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What I Keep Trying To Teach My Students
   File under: Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics , Teaching

Poems may not be products of a process that is over as much as records of process so sensitive they enable you to repeat that process exactly, if you read them carefully enough.

Posted by Jake Adam York at November 7, 2005 9:16 PM



COMMENTS

Am mulling over the idea of the poem as product, a finished process, vs. the poem as a sensitive record of a process the careful reader may repeat and thereby participate in an ongoing process. (I read the word "sensitive" as modifying record, not process, but perhaps you meant both.)

I like to think of the poem as alive, but asleep and waiting for a beloved reader to kiss it awake. Too romantic, perhaps, but I think it is companionable with what you are teaching your students. I want to be such a careful reader.

The word "exactly" however, is not believable. How can the ideal reader, one with the best of skills and sensibilities and sympathies, possibly reenact the process exactly? And why would he/she want an exact replica of the process?

Objections aside, what you teach is astonishing because it removes poetry from the realm of inert consumable products one passively digests and moves on, and places it among living things the reader may, by attending carefully, learn to love and reside with.

The poem is not the text, but the text is a meeting place. Muriel Rukeyser said something like that in The Life of Poetry. It's an older and sometimes overly-earnest book, but worth reading today.

Posted by: Dee at November 9, 2005 9:57 AM