ELT News Think Tank

This Month's Think Tank Panel

Marc Helgesen

Peter Viney

Curtis Kelly

Chuck Sandy

Chris Hunt

Panelists: Peter | Marc | Curtis | Chuck | Chris
Date: October 2003

Topic: "How can we use poetry in the language classroom?"

Chuck Sandy

It's no secret that in my other life I am a poet - someone who spends a great deal of time writing, reading, and talking about poetry. Until this past year, though, I kept this other life separate from my teaching and work in education. I kept them separate because they seemed like separate things. Then two things happened. The first is that I met and began visiting with the Kyoto-based poet Cid Corman once a week. The second is that I discovered a website which was put together by the former American poet laureate, Robert Pinsky.

“I was taught - like I'm sure you were - that poetry is something difficult, something that requires analysis and explication.”

From Cid Corman, I rediscovered a poetry that is at once oral in nature - that is, meant to be spoken - and which is so accessible that it can easily be called folk poetry, or a poetry of the people. This sort of poetry requires no explanation, no study of poetics or structure, for it is song, pure and simple. In this sense, it is poetry that belongs to anyone and which comes out of the tradition of Lorca, the great Spanish poet whose poems were so well known that peasants recited them without even knowing who had written them. These are the poems of the people, and the true poets at work then and now have produced a body of work that anyone can understand and enjoy and be moved by all on their own.

Somehow, I'd forgotten this. Like all of us, I went through the process of getting a formal education, and in this process, I was taught - like I'm sure you were - that poetry is something difficult, something that requires analysis and explication, something that needs to be studied so one can appreciate rhyme and meter, line breaks and rhythm. Corman reminded me that that is not poetry, that's poetics - the study of poetry. "Poetics," he said, "is as far removed from poetry as academics are from life."

Because of poetics and this academic approach to poetry, most people have forgotten - or else never realized - that the only way to really approach a poem is as a single individual reader or listener. In this way, it's not how the poem works or what it's supposed to mean that matters. What matters is how the poem works for that one person experiencing it and what it 'says' to this person - how it moves him or her. When I use the word move here, I do not refer to an emotional rush or swell of feelings, but rather to the thoughts or memories a poem triggers. If we approach poetry in this sense, then, it becomes - in the jargon of our trade - content that can be used as any content can, as a jumping-off place for learner output and communication.

Corman didn't teach me that. That I figured out slowly as I began to occasionally bring in a poem or two to read to my class. These were simple poems, easily understandable. Poems like this one, from Corman.

It isn't for want
of something to say --
something to tell you --

something you should know --
but to detain you --
keep you from going --

feeling myself here
as long as you are --
as long as you are.

There's nothing difficult about this poem, and even after hearing it once, students had no problem talking about a time when they felt the same way Corman did when he wrote this. One student said it reminded him of standing at the station at the end of the evening with his girlfriend, trying to make their time together last just a little longer. Another student said it reminded her of the day she said good-bye to her Australian homestay family. Someone else said the feeling in the poem was like the one her mother had when she said goodbye to her at the beginning of the school year. Who's right? Everyone, of course, and these responses encouraged me to try more with poetry, and to do more with it.

One day I brought in the famous William Carlos Williams' poem, "This is Just to Say."

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Not only was it a very simple matter for students to explain that this is more like a note someone might leave on the refrigerator than a poem, but it was also a simple and fun matter for them to spend a little time writing their own version. One of the best was:

I have stolen
your boyfriend
who you loved

and who
you were probably
going
to marry.

Forgive me
he was my type
so gentle
and so fine.

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Panelists: Peter | Marc | Curtis | Chuck | Chris

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