As anyone who reads my blog knows, poetry is important to me, and April is poetry month. In honor of poetry month, the folks at Drollerie Press are having an author blog tour where writers are asked about how poetry has influenced them and their writing. We are sharing those influences on each others blogs. It is my pleasure to host Sarah Avery on my blog today.
Sarah Avery, author of Closing Arguments and Atlantis Cranks Need Not Apply, knows poetry. After all, she earned a doctorate in English with a dissertation on modernist poetry before going back to her scifi/fantasy roots. After a life of travel, study, and experiences many people only think they understand, it is not surprising that she would use these two very expressive and imaginative genres for her writing.
But Sarah didn’t just get a piece of paper indicating her expertise in poetry, she also taught poetry, has seen the fear and misunderstanding some people have of poetry. She “gets” how poetry is important not just as a field of study or genre, but in every day life, as a way of expressing feelings and moments that are bigger than we are. What follows below is one of best essays I’ve read on how basic and important poetry is to everyone.
“Woof! Squeak!”
by Sarah Avery
What blew my mind the one time I got to teach a course on poetry was how terrified my students were. If my class hadn’t been specifically required for all English majors, and satisfied several requirements for the university’s core curriculum, none of those students would have chosen it. For me, poetry had been by turns a comfort, a friendly challenge, a game, and very nearly a profession–the bell before my bowl of Alpo. For most of my students, poetry had been the occasion of their worst moments in high school English classes, moments of judgment and humiliation–the buzzer before their electric shock.
What could Pavlov’s dog have to teach Skinner’s mice? To be less afraid, to perceive the thing itself despite their fears, to allow for the possibility that a poem might be delicious.
It was both more and less than I’d expected to teach them. I had a carefully balanced syllabus full of lineage, form, and technique. The day before the semester started, I’d congratulated myself on its rigor. The hour I had to face all those wide eyes in pale faces, I found myself selling it to them as a menu full of delicacies.
Things started looking up when one of the students read ahead on the syllabus and raised her hand. “You’re not really assigning Dr. Seuss, are you?”
It was the same question I’d been asked in the department copy room. One of my fellow grad students saw that I was copying pages from Green Eggs and Ham and said, “Either that’ll be the coolest thing you do all semester and they’ll talk it up for years, or it’ll blow up in your face and they’ll hate you for it. Nobody likes condescension.”
In the copy room, my impromptu answer was:
I’ll teach it flying through the air
With long lines by that dude John Clare.
I’ll teach it climbing up a tree
With paeans by that chick H.D.
I’ll teach it creeping on the ground
With Cantos penned by Ezra Pound.
To get those clueless kids to scan,
I’ll teach that book, Green Eggs and Ham.
In any case, my goofy run of couplets wasn't the answer I could give a real live student in the moment when she was deciding whether I was condescending to her or not. Instead, I said something more or less like this:
Poetry happens in the body. Everything about it is something the body does. The body has a pulse, so poetry thumps. The body breathes, so poetry pauses. What is all that sensory vividness our high school teachers wanted us to pay attention to doing in the poem? It's there because the body senses the world. If you have a body, you can get something from poetry--and bring something to poetry, too. Robert Pinsky (the Poet Laureate the year I taught the class, but long before that an undergrad at the very same big state school my students were attending), likes to say that the true medium of the art of poetry is not the page or the written word, but is rather the column of air in the body of the person speaking the poem. The instrument of the poem is the body of the reader. Dr. Seuss never tries to disguise the physicality of his poetry. That's why you get him and not e.e. cummings when you're a child first learning to read, and that's why you get him and not e.e. cummings early in the semester.
"So," I concluded, "it looks like everyone here has a body." I waited a moment. No one contradicted me. "In that case, you've all come prepared."
That was my story. I stuck to it all semester. Green Eggs and Ham, with its thumpy pulse, took all the fear out of scansion marks, which apparently had been the source of a lot of high school trauma.
The physicality of poetry is one of the things I miss. I've been writing fiction seriously for six years now, and short essays for my blog for five years. A background in poetry does help on the sentence level, and to some extent on the structural level, but the intense focus on sound and breath is very difficult to sustain in a novel-length work. You do sometimes find those weird exceptions, novels in verse, and some of them even prosper-- like Vikram Seth's charming The Golden Gate, or Toby Barlow's current werewolf hit, Sharp Teeth. But not every story wants that form, and a writer who cares about publication and audience can't expect a verse novel to find a home out in the world. I expect to return to poetry from time to time, but prose fiction's where I live now.
But back to the students. (I miss them, too.)
What could Skinner's mice have to teach Pavlov's dog?
It was something I should have known, something I'd heard and read before. The poet who mentored me often quoted Muriel Rukeyser's aphorism, "The fear of poetry is the fear." That is to say, one of the intimidating things about poetry is that, in order to understand the good stuff, you have to open yourself to it, and ours is a culture that punishes true openness. For that matter, being open to the world lets in all kinds of suffering, along with the beauty. Numbness has it advantages. The very physicality of poetry makes it that much harder to resist feeling and thinking whatever the poem offers for you to feel and think.
Ultimately, it wasn't just the memory of humiliating ignorance in front of a classroom full of peers and a judgmental high school teacher that had zapped my some of students. The ones who had been able to connect with poetry a little bit, despite their educations, had found there something that demanded they bring, and therefore find, much more of themselves than they were accustomed even to acknowledging. Prose fiction, which was much more comfortable to them, invited them to lose themselves in story. Prose fiction does that for all of us, though the good stuff drops us back off at the end with more than we embarked with. It's a sweet deal, but very different. In most poetry, especially in modern and postmodern poetry, escape is not on offer.
Now, as a fantasy writer who brazenly embraces escapism as part of what stories ought to do, I look back on my students' predicament with more sympathy than I had when I was teaching them. The tools of sound and rhythm, breath and pulse, still matter, but instead of using them to demand the body's attention, I use them to direct the body's attention into the imagined bodies of characters in some other world. What is the medium of fiction? Not the page, not words, but the reader's identity.
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