Rara avis - good poetry

I find poetry curious. Sometimes it is beautiful, and extremely moving, at other times I find it parochial and nauseating. Studying poetry (at school or university) turns it into a chore, and destroys students’ enjoyment of the genre through the painstaking analysis of linguistics, the identification of rhyme, assonance, alliteration and onomatopoeia – not to mention their insistence on studying Sylvia Plath. I can go no closer to The Arrival of the Bee Box and its contents than I could towards a real bee hive. You can, by both, be fatally stung.

What I would like to see happen is a discussion of how the poem makes the student feel. To me, the reader’s reaction to the poem is more important than their ability to detect fourteen different linguistic devices in a twenty stanza poem. Does it disgust them? Amuse them? Arouse them? Confuse them? That’s much more interesting in hearing theories about why the author chose to couple “scheming” with “teaming” and use sacred imagery in the context of something secular like a ride on a bus and an encounter with a ticket inspector.

While it is often ridiculed (and I, alas, am guilty of doing so), sometimes poetry is profound and worthy of our attention – sometimes it says perfectly, what we wish to say or how we feel. Please indulge me with an example;

If there is anything to be learned, it is this.
What matters most is that
we love this life we are leaving
and are unafraid of the next.

From the poem 'Requiem', by Joel Deane, from the collection Magisterium.

Why does death make such fantastic poetic fodder? Schlomo? Any thoughts? Oh … so I’m on my own for this one … Hmm. I guess these lines speak to me because death is not portrayed as a gaping hole of darkness, that nobody escapes and we all should be bowel-movingly terrified of, but as something which is not to be feared, but acknowledged as an inevitability. It can also be seen as a succinct and accurate descriptions of the importance of faith and the comfort it provides, but that is looking at it with a certain theological viewpoint which not all and sundry will be willing to subscribe to.

Oh, and if you want students to develop a love of poetry, never, ever, ever force them to write it – like music, poetry resides within the blessed few, and the masses, no matter how hard they try, will only be saddened and defeated by their inability to produce another “Daffodils”.

Until next time, adieu.

PS – I am one of the masses; my enforced Year 9 English class attempts at poetry have been burned to a cinder, and the disk containing them formatted twice over. I am proud to say that their dismal contents remain only a horrific (but fading) memory in their author’s mind.