At the heart of Stephen Regans piece in Issue 2 of the Newsletter, Poetry, Please, I sensed a perennial worry; we know poetry matters, but how on earth do we persuade everyone else that it does, especially how do we persuade those people who have signed up to either study or teach it? Perhaps one of the most sonorous articulations of this worry in the modern period in England comes at the end of F.R.Leaviss ground-breaking study New Bearings in English Poetry, first published in 1932: So that poetry in the future, if there is poetry, seems likely to matter even less to the world. Those who care about it can only go on caring. The paradox of Leaviss position was embryonic of nearly everyone who came to write about the subject. On the one hand the book was a living, combative example of the authors passionate commitment to poetry and its importance in our lives. On the other hand it was suffused with gloom as it foresaw the eventual diminution and possible extinction of the (serious) poetry-reading audience. The terms of the debate have scarcely changed since. Embattled minority, indifferent (or worse) majority. We have surely talked the extinction of poetry to death.
English teachers are presumed to be among the embattled minority, the true believers in the possibilities of the poem. But of course they are more than this. They are also the foot-soldiers nominated to take the battle to the chalk-face, the active professors of poetry. The problem, common to all conscripted activists, is that the supposed elite minority is recruited from the suspect majority. Now I have little doubt that most people continue to need poetry and to seek out, even if unconsciously, its satisfactions. The poetry most people connect with, however, takes many and varied forms. Some of my students tell me that the modern post-sixties pop lyric fulfils the same emotional role for them as they imagine the poetry they have to study used to fulfill. If I think about the matter in this way I feel that the same might be said for a pre-sixties Frank Sinatra song with its wonderfully exact yet idiosyncratic phrasings and rhythms.
The point is that the poetry most people read or listen to voluntarily is rarely the poetry which students have to read or, I fear, teachers have to teach. My own evidence for this is largely anecdotal but voluminous. While talking about this subject recently to several (non-English specialist) colleagues, two of them suddenly began to recite lines from poems they had learnt by heart at school. Except that there was little heart in the recitations, only the straining to remember. In The diversity of poetry: how trainee teachersperceptions affect their attitudes to poetry teaching by Rita Ray (The Curriculum Journal Vol.10, No.3, Autumn 1999) the answers to two of the questions asked of the forty-eight trainees are worth pondering:
Do you read poetry for pleasure now?
- Yes- 4.2%
- Occasionally - 33.3%
- No - 62.5%
Do you think poetry should be taught in school?
- Yes - 100%
- No - 0
So everyone without exception is in favour of virtue but only 4.2% are confident enough to assert that they practise it on a regular basis.
In the areas of how poetry is taught and whether a wide enough range of poetry is read with enough attentiveness for it to be taught effectively, it seems clear that we can take nothing for granted. Many teachers, who might have been considered by the Arnold-Leavis axis to be in the front line in the battle against the philistines, now appear to feel themselves embattled by the requirement to teach poetry at all. And yet the less poetry English teachers seem to read, the more insistent and incessant are the demands that poetry be taught. The demands are being made by every conceivable educational authority; government pronouncements through the National Curriculum, Education Boards, the Inspectorate, the schools.
One of the results of this now chronically dysfunctional situation has been a mushroom cloud of books about the teaching of poetry. Not even the most dedicated and statistics-addicted researcher could keep track of all of them. Asked to respond to a request for 'books on the teaching of poetry' Google (the internet search engine) turned up, in 0.16 seconds, 544,000 sites. The books cited place poetry in every conceivable pedagogical context; phonetics, creative writing, reading, cross-curricular themes, choral reading, body movement, dance, dramatisation. All these contexts now form part of a familiar educational dogma but they may be less than enabling in the unpropitious circumstances in which poetry and its teaching now find themselves. Too many of the available aids and guides to the teaching of poetry concern themselves almost exclusively with what teachers can do with a poem; the activities which poems can springboard pupils into; the themes and projects which a poem might ease a class into. Guide books like these are close to being the pedagogical equivalents of recent, theorydriven, academic productions on literature. The effect in each case has been to encourage the teacher or reader to escape as quickly as possible from the poem into other, often fruitful activities or speculation.
I am not suggesting that the activities-approach can or indeed should be entirely reversed. My proposal is a more modest one. In the teaching of poetry the poem is clearly the starting-point. But we may want to consider whether, in at least some lessons, we should also make it the end-point. The declared objective of these lessons would simply be that the poem is listened to and appreciated for what it is in its own linguistic terms. To put it another way, I would wish to encourage more teachers and student-teachers to see the poem as a linguistic space in which the teacher feels confident enough to linger before, or instead of, dashing off into the several directions down which he/she is continually being urged to head. To read, to listen, hopefully to appreciate. The outcomes in this deceptively simple process may be regarded by some to be vague and unquantifiable and therefore uncongenial to the drive towards measuring and auditing, but unless we allow for the risky stillness which such a process entails, putting the poem centre stage, then our poetry may continue to be thrilling indeed but its classroom study is always liable to be a diversion.
In Ireland we are fortunate to have witnessed the remarkable flowering of poetry which has taken place over the last thirty years. Tragically it has co-incided, if that is the right word, with times of terrible conflict and violence. The times have been deeply inscribed in the poetry which in turn has self-reflectively and relentlessly interrogated its own status and value when set against the backdrop of the nightmare of history. I can think of no more vital and important resource for a teacher of literature than the poetry and associated criticism which has been produced in Northern Ireland since the 1960s. A recurring anxiety in this body of work is one which has been merely outlined here but which every teacher of poetry cannot fail to be aware of; can a poem be civically responsible and responsive and still remain a poem? (See especially Seamus Heaney’s ‘The Interesting Case of Nero, Chekhov’s Cognac and a Knocker’ in The Government of the Tongue, Faber, 1988). Heaney, a distinguished teacher as well as a major poet, has conceded poetry’s obligation to address the wider questions of politics and history. At the same time he has remained steadfast in affirming the poem as poem, warning us that ‘in discharging this function, poets are in danger of slighting another imperative, namely, to redress poetry as poetry, to set it up as its own category, an eminence established and a pressure exercised by distinctly linguistic means.’ (The Redress of Poetry, Faber, 1995).
For the hyper-active teacher of poetry this might translate into the celebrated reversal of Harry Truman’s injunction to a lethargic aide: ‘Don’t just do something — stand there!’
