Teaching silence how to sing
Lawrence Ypil
Dog-ears in the wrong notebook
ONE of the first things I ask students in my poetry class is: why are you here? And while the question may seem like an affront to the student on the first day of class, I always find it important for everyone interested in poetry to at some point ask the question of himself. If not in the end, then in the beginning, if not in the middle then at least towards the start — before things get complicated, and the bus has already left and there’s no turning back.
Not that there are any right or wrong answers to this question, of course. No answer is high or low enough for poetry. Not that poetry is particularly picky. At some point in our lives, we are drawn to words or song or love, and if things turn out right, then there is the urge to render the song of love into a poem. Some people go to poetry because they’ve been writing poems since they were kids. Others, because they have come across a really good poem that’s moved them, that’s kept them up at night, and they want to return the favour to the world. The best answer I got this semester was from a girl, a Literature major: “I’m in this class because I hate poetry. And I want to really figure it out.” I automatically knew I would like her.
This semester, I”m teaching an Introduction to Poetry course, which although may seem to be the easier course to teach compared to something more advanced, more specialised, is actually harder: at least to teach. I’m forced to return to the fundamentals of poetry, to break down the genre into its most rudimentary elements. What is Voice? What is poetic tension? What is an image? What the hell IS an image?? Sometimes it feels like the biology classes of old, where under the microscope, the leave no longer looks like a leaf, not at least the one that we see in tree’s branches, but is now some strange machine of moving what-do-you-call-it? Chlorophyll, yes.
The difficulty with teaching poetry and any form of creative writing for that matter, is that while one can give overall principles (as in the sciences), much of the magic that can happen depends on an individual basis. What may work for one student, may not work for another. A class on the pleasures of sound and meter, which might turn on the quiet boy in the back who loves pattern and rhythm may turn off the bad boy romantic in front. As a teacher, one is expected to hold these student poems in one’s mind as if one were handling carefully a semi-precious stone figuring out not so much the exactly value of the gem, but the kind of light it is best seen under.
This year’s crop is a motley crew of sorts. There is S., someone who one can tell has tried all her life to follow the rules, but which one suspects poetry is the space where she can finally play a bit of her mischief. Or D., who knows she performs her poems well, but wants to steer clear of the typical spoken-word-tone, and suspects there is something in the printed page that will liberate her to do something new. There is T., a writer of clean crisp verse, a sensitive and delicate ear already, careful about her lines as one would expect from a tender hand, but whose work probably needs a bit of shaking up. She’s the complete opposite, of course, of N., the class romantic, whose poetry seeps out of his lungs the way air would, one effulgent line after the other, one of those naturals really, but whose power may probably be strengthened by the gift of subtlely, a sense of form. There is P., whose sharp mind is trying to find its partner in a curvy spinal image logic. There is C., whose words spiral in and out of thoughts— like the string of blinds meant to keep out the sun. Or is it to let the sun in?
And of course, there is L. who “hates” poetry, who the last time you meet her one-on-one shows you a poem about a mother and a daughter who don’t have the time to talk to each other, except at the breakfast table, for five minutes, before the daughter rushes back to school, and the mother tries desperately to talk to her daughter, even if the two of them begin to realise that they are talking in different languages, and that what this all may add up to is silence — which is also a kind of love. L. brings the poem to you, skeptical. “This isn’t a poem, really.
It doesn’t sound like a poem. It’s a mess. Is it a poem?” I read it once to myself in silence, and then once again out loud for her to hear it in someone else’s voice. It doesn’t seem like a poem. It doesn’t move like it. Its lines are long, reckless. It has too many voices, so different from the conventional lyric. You try to catch your breath when you read it. It has the restless energy of something that could go nowhere and everywhere at the same time, something that could only be close to the truth. How do you tell her, this girl who may have discovered the secret of the class without knowing it. How do you tell her, that this, this exactly is what poetry is about?
