You gotta love those poetry explication exams in undergraduate English classes.
I was a sophomore at the University of California at Riverside, when I finally figured out how to truly read a poem. All this time I had been reading poetry on the surface level—appreciating its music, identifying its poetic devices, evaluating its structures—but I had never really understood how to explore the layer underneath the language.
I have to acknowledge my English teacher, Professor Kimberly Devlin, a James Joyce scholar who made me fall in love with Joyce, and Jane Austen, and Emily Dickinson. She broke it down, everything from Dubliners to Emma to “Safe in their alabaster chambers.” She taught me how to look beyond the text to connect with history, politics, society and religion—the contexts and environments that inform the creation of literature. Suddenly it became clear: words on the page were not just words on the page.
This was especially revealing when it came to reading poetry. I was amazed by all the information that could be extracted from a single line, and all the discussion that could take place around it. I began to recognize poetry as a skill and to respect the poet’s awesome ability to compress a universe to the size of the fist, which a reader could then open up, inhabit and explore.
Since then, every good poem I read looks three-dimensional because it contains “depth.” And every weak one looks “flat”—no different than an ink blot staining a clean piece of paper. An indifferent thing, to be seen and then be quickly forgotten.
As my eyes opened, I also had to suffer though my friend’s inability to cross over. He took the class with me and he was absolutely hopeless. Though we didn’t keep in touch after college, I do wonder after all these years if he was turned off to poetry forever after the catastrophe of our final exam.
We had to explicate a few poems, including the Emily Dickinson piece mentioned above. After submitting the final, we commiserated out in the hall.
“That was tough,” he said.
“It was,” I agreed.
“I was especially stumped by that Dickinson poem. I had a hard time trying to fit the devil into it,” he said.
“Devil?” I asked. “What devil?”
“You know,” he said. “In the line: ‘Rafter of Satan.’”
¡Joder! No pity for the dude, since we were allowed to bring dictionaries. For your amusement, I present here the opening stanza of Dickinson’s “devil” poem:
Safe in their Alabaster Chambers—
Untouched by Morning
And untouched by Noon—
Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection—
Rafter of satin,
And Roof of stone.
I wish every student came across a teacher like the one I had, one of many, actually, but Professor Devlin stands out because she was so engaged with the literature. I could tell she admired it, and this admiration was contagious. I wanted to learn to read the way she did, and I believe that she taught me how. Thank you, Prof. Devlin, wherever you are!
You know, I don’t think we acknowledge our important teachers as often as we should. Go ahead, give some love. Who made a difference in your poetry world?
I had a wonderful (though slightly terrifying to an eighth grader) high school English teacher, Mary Mecom. Unfortunately, she died several years ago, and I don’t think I ever really got the chance to tell her how much her classes meant to me.
“Rafter of Satan”–surely there’s a poem in that!
I was lucky to have mentors in Derek Walcott and the late George Starbuck, but the teacher I most revere is a long-vanished prof. named Jack Erwin, who persuaded hapless, callow young folks (e.g., me) to read Pound, Eliot, Olson, and Williams (what a place to start studying literature!), warts and all, but humanely – when Prof. Erwin worked through their poems page by page, word by word, the books seemed to fall away and we could almost literally see the different worlds in them. He got us through extremely difficult works by teaching us to love difficulty. Once, when an assigned reading in translation was repeatedly unavailable at the library, I dug up the only remaining copy of our reading for the week – in the original language, which I was unable to read. When I explained to Prof. Erwin that the only copy I could locate was in German, he simply said: “It’s beautiful in the German, isn’t it?” As if I would know! The next semester I enrolled in an accelerated German reading course. Once, he wrote in the margins of a paper I’d slaved over: Sprezzatura! – having not a clue what this meant, you guessed it – on to Italian for me. When we got to Shantih shantih shantih in “The Waste Land,” he actually convinced me to take Sanskrit – but I only lasted 2 weeks in that class, taught by someone who seemed to me as old as that language; I left the only other student in the course to fend for himself. The joy John W. Erwin had for poetry so was contagious that the number of people signing up to take his courses grew and grew, but for some reason he was let go and seems never to have taught again. Every once in a while, I run into someone who took a class with him, and none of knows where he is. Thank you, wherever you are, Professor Erwin!
By coincidence, I see this morning a tribute to the legendary W.J. Bate from a former student of his on the Critical Mass blog.
Thank you for this thread, Rigoberto. I’ve owed my teachers thanks for far too long. Come forth with your great teachers!
P.S. Here’s a woman who explains why she thinks school puts people off literature, and adds, “Had a grown-up warned me against reading Leaves of Grass because of its scandalous sexual content I probably would have devoured it in a night under the duvet with a flashlight. Alas, at my school, it was central to the curriculum. Thus, I recall it as pretentious and was aghast at the accompanying assignment to write poetry about a mulberry tree in my garden.”
I have always been frustrated by poetry. I sometimes compare it to wine, something one must acquire a taste for. Unlike wine, however, which I now drink often, the beauty of poetry still eludes me. I had a very young, very gifted teacher my last year in undergrad at GSU, Travis Denton, who was getting his MFA in Poetry. The line about poetry I remember most from him was (paraphased) “Poets are thieves who want to be caught.” That still remains one of the more enlightening statements about poetry that I have yet heard, and I often times wish I was a better detective.
I think I mostly want to understand poetry because so many of my friends are poets, and when they ask me to critique their work, I want to feel I actually know what I am doing, and am not just giving them a prose perspective of a poem. But the poetic art form is so codified, so metaphorical, so personal, that I am often at a loss to the meaning behind most poetry I read, which serves to frustrate me poem after poem.
I will say, however, that I have read wonderful poems which, when explained to me, are truly moving.