Poetry and Public School
Okay so I was reading this writing book, called Writing Down The Bones by Natalie Goldberg, and she wrote something that I completely agree with and love to rant about.
Well, first I'll tell you what she wrote:
"The terrible thing about public schools is they take young children who are natural poets and story writers and have them read literature and then step away from it and talk "about" it."
(And then she gives The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams as an example.)
"What did the poet mean by the 'red wheelbarrow'? Did he mean a sunset? A chariot? And why was it 'glazed with rain'? So many questions. He meant nothing so much as a wheelbarrow, and it was red because it was red and it had just rained. So much depends on it because poems are small moments of enlightenment-- at that moment the wheelbarrow just as it was woke Williams up and was everything.
"Poems are taught as though the poet has put a secret key in his words and it is the reader's job to find it. Poems are not mystery novels. Instead we should go closer and closer to the work. Learn to recall images and lines precisely as the writer said them. Don't step away from their warmth and fire to talk "about" them. Stay close to them. That's how you'll learn to write. Stay with the original work. Stay with your original mind and write from it."
And, as I have said before in my life, I completely agree with this. Senior year in high school, we were going to do a unit on poetry. We got an anthology of poetry that we were going to read, and I was really excited about it. When the unit started, we read a poem and then promptly started to tear it to shreds. I hate doing this so much.
When I write a poem, or even a story, I write it just... because. It's not always necessarily about me, and it doesn't have some deep message that you're supposed to be able to pull from it. It's just words, and they way they work together and flow and make something that I'll want to read. It doesn't have to have meaning. It can be beautiful, ugly, scary, small, epic, or anything just because that's the way it wants to be.
I think that in school, they're so concerned with everyone learning the same things and having equal opportunities that they try and force those rules on art, too. Poems (or stories or songs or paintings...) aren't something that everyone has to understand. It doesn't have a set meaning that applies to everyone. The artist may have meant something when she created it, but that doesn't mean that's the only thing you can interpret it as. I think that art has whatever meaning you bring to it. Some poem may have a huge impact on someone, and not do anything at all for another person. If you don't get it, that's okay. You don't have to.
I feel like teaching poetry this way is also insulting to the poet, in a way. We'll read a poem and then the teacher will say something like, "Well, he was depressed when he wrote this poem." Or, "Her husband had just died and this part of the poem symbolizes her grief." How do we know that? I mean, no one except for me will ever know everything about me, so how can you say that I was feeling some specific emotion when I wrote a particular poem? You don't know. You've never been inside my head. So how can we possibly know exactly why the poet wrote something? We can't.
I think my writing has actually suffered because of being exposed to this way of teaching for so long. Every time I write, I'm always thinking "What will people think of this? Is this way too weird?" And so I'm always hesitant about writing some things. I can't write when other people are around because I'm too nervous that they'll see what I'm writing when it's not finished and "perfect". I'm trying to get over that, but it's difficult.
So, there's my very rambling rant that hopefully made some sort of sense and expressed how I feel. I just felt like that needed to be said.
Well, first I'll tell you what she wrote:
"The terrible thing about public schools is they take young children who are natural poets and story writers and have them read literature and then step away from it and talk "about" it."
(And then she gives The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams as an example.)
"What did the poet mean by the 'red wheelbarrow'? Did he mean a sunset? A chariot? And why was it 'glazed with rain'? So many questions. He meant nothing so much as a wheelbarrow, and it was red because it was red and it had just rained. So much depends on it because poems are small moments of enlightenment-- at that moment the wheelbarrow just as it was woke Williams up and was everything.
"Poems are taught as though the poet has put a secret key in his words and it is the reader's job to find it. Poems are not mystery novels. Instead we should go closer and closer to the work. Learn to recall images and lines precisely as the writer said them. Don't step away from their warmth and fire to talk "about" them. Stay close to them. That's how you'll learn to write. Stay with the original work. Stay with your original mind and write from it."
And, as I have said before in my life, I completely agree with this. Senior year in high school, we were going to do a unit on poetry. We got an anthology of poetry that we were going to read, and I was really excited about it. When the unit started, we read a poem and then promptly started to tear it to shreds. I hate doing this so much.
When I write a poem, or even a story, I write it just... because. It's not always necessarily about me, and it doesn't have some deep message that you're supposed to be able to pull from it. It's just words, and they way they work together and flow and make something that I'll want to read. It doesn't have to have meaning. It can be beautiful, ugly, scary, small, epic, or anything just because that's the way it wants to be.
I think that in school, they're so concerned with everyone learning the same things and having equal opportunities that they try and force those rules on art, too. Poems (or stories or songs or paintings...) aren't something that everyone has to understand. It doesn't have a set meaning that applies to everyone. The artist may have meant something when she created it, but that doesn't mean that's the only thing you can interpret it as. I think that art has whatever meaning you bring to it. Some poem may have a huge impact on someone, and not do anything at all for another person. If you don't get it, that's okay. You don't have to.
I feel like teaching poetry this way is also insulting to the poet, in a way. We'll read a poem and then the teacher will say something like, "Well, he was depressed when he wrote this poem." Or, "Her husband had just died and this part of the poem symbolizes her grief." How do we know that? I mean, no one except for me will ever know everything about me, so how can you say that I was feeling some specific emotion when I wrote a particular poem? You don't know. You've never been inside my head. So how can we possibly know exactly why the poet wrote something? We can't.
I think my writing has actually suffered because of being exposed to this way of teaching for so long. Every time I write, I'm always thinking "What will people think of this? Is this way too weird?" And so I'm always hesitant about writing some things. I can't write when other people are around because I'm too nervous that they'll see what I'm writing when it's not finished and "perfect". I'm trying to get over that, but it's difficult.
So, there's my very rambling rant that hopefully made some sort of sense and expressed how I feel. I just felt like that needed to be said.