCarthy’s stories are in dialogue for which he uses few or no attributions, making it sometimes difficult to know who’s speaking. Again, because the reader may have to go back quite a ways to figure out who’s saying what, the story is interrupted.

McCarthy writes run-on sentences that would give Henry James pause. And yes, by the end of the book, McCarthy the story-teller becomes McCarthy the Philosopher with a capital P.

All this being said, why did my husband like the books? For the same reasons I did. The characters, the setting, and the stories. McCarthy does those three things so well, that many of us readers overlook (and in some instances, overcome) his style.

Not everyone is willing or able to get past a writer’s style to get to the good parts.

How many of us were introduced to Shakespeare in school? And haven’t touched him since.  

How was that introduction made? Through reading. Keeping in mind that Shakespeare wrote plays and poems in the styles of plays and poems. To make things more uncomfortable we were subjected to that form of torture peculiar to traditional English teachers – divvying up the script among students who then read their parts cold. Not only are the students reading their parts unrehearsed, they are reading them in what amounts to a foreign language with which they have little familiarity.

(If you could see me now, you’d see my hands thrown into the air – whether in exasperation or supplication even I can’t tell.)

And Shakespeare’s characters and settings and, best of all, his stories are lost to his style.

Okay, so sometimes you have to do reading differently. Shakespeare, we should watch performed by qualified actors under the tutelage of good directors. There are numerous DVDs available from professionals and wonderful productions by college and high school drama departments throughout the English speaking world.

Charles Dickens is another writer we’re introduced to in school. And seldom, if ever, read again. I very early on discovered that I could follow Charles Dickens if I read him out loud or at least heard him as I read silently. But he wrote for pre-television readers. His wonderful stories were produced chapters at a time in periodicals. People would get the newest installment and gather together in their living room and listen to someone read aloud to them. So, in a way, these are performance pieces, too. Dickens, language sounds like the story he’s telling. He paints pictures with his descriptions and dialogue and even the names he chooses for his characters. We are transported into his stories. If we do not read them in our modern way of reading which is somehow fast – more like we’re watching a movie.

I couldn’t read James Joyce. And I can’t stand being left out. I had to find a way into his stories. Then I discovered his work on audio-books. By a reader who has a slight Irish accent. Of course! Joyce’s stories are all inside his head and he’s Irish. So I experience his stories inside my head. With a slight Irish accent.

 Generally speaking, my husband (and he is not alone in this) is of the opinion that a writer whose style makes the story difficult to read is ostentatious, arrogant, and a waste of the reader’s time. There are too many good stories out there and too little time to read them. Why waste that valuable time reading a writer who is more focused on his style than his story?

     My opinion? I’m still working on Faulkner.