Reading Poetry Was Hard...
…for the wrong reason.
Our eighth-grade English teacher introduced us to the dreaded subject: POETRY. It’s set in all-caps because it loomed so large in our fears. We knew that—at some point in our not-too-distant future—we would be required to explain what poems meant.
That, in turn, would require us to learn how to decode them—to parse out the intentions of their writers, pitiless sadists who had purposely made their poems as inscrutable as possible. Not only that, we would begin the process by reading the most incomprehensible poet of all time.
Shakespeare. We would begin by reading Julius Caesar.
Some of us wondered if it was too early to drop out of school. Alas, we were a few years short of sixteen, so dropping out was not an option.
Donald Grant, our teacher, was an actor. He pretended to be as frightening as possible—and, given the subject matter were about to face, we believed him. I realize, now, that he faced—every year—a new group of thirteen-year-olds, barbarians who had yet to learn how to manage the hormones that were ravishing what little remained of their childhood’s innocent curiosity. Thirteen-year-olds are ticking timebombs of ignorant cockiness. If he had any hope of managing us, he first had to instill fear. He casually mentioned that—hidden in his classroom’s closet—there was a fully functional torture rack.
We never got to see it, but none of us wanted to risk an encounter with it.
One of the other ways he scared us was by reading, aloud, the poems of Edgar Allan Poe. As I said, he was an actor—a brilliant actor—and his readings terrified us. They also thrilled us. Gradually, we began to see through his façade, and our fears faded.
Just then, an older student knocked on the classroom door.
Mr. Grant opened it. His former student came in, fresh from shop class, bearing a large sharpened hook. Not looking at us, he handed it to our teacher and said, “Here’s the part for your torture rack that you ordered.” A funny thing happened. We were frightened, but amused—and saw that Mr. Grant’s former students still loved him enough to play with him (and us). It was all an act for our benefit.
When Mr. Grant recited Antony’s funeral oration, his acting skills won us over to poetry, in spite of ourselves.
He then gave us a fat pile of mimeographed poems to read. He had deleted the poets’ names (so that we would not be distracted by what we thought we knew about them). Several of us took that as a challenge. We went to the library to track down the missing names. We managed to discover poets’ names for all but a few of them.*
While our plan succeeded in teaching us some useful research skills, our efforts completely missed the point of reading the poems. One of the poems, “Ars Poetica,” by (we discovered) Archibald MacLeish, ended with the lines:
A poem should not mean
But be.
We would have been wise to take those words at face value—but, alas, we still thought that poems had to have some carefully obscured meaning. We didn’t know that the real reason that reading poetry was difficult was not that its meaning had been hidden from us.
Reading poetry was hard because we could only grasp a poem’s “meaning” by making ourselves vulnerable to it. Making ourselves vulnerable—on purpose—required courage and a curious kind of strength, the management of which we had yet to learn.
*About those few poems for which we never found attribution: they were written by Donald Grant, himself. Imagine the kind of willing vulnerability it took to expose his poems to thirteen-year-old yahoos, year after year.
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