We live in Celje, a Slovenian town of some 45,000 with not only a professional soccer team but also a full-time professional theatre. Primarily language teachers, we are sometimes called on to bring poetry into the English classroom. This is at best a peripheral part of our teaching duties. One of us is a Slovenian high school teacher with students at an upper-intermediate level, and the other a Canadian-born lecturer at a Slovenian university (with duties ranging from practical English, to literature, to Canadian culture).
Slovenia has a level of bilingualism that is the envy of le reste du Canada. As a group, Slovenian students speak English very well. This is because of the fabulous, almost miraculous instruction people like us provi… all right, TV is sub-titled and at least once a week students surprise us with idioms learned from The Jerry Springer Show or American Idol. Years of American pop culture is married to a rigorous focus on grammar and the results are good. This means that students have the linguistic wherewithal to discuss English poetry already at a fairly young age. But it still shocks them.
We are not poetry people by nature, even if we each smuggle it into the classroom as often as possible. Though we love reading, words come to us as chunks of meaning rather than pure sound. We’ve learned to live with and admit this. Neither of us intuitively feels the music of the verses we read, and if lines 3, 9, and 14 happen to rhyme, this might escape us. Most poets (we jealously assume) sniff out dactyls and spondees the way pigs sniff out truffles. We hope that this reward comes as a rush in the blood rather than as a series of technical terms, that the real poet doesn’t clinically muse, “The fifth line of this verse in iambic pentameter is catalectic.”
If this is not the case, poets, please leave us our illusions.
Because it is crucial to where this essay is going, one last illustration of what we are not. Back in primary school in Toronto, I assumed I had a knack for literature. I had been hearing this at least since the day I scribbled out my grade two Christmas poem for Grandma. This cheery effort still hangs on her wall in Barrie, Ontario, and I still wince at “Think about Jesus / Don’t think he’d tease us” (I used to take it down, but Grandma always found it and it would be back up on the wall by next visit).
About half of my Toronto classmates spoke a different language at home, and they had not yet caught up in English. This allowed me to do no schoolwork for at least a decade. Come high school, I learned that math and other subjects can be very, very hard. Still, I sailed though the trio of dystopian novels – The Handmaid’s Tale, Brave New World, and 1984 – with few difficulties and less effort. Shakespeare was trickier, but possible once I got around Hamlet’s funny words. Besides, I was good at literature. That and a dislike for broccoli had been decided long ago.
And yet, when we read Auden’s “The Unknown Citizen” as a companion piece to one of the grim novels, I missed the first rhyme. For me, the poem began:
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Twenty years later and now on the other side of the classroom, my teaching gag for this poem is to ask students to find the first rhyme. They go for the obvious “be and agree,” then look puzzled and concerned for me when I say no. Rhyme numero uno is, of course, “8” and “State” from the dedication left out here. Auden was pulling a fast one with the ugly-looking “(To JS/07 M 378/ This Marble Monument Is Erected by the State)” sandwiched between title and body. Students miss this couplet because they think, as I thought in high school, that the real poem begins only later. Who reads dedications, or footnotes?
Occasionally a poetic classroom nose senses this rhyme immediately; once I had a true sceptic say this “8-State” combination was unintentional, a fortunate fluke. I argued, circularly, that Auden’s ear could not have missed this because, well, because he’s a poet. The sceptic would not be convinced. To us, these two responses represent who has poetry in her bones and who does not.
We realize that this Auden example is slanted because the numbers and slashes are ugly only to the eye, and when students read the lines aloud, the rhyme and rhythm are unmistakable. Also, we have wilfully pretended that there is an absolute split between poets (or those who should be poets) and non-poets like us. This is not really so black-and-white. Poetic knack exists on a continuum between those with a God-given gift and those who couldn’t swing if they were hanging from a noose. We are somewhere in the middle.
In other words, we are typical teachers of poetry. Slovenian has the expression deklica za vse – literally, girl for everything; colloquially, man Friday – for what we are. Usually poetry occupies perhaps two pages of a 150-page English textbook. The same teacher who has to steer students through verb tenses and pronunciation has to spend the odd hour on Dickinson or Wordsworth. And that is why we wrote the reluctant-sounding “called on to do poetry” at the outset of these musings. The choice of words has nothing to do with eagerness; it has to do with the reality of our situation.
There are two main problems with poetry in the Slovenian English language classroom (and perhaps even in classrooms in general): The teacher is not always a poetry person, and students are wrestling with the English language itself. Doing poetry is often spooky because it is so different from what students have done up to now, such a departure from the teacher’s daily routine. For once, students are using language – not just inhabiting the hothouse of grammar exercises or practising their R’s. The temptation is to reduce poems to theme or paraphrasing, which can mean death to form and musicality. The poem becomes a pedagogical springboard to free discussion. “The Unknown Citizen” is there to promote debate about anonymity and freedom in the Internet world; “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” is an ice-breaker for talking travel. In other words, the poems are used just to get students to open their mouths and speak Foreign.
Bringing in poems to spur general discussion is fine and good, so long as it is not mistaken for real poetry time. After all, if a student hasn’t read “The Unknown Citizen”, he can keep quiet for the first few minutes then join the conversation midstream, once the poem has been left behind. In extreme cases, English as a Second Language poetry classes end up teaching students about the Globe Theatre. Look at the ESL lesson plans available online under “Shakespeare,” and you’ll see ideas for creating posters, doing crossword puzzles on the Bard, and anything, it seems, to avoid actually reading the sonnets.
In Slovenia, a biographical approach is also very popular. Some of this is spillover from Slovenian literature classes, where there is an obsession with the writer’s life and with what she was thinking at the time. This seems weird to one of us, but that is moot for our present purposes. The too-often asked literature question is, “What did the poet mean in these lines?” – as if that set the bounds of interpretation. This methodological fetish lends itself particularly well to much Slovenian literature. The line between fact and fiction in France Prešeren and Ivan Cankar, Slovenia’s greatest poet and prose specialist respectively, is indeed thin, and an awareness of their life stories is very helpful for understanding their art. Unfortunately, this can provide a cerebral justification for reading about literature-producers rather than reading literature. If there is little time for poetry in our English classes, this approach is a waste of time.
Especially in the English classroom, memorizing dates can be a comforting survival path for student and teacher alike. At its worst, this is role-playing minus the costumes – the teacher asks “When and where was Shakespeare born?” and the student regurgitates a catechistic response. Throw in a few generalized tidbits about the Elizabethan age and both parties feel satiated. They feel like they’ve done, or at least survived, Sonnet 18. This search for a mathematical cleanness is understandable, though it does kill that precious ambiguity that is the spirit of all great literature. We’ve survived the poetry hour, but at what cost? The soul of poetry has been lost, and no world gained in the telling or teaching. In less fluffy terms: Students are less likely to pick up a book of poetry later in life.
Many students complain to us that their Slovenian literature classes murdered any desire to read. We take these complaints with a grain of salt because we assume that these young people are exaggerating and because, as teachers, we cannot fathom any educator wielding such power. Regardless of how insincere these complaints may be, students often retain the handcuffing belief that they must have pre-knowledge of some sort before they can make any statement about any poem.
Of course, information overload can be death to any enjoyment of poetry. Moreover, this is not a natural reading approach. One does not google Mary di Michele’s details before reading her poetry. At this point the teacher’s aim is the key issue. Do we want to bring up people who will (with our help) learn to appreciate poetry and later on in their lives read it? Or will we in the manner of l’art pour l’art do what curriculum demands – meet the bare formal minimum – and move on? We prefer the first option. Even if we are not the best people to be teaching poetry, we like to think that we are not teaching in a vacuum. We like to think that students are learning something that can be used outside of the classroom and enrich their lives even after graduation.
When bringing in un-mandated poetry for the first time, one has to be careful. The poem should be doable. A teacher of poetry should know her marketing techniques and start with something that engages students immediately, without making them struggle for the primary meaning of each word. Poems should be different from the other passages that fill the colourful textbooks, and for once there should be no dictionary-hunt to figure out the primary meaning. We do not want students to realise (yet!) that poetry can be hard work. We like to find poems that require no dictionary whatsoever. As well, because in our experience free verse sweetens the temptation to paraphrase, we prefer poems with a formal scheme obvious even to beginners. (Our students are not coming to free verse with hundreds of nursery rhymes or other traditional forms in their bellies.) We have had luck with poems like Grace Nichols’ “Epilogue,” Robert Frost’s “The Secret Sits,” William Blake’s songs and anything that does not rely on what Slovenian students call “fancy words.”
Simplicity of diction is great for motivation and, more importantly, shows the students how much can be done with just a bagful of language. When they look closely at poems, many of them realize that they are actually doing something with language. They are not merely doing grammar exercises, but truly thinking in and through English. For developing language awareness and keenness of concentration, there is nothing better than poetry. When students move past the giggles while looking at Larkin’s “This Be the Verse” (“They fuck you up, your mum and dad”), and then begin to undo the pun, understanding why the four-letter word is the right one, the teaching thrill is electric. For once students of English think about rightness rather than mere correctness. When a student writes, “he try” on a grammar test, you have to mark it wrong. When the same student interprets a poem on his own, the thinking is implicitly rewarded.
Poetry also resets the classroom system. When students encounter literature, they start anew. The best ESL students are not necessarily the best at poetry, and the teacher often sees pure musical talent. Sometimes the quiet students speak up, whereas the native-like speaker suddenly has little to say. Often this democracy extends to the teacher, as the knowledge-gap is temporarily erased. “What does this line mean, Teacher?” Good question. The most exhilarating poetry moments come when a student reads a poem aloud in a way that transmits his or her vision of the poem. Five years ago, a young man seared an on-the-spot reading of Shelley’s “Ozymandias” into my memory. He had never seen the poem before, he mispronounced a dozen words, but he got the poem, its music and its mocking, sneering leader’s boast:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
Whenever I read this poem I feel like I am a dull echo of that student. I hope that reading stayed with him, too.
Doing poetry is a process that takes time, though there is little time for it in our classrooms. One cannot measure the results overnight, and probably cannot measure them at all. When poetry enters the classroom, students get to dive into the depths of the English language and into the workings of the language, its syntax, its sounds, its possibilities. It can be fun to get wet with your students.
Auden's “The Unknown Citizen” is quoted from W.H. Auden: Selected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson (Vintage, 2007)
Alenka Blake teaches English and German in Celje; Jason Blake is a lecturer in the University of Ljubljana’s English Department. They have worked a great deal in the area of intercultural communication, extending their research to marriage. Jason’s "Canadian Hockey Literature" has just been published by University of Toronto Press.
