I recently began an undergraduate English class on how to read poetry by having students fill in the blank: Reading poetry is like ______.
“Reading poetry is like trying to unlock a chest,” said one student.
“Reading poetry is waiting for the professor to give me the answers,” said another.
And they’re not wrong, because this is how students have been taught to read poetry. In the classroom, students believe their professors hold an invisible key. It is a master key—it will open the door to any poem. Students wait for their teachers to insert the key into the lock, open the door, and release the hidden meaning. Then, students will also possess the key to the poem, sometimes without ever even having to read it. But the truth is teachers have no such key, and this belief in locks and keys is detrimental not only because it limits student learning, but because it reinforces a system of disparity in which some groups have access, education, the right language and experiences, and some groups do not.
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| Artwork courtesy of Vernon Meidlinger-Chin. |
Poems have history with the language of locks and houses and keys. “Stanza,” after all, quite literally means room. In many poems, the house functions as a useful meta-poetic structure, where the poet writes as an unseen architect. Consider the first two stanzas of Emily Dickinson’s famous poem “I Dwell in Possibility”:
I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –
Of Chambers as the Cedars –
Impregnable of eye –
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –
As readers, we hope to enter these poetic houses. We often become frustrated when we don’t gain ready access to a poem’s interior. Either we conclude that we are poor readers or we feel that the poem is wrongly written—too inaccessible in its word choice and operation. We leave the poem disappointed that we have not grasped “the meaning”. Yet this is a diminished conception of what poetry provides--and certainly not the way we want to teach students to approach poems. Dickinson’s poem poses an alternative. Her house is one of “Possibility,” it’s “impregnable of eye”, it’s “numerous of Windows,” and has “Gambrels of the sky.” Everything in this house-of-a-poem resists the idea of a poem being reduced to one singular meaning. Still, Dickinson allows a visitor to enter her poem-as-house through a door or window, and even from the sky. Her work is generous, but not because it provides a key to the front door. The poem suggests an approach to poetry, a pedagogy, that encourages students to see the difficulty of poetry as residing not in its one true meaning, but instead in the choice of how to enter the poem. Students often don’t believe they have choices when it comes to reading a poem, or that there is no lock and key, but a multiplicity of ways out and in.
There is also another option rarely presented to undergraduate students--that some poems purposefully leave the reader at the threshold. A locked house is locked because the poet intends it to be so. The claim that every poem should allow every reader access reflects an underlying belief—that the reader has not only the right to move through the poetic space, but also a right to the experience. Often, students' only sense of poetry is poetry from the Western canon. They are encouraged to consider these poems as their own, because poetry of the canon is considered representative of universal experience, despite these works in all reality conveying only a slim cross-section of perspective--predominantly white and male. This is worrying for two reasons--the first is that readers who do not share these experiences will find themselves alienated from a supposedly universal experience, reinforcing any sense of otherness they already hold, and the second is that when readers who assume access to a poem encounter a poem that conveys an experience contrary to those found in the canon, they assume a similar right to access these experiences.
When we teach students to not dismiss poems because they find them too difficult or too outside the realm of their own experiences, but instead to view the poem as an experience to which their own may not align, we are teaching them to respect the boundaries created by the experiences of others. We are teaching students that they don’t have to accept the language of the canon as their own when its perspectives do not reflect their own lived experiences. We are teaching them an awareness of space--the space of their own identities and the intersections between the identities of others. We are teaching students to recognize the experiences of others in the terms through which they are presented, not the terms that convert the experience into a language masquerading as universal.
When we give students “the meaning,” we are denying them the right to possibility. We are denying them the right to engage with the difficulty of a system of language and knowledge that is not their own--this difficulty is a gift. Poetry resists reduction. In this resistance, poetry finds a power to counter dominating modes of thought that perpetuate a disparity of access. We should encourage students to resist being reduced to a singular meaning too. We should encourage students to resist reducing others to a singular meaning. And so, when we give students “the meaning,” we are reinforcing for some students what they’ve been told their whole lives—that, because of who they are, they will never hold their own keys. So instead of keys to meaning, let’s give students ladders. Let’s give them hammers and nails. Let’s let them climb down from the sky. And, let’s give them poems.
Madeleine Wattenberg studies poetry in the MFA program at George Mason University. Her work has appeared in Guernica, The Louisville Review, Cactus Heart, and Gingerbread House. Vernon Meidlinger-Chin interviewed Madeleine in December 2015. You can find that interview here. A huge thank you to Madeleine Wattenberg for lending her voice to Floodmark!
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