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poetry:

Poetry and Pedagogy:

Through the Overhead Projector

"Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be "the expression of the imagination": and poetry is connate with the origin of man."

~Percy Bysshe Shelley~

In talking about poetry and pedagogy specifically, the “and” conjunction in between “poetry and pedagogy” will first be addressed. With an “and” conjunction, the word “pedagogy” can be attached to virtually any other general or specific discipline of study. The combining of “X” discipline and “pedagogy” essentially creates a new discipline or philosophical pursuit. Whether it is “science and pedagogy,” “biology and pedagogy,” “microbiology and pedagogy,” “art and pedagogy,” “painting and pedagogy,” or poetry and pedagogy, the word “pedagogy” or “the method or science of teaching and instruction” itself alters the content of the conjoined discipline. That is to say, science no longer remains science when conjoined with pedagogy, biology no longer biology, art no longer art, poetry no longer poetry. The disciplines become a meta-study of sorts, a study beyond the study, or a study of the method of teaching the discipline of study.

The act of attaching “and pedagogy” might be thought to function in a similar fashion as attaching “philosophy of” before a given discipline in grammar. Of course, “pedagogy” and “philosophy” differ in meaning and the grammatical function of “and” and “of” perform different acts. However, in the qualifying enactment and precision, the two sets of word units latch onto the word of a discipline in strikingly similar ways. For these purposes, we will consider “poetry and pedagogy” together and in particular. The secondary-level pedagogue of poetry, and poets alike, arguably must balance whatever comes after the words, “poetry and.” In the case of “poetry and pedagogy,” the teacher or the poet must balance – accurately and precisely – the content, the method, the technique, and the form to successfully consummate a genuine “poetry and pedagogy” within his or her classroom or poem.

In Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary, Lynn Keller considers poetry in terms of Edward Hirsch as “the literature of depths” in the chapter titled “The Centrifugal Classroom” (30). In reading countless lines of poetry, discussing poetics in a graduate setting, and writing poetic experiments of my own, I have seen in my experience that poetry lives in more dimensions than depth. Poetry, as traditional poetry and pedagogy might demand, also lives in the kind of centrifugal width that Keller defines. This is not to say traditional poetry has not always lived its life simultaneously in widths, depths, heights, time, and other metaphysical dimensions. My awareness, however, has been widened, deepened, heightened, and has become more longstanding to the necessity of understanding space in poetry and pedagogy. A poem or poetic experiment functions within the perimeters of a certain space, governed by the laws of width, depth, height, time, and other imaginable dimensions. In a similar way, pedagogical experiments, or simply teaching, are also governed by the same rules and laws of physics.

To examine “depth,” for instance, one can observe a number of senses from the downward, backward, or inward measurements to the more abstract profundity of thought often colloquially used for a given piece of poetry as well as for pedagogical lessons and lectures. Depth often becomes relative depending on the position and perspective of the observer. This is also true of width, height, and time and can be speculated as true for other imaginable dimensions outside the scope of this discussion. In fact, many ways of considering the various senses of dimensions are outside these present scopes. However, poetry at a minimum must be both measured in depth and measured in width. When measuring poetry’s width the image of measuring fabric from selvage to selvage seems appropriate.

Keller opens her essay with a discussion of how Hirsch regards a lyric poem in How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry: Keller explains how Hirsch sees lyrical poetry  as a vehicle to open the reader to the external world and the word in a new way, his emphasis falls strongly on defining the lyric as an “instrument of…inwardness” (18); the poem’s energies, then, pull centripetally down and toward the center of the individual reader, enabling a private experience of “sacred mystery” (16).

Keller juxtaposes this principle of the energy of a poem moving “centripetally down and toward the center of the individual reader” with a teaching and reading strategy involving centrifugal motion. Keller evokes the notion of a “centrifugal classroom,” which relies on “a collective rather than privatized reading process,” rethinking traditional roles of classroom “authority,” and “the class being drawn toward the world outside the poem and how language works there” (31 – 34).

Keller, fully aware of the precarious binary distinction and tension between centripetal and centrifugal force, nevertheless gives the pedagogue of poetry, literature, and reading in general much to consider. Rethinking the classroom reading process in terms of collectivity and reworking traditional classroom hegemonies might bring many pedagogues out of their comfort zone into a realm of growth. However, in a poetic and didactic sense the pedagogue does have a certain responsibility to serve as window for student transformation. Paulo Freire suggested teachers to be “cultural workers” in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, thereby teaching students to be their own creators and producers of culture. Teachers of poetry, students of poetry, and poets all presumably aspire to experience the world and record and inspire their experience in language through making, creating, and producing lessons and poems. The process of making, creating, and producing, whether it’s a lesson or a poem, involves a process of imagination and a writing of that imagination into the world. The language of imagination or a language I call “wound-language” exists in another discussion entirely. The process of writing a poetic, composing a poem, and practicing sound pedagogy in a twenty-first century high school classroom, for the purposes of this discussion, will surely require a deep, wide, and heightened awareness and application of a Keller-like centrifugal classroom motion.

An analogy might help begin to illustrate and see the necessity of seeing not only deeply, but widely and more clearly. Overhead projectors have lived in-and-out-of-focus between blackboards, white boards, and laptop projectors. Overhead projectors are a tool teachers teaching in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have grown to know quite well, whether they possess a deep love or a wide hatred for the illuminating machine. In helping students adjust their width and scope of an inquiry or narrow a given topic to a narrower issue, which in a concrete sense helps them learn how to measure width in their research, I have used this analogy of focusing the lens on an overhead projector. I tell them that if their subject of inquiry were to go onto a blank transparency and held up to the light of the eyes of another, part of their work is to appropriately adjust their purpose and audience like the lens on the overhead projector to bring their conversation into focus.

The point of the analogy helps students see that by slightly adjusting the focus on an overhead projector allows the viewer to see the object of inquiry more clearly. Poets might contend that there is much to be seen in the blur and perhaps there is a way of adjusting one’s eye more effectively to an image out of focus. What has been true for my experiments of writing poetry has been a process similar to adjusting a lens of an overhead projector to see an image I am working with projected through light more clearly. The same has been true for designing effective and transformative lesson plans. An image in a poem or a lesson I desire to communicate becomes more clear and succinct given a slight adjustment of the projector’s lens. It is easier to see an out of focus transparency blown up on the projection screen in a classroom, than it is to see an image within a poem that needs adjustment. For example, when a descriptive image in a poem gets adjusted to become an enactment, the new image can be seen clearly and precisely.

Another analogy or example of how focus or lack of appropriately adjusted width applies to pedagogy was revealed to me when preparing for a class. I sat in my office and stared at a transparency I intended to use on the overhead projector. Moving two sheets between my fingers, the transparency and the original 8.5’’ by 11’’, computer printout back and forth in my fingers, a realization dawned. When the transparency rested slightly above, below, or to either side of its original fabrication, the language became illegible. However, in aligning the transparency and the original in my fingers in a certain precise fashion allowed the words printed on the two sheets to be seamlessly aligned and legible. I thought about how precise poetry and precise pedagogy perhaps functions similarly. So, I have begun to think about poetry and pedagogy as a precise enactment in focused reading and writing.

A precise enactment in focused reading and writing, whether in the enactment of a poem or the enactment of a lesson plan remains somewhat broad and abstract in the sense that reading and writing still remain unclearly defined. To merely say a poet must read an object or idea in the world and write their imagination in a deep and wide fashion in order to birth the object or idea into a poem does not precisely define the enactment that must transpire. Poetry, as much an art of accurate reading as writing, must rely on imagination to interpret sensory and bodily information. How a thing in the world or object is read will grossly determine how a thing in the world or object is written about in poetry. Therefore, reading in certain senses determines writing. However, if a certain kind of imaginative writing takes place in a poet’s act of experiencing, then writing and reading are occurring simultaneously.

Likewise, all teachers are teachers of reading. Whether a teacher teaches math, science, social studies, or English, a teacher is responsible for teaching their students to read and understand the given discipline. Precision and accuracy in reading numbers, trends, histories of cultures, or poetry will determine the precision and accuracy of the writing the students produce. However, in the instance of poetry, students must be taught not only to read with precision and accuracy but also with creativity. Students are often exposed to Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman in high school or in lower-level undergraduate literature classes in college. They might be taught how Dickinson capitalizes nouns and how Whitman uses anaphora and parallelism. These formal elements are vitally important to precisely and accurately read the works of these great poets. However, hearing a silent rhyme of a Dickinson poem and her pre-semiotic understanding of language requires a level of poetic and creative reading not as often practiced.

Within a high school English classroom, where poetry inevitably will be studied, teachers might do well to consider how their readings of a text or a poem will influence the writings of their students, poetry and otherwise. Helping students adjust scope from abstract thinking to concrete thinking, such as the above example of the overhead projector illuminates, is important. Teaching students to adjust scopes within their imagination is equally important. Scopes of the imagination may not as easily be focused as turning the knob on an overhead projector. Scopes and lenses of imagination may require a certain kind of wounding within traditional forms of reason and understanding. Classical education should be embraced and not discarded. Ways of cutting into a classical text is a task teachers must be prepared to attend. Sharpening tools such as precise, accurate, and creative reading skills might be a way of cutting into the epic accentual verses in Beowulf, the terza rima in Dante’s Divine Comedy, and through the sonnets of Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Milton.

Poetry and pedagogy, therefore, can be understood as a study of reading, writing, and teaching deeply and widely that aspires to enact the imagination onto the study. A poet writing a poem and a teacher delivering an outstanding lesson are engaged in two different activities entirely. 

Nevertheless, the two different activities similarly require enacting imagination onto and into the activity. The poet writing the poem uses the parameters of the space given on a page, the parameters of the form in which he or she is working, and the parameters of his or her imagination to enact a poem whose form lends to its content in an inspiring and exciting way for the reader. The instructor teaching a class uses the parameters of the space of a given classroom, the parameters of the curriculum in which he/she works, and the parameters of his/her imagination to enact a lesson whose form lends to its content in an inspiring and exciting way for his or her students.

Much of poetry contains didactic qualities and great teaching often crosses into realms of being poetic. The lines between the circle of poetry and the circle of pedagogy can overlap like in a John Venn diagram. To apply a poetic, which involves the precise writing of a metrical verse using sound and rhythm, in a pedagogical setting must necessarily enact an imagination. Such imagination was missing from many of the classrooms of my formative years. Teaching the first lesson of a poetry unit in verse might be one way to break the ice with students rigid to the language of Chaucer or Shakespeare.

As tedious and annoying as the activity may seem of having students literally deconstruct the syllabication and stressing of a given text, it would legitimately be a valuable start to hearing the words on the written page. Likewise, the present conversation aspires to be a valuable discussion in considering how poetry can influence pedagogy and how pedagogy can influence poetry. Keeping the two studies in close proximity seems to only enhance the other when a teacher decides to implement poetry into their practice or when a poet decides to implement a didactic message into a poem. By conjoining “poetry and pedagogy” with an “and” conjunction will inevitably deepen, widen, and heighten the two disciplines, either in the writing of a poem or the teaching of a class.

A New Literacies Dictionary: Primer for the Twenty-first Century Learner

Adam Mackie 

2010