This is a poem neither your students nor mine have ever seen before. I wrote it yesterday, so it’s about as contemporary as you may get, lacking seated right now and writing your own. If you ask me it’s a full time income, breathing organism—not occur stone; tomorrow I possibly could change it. An organism made from words, that each and every reader brings your in her very own way. Emily Dickinson says, “A phrase is dead / If it is said, / Some say. / I say it just / Begins to live / That day.” (1)
Whatever my poem means to me, I couldn’t possibly reduce this meaning to a prose paragraph. I don’t want to say, “It’s about making pot holders when I was young and homesick at summer camp,” or “It’s really about my loss of my mother,” or “Actually, it’s about applied art versus fine art.” Or “It’s about the type of home and separation.” I didn’t lay out, at the least consciously, to make a poem about any one of this; I wanted to learn why seeing the pot holder when I opened a compartment gave me a sudden, inexplicable urge to write. Given that the poem’s written, and I’ve discovered some answers, Perhaps I will say it’s about these things.
But I’m much more thinking about asking, “What does it say to you?”—you that are reading it, remember, like your life depended on it, letting in your beliefs, your dream life, your physical sensations—and, I’d add to Adrienne Rich’s list, your memories and the mood you happen to stay just now…?
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We don’t have to begin with a discussion of what poetry is, or with a listing of figures of speech, or a quarrel about whether this is a good poem or even a lesser poem. I offer it, you take it or leave it. Something I try to consider to tell students when the initial poem of the season surfaces is that they’ll like some poems a lot better than others, aside from alleged “greatness.” I tell them I’m really desperate to see which poems each person chooses to speak about during the season ahead—or chooses to see aloud, copy into a journal, go find more poems by mcdougal of, write a poem back once again to, or steal words from.
They’re all fine responses to a poem, just as effective as writing a three-page critical analysis of it. Obviously, many college professors won’t feel in this manner, but carpe diem. Right now it’s high school. Or junior high. And surely there is life after college—some sixty years of it.
There are certain advantages to starting with a contemporary poem. Fewer footnotes, most likely, which means fewer opportunities for all of us to show our expertise: “In Shakespeare’s day the term ‘die’also known the moment of sexual consummation. So that’s a pun right there. And there’s an allusion—an indirect reference to religiomythicopastoralhistorical.”
Fewer preliminaries, too. Before I hand out Shakespeare’s sonnet about envying this man’s art and that man’s scope, I could want to do some free-writing with my class on which they most envy within their friends and enemies, perhaps how envy feels, and what they themselves possess that others might envy. This can help create a common context for the poem, so that the unfamiliar language and inverted word order won’t bring fifteen-year-olds to a grinding halt. Then I’d read it aloud—again, before they see it on the page in all its footnoted and eternal greatness. I might even memorize the poem so I really could present it with the conviction and urgency that eye contact can give.
Another reason to begin with some current poems is that the contemporary poet is less susceptible to view a poem as a way to do some overt teaching: “Additionally they serve who only stand and wait.” “The appropriate study of mankind is man.” Teenagers get enough of this from their parents and from us, so it’s not surprising when they prefer poems that give them a tad bit more leeway—that let them burrow (or skim) to see what the poem must offer them, not Mankind.
