A Different Poetic Use

The power of poetry is often overlooked, even avoided by most of society. It's sad to see that happen since poetry is a source of beauty and power. Poetry also carries with it amazing teaching opportunities, which this article highlights.

There are many things that can be done with poetry. We can teach the use of punctuation as it translates to speech, such as how they make the reader pause. We can use it to show the written use of punctuation as it is a focus of many poems. Another use of poetry is to show a way to allow emotion to enter text.

One thing that always bothered me, and I'm glad that this article referenced it, is when people over analyze the meaning of poems. I'll borrow from the article here as they quote Billy Collins, which covers our point. Billy Collins characterizes the latter as a “deadening” act that obscures the poem
beneath the puffed-up importance of its interpretation. In his poem “Introduction to Poetry,” he writes: “all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope/and torture a confession out of it./They begin beating it with a hose/to find out what it really means.”

I saw this rope to a chair mentality in college when reading the poem "In the Echoey Tunnel" by Christopher Reid. A nice poem about a little girl playing with her echo in a tunnel, but the whole class (with the exception of the professor, one other student, and me) wanted to analyze it till they found some dark meaning to it. Sometimes a poem is just a lighthearted thing that doesn't need to be deeply analyzed. Can we use poems to teach literary analysis, sure. But we should also consider the option that not all them need be dissected, this is English and not Biology.

I appreciated this article, mostly because it said many things that I agreed with that I just lacked the words to say.

It is certainly worth the read! You can access the original article from The Atlantic here.