大學部教學︰Teaching Poetry in an undergraduate course.

1. 入門︰How do you teach a poem to make Taiwanese students like it?
2. 指引︰What if some students just don't get it?
3. 時間安排︰When do you introduce the poem's poetic form, its rhyme scheme or its related historical background?

研究所教學︰Teaching Poetry on the MA level.

4.      利用各種方法產生對話︰Encouraging dialogue in multiple directions

5. 將歌曲視為詩︰Teaching popular songs as poems

1. How do you teach a poem to make Taiwanese students like it?

 

It is easy for them to start with their own experience. For instance, in teaching Li-Young Lee's "I Asked my Mother to Sing," students certainly have a lot to say about their experience of singing in a group of friends or family members with the Karaoke machines. Then I will ask them to talk more about the poem, give them some questions to go on discussing their ideas, or ask them to question one another. If the whole class gets engaged in some debate, I will literally go to the back row of the classroom, take a seat, and let them talk.

 

I like it when the class is "chaotic" with all sorts of ideas. However, in the middle of the class, there is usually a turning point, when some of the questions I ask get students to look at the poem from another perspective.

 

2. I guess this is how you direct students to go deeper into a poem. What if some students just don't get it? Or when their interpretation is simply wrong?

 

If only one or two talk, I will follow up on what those few students have said and then try to engage more students. If one student feels particularly strongly or responds really passionately to a poem/poet, that is a great way to get started. If some students say something definitely wrong about a poem (for instance, saying that "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams is about an atomic bomb), I will ask them to backtrack, to go back to reading the poem closely. Then we will talk and walk through the poem step by step together. I like to use the metaphor Seamus Heaney sets up in “The Swing” or Robert Frost uses in "Birches": I believe that a poem, like a birch tree, always starts from the earth. While some students may have swung high with a poem, some others may not know where to start. In that case, it's better to go back down to earth. Sometimes, and especially with freshmen, this means that I need to paraphrase the poem I teach, or ask them to paraphrase it. But oftentimes it means reading a poem out loud, letting students hear and speak it out, and getting students to pay attention to some details of the poem. Students tend to be afraid of poems, so part of my job is to help them learn to feel comfortable “playing” with the poems, like verbal toys, and to disrupt their preconceived notions of what poetry is. Poetry isn't punishment!

 

Q: In responding to students who offer "wrong" interpretation, do you say directly that they are wrong? Do you worry that students may miss some important aspects of a poem?

I like to emphasize the positive—what a student accurately notices about a poem—and I try not to say that a student is wrong or, at least, not make a student feel bad or foolish for misreading a poem. Sometimes we just joke about the mistakes. Getting students to be able to laugh at their own mistakes (and mine) is one way to make them relaxed and open in talking about their ideas. I work hard to make each class become a comfortable space where students feel at ease and free to offer their responses, whatever those responses may be. My pedagogy is based on a theory of comfortable chaos, which almost always involves some confusion for them, as they hopefully come to see the poem (and issues relating to their lives) from different perspectives.

 

Yes, there are some aspects of a poem I don't want students to miss. For instance, the pauses and hesitation in the last stanza of Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art":

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident

the art of losing's not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

However, I don't need to say everything. I only ask them to think more about the use of parenthesis in the first two lines and the pause in between these two lines, and then they will pick up the efforts and energies in the speaker's forcing out "(Write it!)" in the last line.

 

　

3. When do you introduce the poem's poetic form, its rhyme scheme or its related historical background?

Sometimes a particular poetic devise will jump out at students. They may notice, for example, that Philip Larkin uses an outlandish rhyme, like he does in ”Sunny Prestatyn” when “poster” is rhymed with “coast, a” and students will laugh or question why it's there. On occasions like that—or in a sonnet by Shakespeare or a villanelle by Dylan Thomas or a sestina by Elizabeth Bishop—the form itself may jump out at them and provoke questions and responses. Students' own responses provide the best source of entry into discussions. Often, though, discussion of form or rhyme happens towards the end of a class. But I like to emphasize that poetic form and rhyme are not just something mechanical or simply decorative; the way a certain form produces meanings and sound effects should have been discussed before the details of such form is introduced.

 

　

MA Course 4. Q. How long does it take you to finish reading a poem with graduate students? Do you worry about not finishing the poems on the syllabus?

 

Sometimes it can take three hours or even longer for graduate students and me to talk about one poem. Recently, for example, a class and I spent five hours dealing with a poem called “Nocturne in Black and Gold” by Mark Doty, and even then, we were only able to discuss the first dozen lines in detail. In one week, I usually ask students to read twelve poems, but we often only focus on one poem in class. I ask them to write on one or two of the others in their reading journal (or "Dear Ray" letter). It always amazes me which poems students choose to write on in their journals and in their term papers. I like to use our time together in the classroom to model for them close reading and analysis of a poem and then encourage them to do that kind of attentive reading for the poems they have read but we cannot discuss in class.

A class is never predictable.

 

Take Emily Dickinson as an interesting example. Her poems produce multiple meanings, and they deconstruct themselves. While she was busy doing housework—literally baking her prized bread and doing other kitchen and garden tasks—she wrote her poems, sometimes by pinning slips of papers together or writing, say, on the back of an envelope or recipe card. She did revisions and by the late 1850s would even hand-sew poems of different periods together to make her own collections. We are lucky to have the manuscript of her Fascicle 16 digitally re-presented (http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~ajf2j/emily/stab.html  ), so that students can see how her poems are “polyvocal” in the manuscripts: there are strange punctuations, words with variants, different stanza forms (which were reduced to quatrains by her editors), strange rhymes (slant rhymes, like the rhyming of “drop” and “up” in W.B. Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan,” which produce contradictory psychological effects). She also subverts the meter and her own use of religious discourse. I get students to read Dickinson’s manuscripts and compare them with their published versions. As an illustration—and a complication—I also show students how the manuscripts of my own poems are completely different from their print versions.  

It is very interesting—and hopefully helpful—to guide students so that they discover for themselves multiple meanings while discussing her poems. Some of Dickinson’s lines can stimulate a lot of discussion. For instance, with the line “Before I got my eye put out” (336) we can ask whether she meant it literally or symbolically. Either way, it’s a question of subjectivity—of her splitting her subjectivity. 

 

5. How do you teach different popular songs as poems?

Poetry contains music. As a matter of fact, jazz, for example, has changed modern poetry, not just Afro-American poetry. When I taught the Blues, Bob Dylan, the Beatles and Radiohead, I found that students, on one hand, could catch the rhythm as soon as the songs were played. Some even stood up and danced. Although blues are a bit harder for them, in general, it is still easier for them to grasp the rhythm first and then comprehend the meanings of the lyrics. 

On the other hand, I also urge them to compare and contrast a song's music and lyrics. The Beatles' lyrics and music frequently say different things. For instance, in “Paperback Writer,” the chorus in the background uses a nursery rhyme to respond to the lead singer with the recurring “Frère Jacques” seeming to make fun of the writer and suggest how boring he is. In this way songs can be not only poetic but also dialogic.    

Students are usually more receptive to the poetic elements used in songs: the use of rhythm, rhyme and their connotations. Although the Beatles and Bob Dylan are “ancient” for them, they like and respond to their music right away. I think it is the music that does it. Music enters a different part of their brains than language does and strikes an emotional chord with them. Some of my students even confessed that they cried after listening to “Fake Plastic Trees” by Radiohead.
Another way to help students appreciate the poetry of Bob Dylan is to get them to talk about the montage development of images in “Visions of Johanna” or “Mr. Tambourine Man." These songs, like visual art works, freeze frame some volatile images and make a collage of them. What is apparently disconnected and fragmentary, then, stimulates students and allows their imagination to run free.  I usually come with everything prepared—and sometimes joke with students that I have enough materials for about twelve hours, so they can phone their families and say they may be home late—but my plan gets discarded the moment I enter the classroom and get the first response from a student. I think it's more important to follow what interests—or irritates—them rather than what may interest me personally at that particular time. And I really don't mind that, because I want them to learn the value of poetry for THEIR lives, not mine. My immediate goal for a class is to discuss the interpretation—or more often than not various, multiple and even contradictory interpretations—of a poem. My larger objective is to help students situate poetry in their lives, since I believe that poetry is a way of thinking, of putting two completely different things together, so it is supposed to bring up dialogues, dialogues in a poem itself, between the poem and its readers, and among students and teacher. Hopefully by the end of a semester students will have learned not only about poetry, but also about themselves, including new ways of viewing their self/selves in their own personal and social contexts. And they will have developed analytical skills that will help them in other areas of their lives.

 

Overall, I believe that with all the dialogic elements in poetry, songs and discussions in and outside of classrooms, students will feel less alone. I hope and believe that these ongoing dialogues they have with the poetic texts, with me, and with each other will make their lives richer and more meaningful.