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Show page 18 , Spring/Summer 2003 The Poem as Discipline and Experience BY KATHARINE COLES, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH Poetry writing, as it is taught at the university level, requires that most students change their perceptions about poetry. Many, especially those who are coming to the university directly out of high school, think of the writing of poetry as being primarily about self-expression, with a focus on ---------------------- the author, on her emotions, her meanings, her methods of interpretation. This has partly to do, I think, with poetry's intimacy, with the sense it gives that we are overhearing a speaker addressing us directly about some urgent and private matter. It also has to do with the way poetry writing may be viewed by primary and secondary school teachers, and therefore by their students, as providing a break from the usual rigors of grammar, spelling, and punctuation. The teachers, who may have between 30 and 40 students in a class, are released by this view of poetry from the need to pay close attention to their students' poems on the technical level. If the point is self-expression, these more technical details don't matter. Not that there is no value in writing exclusively for oneself. But signing up for a creative writing course implies that the student wants somebody to read what she has written, if only the teacher and other students in the class. It is my job, and the job of the other students, to give any student poem our best, fullest, and most generous "Pleasure, not to communicate some urgent message to the world, is the primary reason most of us write, and the expression of this pleasure in attention. But the point of this attention is to help the writer learn to engage strangers, who don't have to read the poem unless they want to. If a poet wants strangers to read her work, she must learn to please them, to provide them with rewards for their efforts. And strangers, I tell my students, must be wooed. They don't care how the writer feels; they care only about how the writer makes them feel. So, though of course I care about my students and their emotions on the human level, a student's own emotional engagement with her poem is at once a given- after all, she bothered to write it- and at the same time largely irrelevant. The process of writing the poem, then, is not the process of self- the poem becomes, after all, a kind of exPression but the Process of the making of a work of art, something Self-expression." that might elicit a response- emotional and intellectual-in somebody else. This requires the poet to find a language that operates at once with absolute precision and with enormous complexity. Unlike the scientist, who works to achieve a linguistic exactitude that allows for only one possible interpretation, the poet seeks to deploy numerous possibilities at once, and at the same time to contain the range of possible interpretations within a particular sphere or set of spheres. The poet does this by using syntax, figures, form, and word choice to create and control ambiguity. An example of this occurs in the following stanza from Thorn Gunn's poem, "Tamer and Hawk" (Selected Poems 1950-1975, Strauss Giroux, 1979): |
