Introduction to Poetry
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
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.
Most of my students aren't beating anything with hoses. The second quad started a few weeks ago, and my class size tripled from 14 to 44. I thought with more students in the class, I might hear more opinions, more connections, but instead of more conversation in a large class, we have decidedly less. Fourteen is preferable not just for making it easier for me to learn names and grade papers, but also for making it easier for students to talk out in class. But despite their silence in class (We read an essay by Meriweather Lewis, so I asked about the purpose of Lewis and Clark's journey ... crickets....), I think they are thinking about some of the readings, at least based on their journal posts. I've had several really good submissions. I think what I need to do is call on these students by name. It's intimidating to speak up in front of a group.
The content of this class is not everyone's favorite genre. I recognize that some of these essays and poems are going to be boring for a good number of people, especially since none of them are literature majors, so whether they learn to love Wordsworth or Wendell Berry is not really a goal of the course, although that would be a nice outcome. I just hope I am helping them appreciate literature, which perhaps is harder than teaching about Wordsworth. Most of the students signed up for this course because it is a general education course that fits their schedule.
What can I do to make these readings more interesting to students who don't really like to read? Sing and dance? I've started to present videos of the bobolink singing (the chorister in Emily Dickinson's "Some keep the Sabbath"), images of Walden Pond now and then (and a story about how it is being polluted by swimmers peeing in it), and photos of my parents' farm in the fall, of our own trip to the desert, etc. I'm hoping that the visual imagery will capture their imagination, help them connect to what they read. Maybe by the end of the term, the students will not only recognize the names of some authors and be able to identify some of the different trends or tropes in nature writing, but also find a handful of authors they really like.
I probably am assigning too much to read, but it is a survey course. Since I recognize they won't read all of the essays, I give them permission to skim and dive - to pick a couple essays to browse and one or two to spend more time with - skim some, dive into some.
This term I am trying to be a little more systematic in the way I present information: I start class with reminders and announcements about assignments and upcoming events (Exciting news here: One of the design professors is redesigning Pope Francis's Laudato Si to make it more appealing and visually meaningful. See a prototype here: https://issuu.com/seabrightstudio/docs/now-more-than-ever_prototype-draft07218 )
I've also started having them write down the answer to a question relating to their lives - for instance, last week I asked if anyone knew what ballot measures are coming up that relate to the environment. (I tried to use polleverywhere - an online survey program - with mixed results.) The class before I asked them to write a short description of their favorite place and then share. The day we discussed Walden, I had them add up all the costs of owning a car (like the cost chart Thoreau creates for building his house), and figure up how many hours they had to work a year to pay for it if they made $20/hour. (The average cost was about $4000 a year, by the way, 200 hours of work.) But then I lecture for an hour, and I see the phones being checked surreptitiously under the desk. I figure they are young adults, so I'm not confiscating phones, but perhaps I need a stricter policy on that because it seems to be a contagious activity. In the smaller class, this didn't happen quite so much.
At any rate, I enjoy what I'm reading. I get bogged down in finding interesting side notes sometimes, prepping for class, so it takes too much time, but I do recommend rereading Walden and skimming and diving through the Norton Anthology of Nature Writing. Which reminds me that now it is time to go outside.
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| Indiana farm in early November |
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| Joshua tree late October |
