poetic pedagogy up to performance poetry, hyderabad

The English Literature Journal Volume 1, Issue 1 - 2014 ISSN: 2348-3288

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The English Literature Journal Vol. 1, No. 1 (2014): 6-10 Research Article Open Access

Poetic Pedagogy up to Performance Poetry Mahdi Shafieyan* Assistant Professor of English Literature, Department of Foreign Languages, Imam Sadiq University

*Corresponding author: Mahdi Shafieyan

ABSTRACT Understanding poetry has always been a burdensome task for students; they always think that even the simplest poems have so many hidden meanings that are out of reach, so they look for as much information as possible about the poem, its poet, the historical background, and so on. The task of a poetry teacher is very much different from those of fiction, drama, or generally other scopes of literature. He/she ought to stir students’ emotions by his/her reading, as poetry is the only main genre that should be read completely in the class. Furthermore, the teacher has to sensitize his/her pupils to sound and sense in a motivating way so that they enjoy the selected pieces. Then, he/she should make his/her students understand the diction and figures that usually keep a long distance from the ordinary language. This study features teaching poetry in the current era in which so many new forms have appeared due to the electronic sources along with performance arts. This is to indicate that today the syllabus should oscillate between classic forms and postmodern types. Hence, this research takes different sorts of poems to show the applicability of its lesson plan. In the introductory notes, it tries to elucidate the distinction between poetic methodology and teaching of other genres. Then, it provides the reader with plans from before- to after-class activities, and finally comes to testing. The researcher aims to suggest the last trends in poetic pedagogy the main role of which is to give learners incentive to better comprehension of this genre. The findings confirm that teaching poetry is no more only text-based or teacher-oriented, but due to contemporary poetic variations it demands other means’ and students’ involvement.

Keywords: pedagogy, performance, poetry, poetics

INTRODUCTION Literature as an academic major carries some unique features, which make it approach everyday life or what people grapple with frequently: it is the representation of social living and man’s complexities, on the one hand, as well as the delicacies and minutiae of intellectual or sensational relations, on the other, with all their huge scopes. In other words, it is not a mere reverberation of facts, as many fields of study are, but accompanies the reality with mellifluous narrations. In this constellation consisting of a diversity of stars--genres, and forms--as well as other galaxies--other disciplines that are within this inherently interdisciplinary area--poetry is the sun. The main question that needs to be answered is about differences between teaching poetry and other genres. If there are some restrictions for other genres such as fiction and drama to depict sonic emotions whether due to their large lengths or what may appear as artificiality of language, poetry does not confront such limitations. As one of the most eminent scholars in contemporary poetry, Marjorie Perloff (2001) illuminates this matter more deliberately:

I believe a poem differs from routine or normal discourse (like this statement, for instance) by being the art form that foregrounds language, in its complexity, intensity, and, especially, relatedness … In the poetic text, everything is related to everything else - or should be - the whole being a construct of sameness and difference in pleasing proportions. (Perloff and van Hallberg, 2001, p. 87) The next gap between teaching of poetry and other areas is the trepidation on the part of not only students (Wrigg, 1991, p. 1) but also teachers (Haugh et al., 2002, p. 25). Unlike fiction and drama, poetry classes in undergraduate courses demand technical and theoretical aspects, such as metrics, poetics, as well as prosody; probably, fiction and drama classes at this level do not necessitate dealing with narrative theories, for instance. Showalter and Middlebrook (2003), poets themselves, see students’ resistance to learning poetics as the main disadvantage of teaching poetry (p. 65). Deeming it necessary to concern theoretical aspects of

Received: 21 October 2013 Accepted: 28 October 2013 Online: 20 January 2014

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Received: 21 October 2013 Accepted: 20 January 2014


poetry, Arac (1994), however, believes that “without attention to prosody, poetry may seem like arbitrary magic rather than a codified technology of verbal power” (p. 174). This obstacle could be cleared by a suggestion for instructors: the teacher should work on the poems he/she fears in the class, Lockward (1994) would say; when he/she provokes a heated discussion in the class, the problematic chasms could be bridged by reader-response approach. The fear on the side of students also could be cleared by the same strategy since they are plausibly uncomfortable with understanding of the poetic language (pp. 65-68). The element of comprehension is so significant that whenever blocked, enjoyment would be obstructed. Of course, attentions should be drawn to the fact that these “problems” do not belong to poetry but poetry-teaching. In the present article, in order to solve such difficulties, the researcher attempts to focus on the methods and techniques from pre-session assignments to post-class activities and to present a meticulous lesson plan in order to overcome the arguable trepidation. Step-by-Step Lesson Plan Coming to the poetry class requires prior preparation; this is the first step that helps walking toward reading and activities in the classroom. Teachers should ask students to read the poem before the session for looking up new, literary words. For second/foreign language learners, it is obligatory to focus very much on words’ pronunciations, as they are tightly linked with metrics. In the event that the course contains long poems, they ought to inform students to read the syllabus before the term. Reading in the class needs some tactics in order to enthuse students; for instance, teachers had better begin each class with a poem by a different poet. However, the main part is reading itself, which must be aloud, although all poems are not read in the same tone; some need to be shouted and some have to be undertoned in order to convey the emotion correctly (Fisher, 1985, p. 3; Kenner, 1988, p. 3). Almost all theorists and pedagogical practitioners consent to different readings, which are divided into four steps by Evans (2003): The first reading should be without any stoppage and explanation. In poetry, we read everything including the punctuation; that is, no only should common punctuation marks have their meanings indicating pause, run-on, etc., but also they would rely on smooth transference of the ambience of the poem. In the following example, a good reading ought to home in Prufrock’s hesitation when it reaches at the dashes, ellipses, and question marks: And I have known the arms already, known them all-- Arms that are braceleted and white and bare (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!) Is it perfume from a dress That makes me so digress? Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl. And should I then presume? And how should I begin?

. . . . .. (Eliot, 1917, p. 5) As the last two questions can clearly show, he is a man of incertitude; the dubiety casts a heavy shadow of distrust on the previous sentences including his claims: “And I have known the arms already, known them all”. In this way, the reader should reflect the vacillation represented by the two dashes in advance. The second reading is with technical aspects; so to speak, the form, meter, rhyme scheme, and so forth. The third can be specific to the explication of the poem; in this midway, the form helps one interpret the poem better; he/she sees the length; if lines’ lengths are unequal, the voice can be frustrated or anxious. Then, one pays attention to the punctuation; if sentences are not full, probably the speaker is angry. He/she ultimately analyzes dialogs, if any, and asks students “who speaks more? or “who is dominant?” (Fisher, 1985, p. 3). Here, the teacher leads a discussion that encourages a personal relationship with the poem and goes on to interrogate what emotions the poem conveys, questions such as “what do you remember from the poem?”, “where did your mind go while reading?”, or “what do you like to ask the poet?” (Lockward, 1994, p. 67). For the last time we reread the piece for a better appreciation. Since in practice there is not enough time for this ideal program, the researcher advises on merging the second and the third readings. Evans (2003) adds that long poems should be read at least twice (pp. 374, 379). Although these readings are assumed to be performed on the part of the teacher, and despite Howard’s (1980) belief that having students attempt to read is “embarrassing to the reader and boring to all” (p. 62), the researcher’s suggestion would be to involve students in the last reading, for then they would have a reading pattern in mind and a good understanding to exhibit the intonation precisely. Mention should be made that this principle is flexible enough in respect to students’ levels; graduate students or even seniors could participate in readings from the very first stage. All said apart, teaching is not restricted to the class, but it may necessitate some activities for home, which are expounded as follows: First, to assign writing a personal poem recommends to students that poets might write of personal or highly ordinary things (Tarzia, 2001, p. 3), such as a spider in A noiseless patient spider by Walt Whitman (1891) or After the movie by Marie Howe (2008). This will be fruitful to allay pupils’ fear because ordinary things and themes need everyday language, which is much easier to come to grips with and seems to express its topic on the surface. In this way, they analyze poems like writers not readers. It is better to make students an offer to start from words, then to add poetic adjectives. Rhyme does not matter, but imagery is important (Haugh et al., 2002, pp. 25-26).

Mahdi Shafieyan / The Eng Lit J. 2014, 1(1): 6-10


Other activities helping to writing and so reading poetry are as follows: Writing one’s own version of poetry by replacing the persona with one’s parents or oneself, “mad ads” or writing a couplet for a product’s advertisement, “group poem” that occurs when each student brings a line by a poet to the class and one is determined by the teacher to write his/hers as the first line and then giving the paper to the person to the right to go on and complete the poem are three samples. Next, “acrostic” is actually very exciting in that here the initials of the poetic lines are versified to make the student’s name. Goshko (2010) hints that “poem-drawing”, as another, can engrave the imagery of a poem on students’ brains; for instance, Coleridge’s Kubla Khan (1816) is very good for this task as the meanings of some lines are connected with the imagery. A further work could be “rote learning”; although memorization is not suggested in other fields, poetry is an exception (Bloom, 2001, p. 73). Billy Collins (2001) rationalizes memorization as he is of the opinion that poetry began as a memory system. Mnemosyne, hence mnemonics, was the mother of all the Muses in Greek mythology (p. B5). In a “readingathon” (reading marathon), students choose poems to read and then write prose responses to them. A response will be 75-100 words and students can reply to one of the following elements of the poem: images, sounds, subject(s), emotional effect(s), meanings, and questions about the poem. Assigning writing “portfolio”, John Webster asked his students to record their readings on poems throughout the term; by course end, students will have accumulated thirty to forty pages of writing about Elizabethan poetry, all of which have been produced by their own hands. “[T]he sense of a student’s work growing has a more abstract force, for as students review their work to write the self-reflexive essay, they can see for themselves how much more sophisticated their thinking has become” (as cited in Showalter, 2003, p. 73). “Contrast” means to have pupils collate a poem with a prose statement of the same theme, and “comparison” implies likening two or more poems on similar themes. Putting a short poem alongside a suggestive prose text from the same period, one can observe how the two texts elucidate each other, and then comparing the same poem with a roughly similar one from a contemporaneous American or continental society would result in students’ recognition of literary schools and movements around the globe (Cheney and Prescott, 2000, p. 261). Moreover, there are some class participations which not only incite students to learn more effectively, but also give them the pleasure and fun of creating poetry; after all, there is a chasm between the apprehension of one who just reads poems and the perception of a person who writes poetry as well. A pertinent activity to “poem-drawing”, explained above, is “poem-acting”, which once more highlights imagery; the example might be Robert Frost’s The subverted flower (1942). If there are different voices, each student could read and act one. Next is “clustering”, which means grouping

verbs, objects, colors, emotion describers, and so on in order to come to an interpretation; for example, if transitive verbs are a lot, the action is significant (Fisher, 1985, pp. 3-5). “Paper bag poetry” is a Dadaist way according to which the teacher calls each student to jot down a word on a slip of paper, puts it in a paper bag, then collects all of the class’ pieces, and finally asks students to write a poem with the given words (Jump, 2003, p. 12). Activities go beyond writing; some scholars suggest inquiring students to record their own readings. Among other inventive ways is requiring each member of the class to create his or her own anthology of favorite poems (Showalter, 2003, pp. 70-71). Activities, furthermore, are not restrained merely to students but teachers; in fact, there are some tips that would help the latter very much in managing the course. Professors are suggested to invite local poets to their university for readings, workshops, or discussions. If they have any means for publication, they can kindly motivate students by putting their poems on a magazine, newspaper, weblog, or website. Do not kill, but instill the love of poetry in students, says Lockward (1994); indeed, speaking of the course’s difficulties terrifies them. Teaching from contemporary to past is a great assistance to learners because of the colloquial language and up-to-date subjects; in this way, their fear will disappear. The instructor may also expose students to beautiful and powerful language with musical intensity (pp. 65-66, 68). The researcher’s suggestion is that as culturally Iranian students are used to listening to poems in rhyme, little by little, the teacher in this context should go toward English blank or free verses. In addition, there exist some “Don’ts”: Do not explain the poem like a possessor; this means that the poem has one meaning. Do not pretend that metrics are prescriptive but descriptive. Do not speak overtly about theory. Do not impose critics on your students. Do not fit a poem to a historical period; they are universal. This is not to say that historical events should be omitted but posed after students’ discussions. Levy (1986) takes the stance that students lack “virtually all the extensive, historical, literary, mythological, and theological information necessary to even a partial understanding of the poem.” He tries to give them some historical and biographical background, in part because “they honestly do not understand why anyone would want to write [such] a poem” (pp. 56-57). Among other paths that can stimulate young students of the digital era is the explication of the relationship between poetry and technology. Evans (2003) says that “poetry demands to be heard, not merely seen [that is read], and it is only in the classroom that we can be positive it will be heard” (p. 372). In this way, listening to records of poetry readings by famous actors or contemporary poets can be for clarification, sheer pleasure of hearing, as well as the cadence and meter (Wrigg, 1991, pp. 1-2). However, in the present digital age, watching poems could be more interesting than hearing. The following modes are the connection



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between poetry and visual media, which come under the rubric “poetry performance”: anipoems, typoems, concretism, and interactive poems,i to name a few. Mention should be made that a teacher ought not to go to extremes; that is, he/she should not overweigh the scale of these postmodern versions over the traditional ones’. Some of the benefits that accrue from such sorts could be enumerated as follows: first of all, students are enthused by cyberpoetry and innovations in the given area. This young movement has raised a conflict as art versus entertainment and has caused some to have the conviction that it has reduced the former to the latter notwithstanding (Konyves, 2011, p. 3), its novelty of presentation succors to better understanding and adds to the previous attractions of poetry. Second, concrete poetry, anipoems, and generally all species that do not have a fixed form make our students understand that there might be some readings for a single poem. This may relieve their stress of inability to comprehend the material, although it should not culminate in the misconception that all personal readings are admitted. Further, it will be very useful to teach them poetic elements, like rhythm, by simple anipoems and remind them of the fact that rhythm is not limited to poetry, but human life. Finally, in other characters of performance poetry that are written and read by the poet him/herself intonation brings along the author’s intention, which again helps students apprehend the authentic meaning of the text; nonetheless, this eye view is not supported by the postmodern reading, which does not receive relying on an authentic interpretation, and its followers try to nourish the forms that invite the reader to the non-meaning genera, such as sound or found poems (Piombino, 1998, pp. 65-66). Testing The final step in the course is testing, which has raised many controversies in recent years. Ghaderi (1991) asserts that a professor never has to test on poetry by multiple-choice items; this means that only one reading is possible. He/she can ask students to bring one untaught poem to the test session to write about. They could be asked to write on a taught poem by following another critical approach, regarding their degree. Lockward (1994) adds that never ask pupils to apply a historical approach to a poem (pp. 65-66), for the above-mentioned reason. If one of the goals of a teacher is to encourage students to acquire a life-long habit of reading, he/she should provide class time for this important section. In the event that students are learning strategies that enable them to interpret literature and they have confidence in their responses, one will no longer need to rely on quizzes that require only recall of information. We assume that if we do not give quizzes on the readings we assign, students will not read. To dispel this doubt, we may give students a

writing assignment on a work demanding new interpretations in the class (Johannessen, 1995, pp. 1-3) REFERENCES

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Notes i. For anipoetry, see: A. M. Uribe, (1998), Gym, Web, 16 June 2012. <http://vispo.com/uribe/gym.html>. For typoetry, see: A. M. Uribe, (1969), It’s raining, Web. 16 June 2012. <http://vispo.com/uribe/ drop.html>. For interactive poetry, see: J. Phillips, (2007), Imagined, Visual poetry, Web. 11 Sept. 2011. <http:// phillipspoetry.com/interactive_poem1.html>. For visual poetry, generally, and concrete poetry, specifically, see: J. Phillips, (2012), Word power poetry & poetics: Visual digital &

concrete (Canberra: Author).


poetic pedagogy up to performance poetry, hyderabad

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