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.

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! 

A follow up to Madeleine Wattenberg On Mythology.

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Live in New York City long enough and you’ll start to feel a little bit mad. You start opening up to the staff at your local bodega and you call all the subway rats by name and, well, you just have to get out.

So on a rain-drenched October evening I found myself, standing, wet as a country dog in summer, in Hudson Yards, waiting for a bus to take me away from the city. I was headed for the comparatively pastoral Washington DC to see the sights, peruse the museums, and catch up with friends, not the least of which was poet Madeleine Wattenberg.

I had met Wattenberg once previously, as one does, through a mutual friend at a party.

“What do you do?”

“Oh I write.”

“Oh me too!”

“Cool! What do you write?”

“You know, this and that…”

…was probably how our conversation went.

On the grounds of the conversation I deemed it worthwhile to drop in on her and furthermore that I ought to bring her a gift. Through that fog of my memory I could only think to myself “Bring her something Greek”, and I figured I'd remember to find her something perfect. Somehow, the perfect gift managed to find me. For it was aboard the bus, somewhere around Baltimore, once enough passengers had departed that I finally felt comfortable enough to wring out my socks, I noticed that somebody had left a book behind. Being the nosy person I am, I cracked it open and began reading Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson.

[Geryon fights Herakles]

Red tells the story of Geryon, a red, winged monster who lives on the red island of Erytheia with his two-headed red dog and his herd of red cattle. In myth, Geryon was usually but not always depicted with multiple bodies perched upon a single set of legs. In all versions of his story except for Carson’s, Herakles arrives on Erytheia on Helios’ chariot and, as part of his famous labors, kills Geryon’s dog, then Geryon, and takes his prized red cattle.

In Carson’s verse novel (which follows from the story by the ancient Greek poet Stesichorus) Geryon has a family – a chain-smoking, exhausted mother; a cruel, abusive brother. He goes to school. He enjoys photography. He feels driven to record his inner life in the form of an autobiography. And he is in love with Herakles, who arrives on Erytheia from Hades, not unlike me, by express bus service.

[Gustave Doré’s conception of Geryon]

It’s not odd to lose a book on public transportation (my former copy of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe disappeared aboard a transpacific flight years ago) so it makes sense to periodically find lost books. But what’s rare, rare enough indeed to seem like a deliberate quirk of the universe, is to find the very book your friend is writing on, drawing inspiration from. 

“I hope you enjoy this,” I handed Red to Wattenberg. She was momentarily speechless. 

“I’ve been meaning to buy a copy for so long…and you just found this on a bus?” Wattenberg said, turning the book in her hands and thumbing the pages, “Nobody will ever believe this.”

To have found, on an East Coast megabus, the very verse novel Wattenberg called “a complete queering of myth” in our eventual interview, by a poet she holds in the highest regard, doing the things with mythology that she does in her own poetry, seems far too coincidental to be believed. But it’s true. And I write this to remind myself that these lovely little quirks of reality do happen. And moreover to say, if you lost your copy of Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson on a New York to Washington DC bus along a rain-soaked road in early October, may you find peace of mind knowing that your book found a home.

Read more posts by Vernon.

Madeleine Wattenberg calls me, video chat, from her home in northern Virginia. It’s night, and shadows stretch across the walls of the eerily empty, Victorian-style rooms, and I can barely see her eyes for the shadows cast by her curly, black hair. She smiles, and it’s only fitting we are talking about the intersection of the morbid and the sensual.

“There’s something really romantic about the underworld,” she says, “We have a sensual connection to death, even referring to orgasm as the ‘little death’.”

This connection is plain in Wattenberg’s recent poem “Charon’s Obol”, published by Guernica magazine. The title refers to a tradition in ancient Greece where the living lovingly placed ceremonial coins under the tongues of the recently deceased. Once the soul of the dead reached the river Styx, the ferryman Charon would remove the coin as a payment for his services. Wattenberg repeats this gesture of “reaching into / and withdrawing” as something that is simultaneously sensual and morbid, invasive and familiar.

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I prod Wattenberg to expound on how her poem reconciles these ideas, and she laughs. Like all good poets, she’s reluctant to say what her poem is about.

“I know my intention,” she says, “But I have to meet my reader in their interpretation… When you’re creating a poem, you’re trying to set constraints for interpretation, but once you let it go you can’t control that anymore and sometimes people will get something out of your poem you didn’t intend at all.” She grins, adding, “I find that fascinating though.”

I ask, “Are you ever afraid that a reader might have a poor experience with your poem because they aren’t familiar with the mythology?”

“I’ve run into the problem where I’m familiar with Greek myths because I read them as a kid. But I sometimes meet people who aren’t familiar at all and your poem falls apart,” she says, “There’s a debate as to whether or not a reader should be able to look things up or if the poem should be able to stand on its own. I think a poem should be able to work without the reader going to an encyclopedia, but there is still room for things the reader doesn’t know. Not knowing just can’t derail the poem.” 

As we write, we find ourselves, knowingly or unknowingly, revisiting the tales of antiquity. I personally find myself thinking back to the opening passage of Moby Dick, when Ishmael, world-weary and lost, experiences the same melancholy that we are all familiar with from our aimless youths. “With a philosophical flourish, Cato throws himself upon his sword,” Melville writes, “I take quietly to the ship.” Mythology helps us in our darker moments by letting us know that we are not the first to tread this path, that once there was a first traveler who paved this trail for us, an origin story of story. I muse on this to Wattenberg.

She says, “Origin narratives are really interesting for the way they lead to world construction and what about them we can return to and examine and rewrite in order to give voice.”

“So what are you rewriting?”

Wattenberg thinks for a moment. “I think women are particularly attracted to rewriting Greek myths as a way of combatting a history of silence,” she says, “Rewriting mythology is about taking silent, passive women, giving them a voice, and showing them as real women with agency.”

Think of The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood. Penelope is a character who traditionally just sat and waited and wove, waited and sat and unwove. By revisiting mythology and rewriting mythology, people who have been given passive and subservient roles in western culture can regain their place as creative agents in a literary tradition. Certain readings of “Leda and the Swan” by William Butler Yeats even give Leda agency, and while Wattenberg and I toy with the idea of Yeats’ piece serving as a parallel to “Charon’s Obol”, she finds more similarities in the work of Anne Carson. 

Wattenberg praises Carson’s translation of If Not Winter, Carson’s translation of the poetry of Sappho, which was discovered, fragmented, much of the original text. “Carson found it very important to preserve the sense of fragment instead of filling in the gaps,” Wattenberg says, “I see that as a way of preserving the inherent silence that accompanies the fragments which is not only a representation of what’s there, but also a representation of loss.” In this way, Carson preserves the history of silence that women writers and female characters have been subjected to in the West.

So what’s next for Madeleine Wattenberg? Certainly more writing.

“Part of why I write is because my mind and my experiences are just drifting away from me and writing a poem is a way to recondense, and hold everything together in a concrete object before everything starts drifting away again,” she says.

“And what will you write about?” I say, “More mythology?”

She describes to me a series of poems that examine the intersection between the seemingly far-removed fields of mythology and science.

“Myth is storytelling, she says, “but it’s also a lens though which we try to understand the origin of the world. That intention isn’t so different from science.”

“Perhaps the intention is similar,” I say, “But aren’t their methods are quite different?”

“Emerson would certainly say so. Emerson has an essay in which he claims that science, by nature, isolates, while poetry, by nature, builds connections. I would disagree with Emerson,” she cocks her head to one side and continues, “I think it’s a different way of forming a coherent narrative about something.”

At this point, after all the musing for so long on the importance of mythology Madeleine Wattenberg’s eyes twinkle and she and laughs, “At a basic level they’re just good stories that naturally lend themselves to being revisited.” 

And so they are. If you are to write, you ought to read and rewrite, and there is no material better fit for reading and rereading and rewriting and revisiting than the myths of antiquity.