Robert D. Shepherd shared this poem by Billy Collins, who was the nation’s poet laureate from 2001-03. I think what Shepherd had in mind when he shared this was the tendency of certain thinkers and standards writers to over-intellectualize the experience of literature.
Introduction to Poetry
By Billy Collins
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But 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 wish we could send this to Coleman and the cheerleaders for the corporate standards. Maybe Exxon Mobil can use this instead of their propaganda, but that would mean they would have to read closely and critically. Not sure they are up to it.
It is rare in a working environment that someone says, “Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday but before that I need you to contemplate the meaning of this poem.”
True, Ron, but perhaps if Johnson has the ability to look below the surface level, he’ll have greater insight in the working environment. And, perhaps, Johnson won’t take everything he’s told at face value.
So, Apple booted Steve Jobs. The notion was that it was all fine and good that he had built the company, but the company had now grown up, and it needed a grown-up to run it, someone with a “real” business background. So, they brought in a string of high-powered CEOs with unimpeachable business resumes. And those people brought the company to the brink of ruin. These people failed not because they were incapable of reading or writing a market analysis. They failed because they thought that that’s all it took to do their work well. Apple really didn’t have a choice but to bring its poet back, and within no time at all, the poet had made it the highest capitalization company in the world.
This infamous statement from Mr. Coleman speaks volumes, doesn’t it? The new leader of the discipline of English language arts has utter contempt for the English language arts and knows who the masters are.
It’s Louise Rosenblatt for me. Words & Ideas + Personal Response = Meaning. Don’t have to beat it; just respond to it.
The problem is that most non-literary folks assume there is a meaning to be found. Or more accurately, “THE MEANING.” And consider that one of the advocates for the Common Core is my arch nemesis from my days as a graduate student in literature, E. D. Hirsch. Hirsch’s critical theory, in brief, is that there is a “best” interpretation of a given work of literature and that the author’s take on what that might be is definitive (assuming, of course, that the author has kindly provided us that take outside of the work itself).
If I’m not butchering Hirsch’s viewpoint, then I think it safe to say that he shamelessly brings back the Intentional Fallacy, debunked close to a century ago by T. S. Eliot and the New Critics (not to be confused with Christian McNeill and the Sea Monsters). And that approach seems consistent with someone who believes in “The Canon” and has built a highly-profitable industry out of it.
What makes this poem so delightful is how it juxtaposes not something airy-fairy/anything goes vs. analysis, but rather real critical analysis with the sort of idiocy I think we get from far too many people, critics and non-critics alike, who believe that there is ultimately a “best” interpretation. Like many good poems, it helps the reader experience something about how to interact with it “profitably,” not by telling us how, but by drawing us into possible experiences, conspiring with us, if we’ll let it, to visit undiscovered places in it and in us.
But it is also important, Michael, to remember that people are DRIVEN to write because there is an experience that they want you to have that they expect to have certain meanings to you, and the craft of the writer is to create an experience that will be significant to you in some way. It’s no fallacy to say that it’s pretty clear that The Grapes of Wrath is not about why we shouldn’t silly fellow feeling toward people like Tom Joad and Rose of Sharon get in the way of maximizing profit. Yes, literature is experience, and experience has unique personal resonances. But these are also predictable, and that’s why we tell stories, because they ARE predictable. Otherwise, the whole notion of communication between two minds, of cultural transmission, of literature as a means for bridging the ontological gap, is lost.
You and I both go to Rome and visit the ruins of the Forum. We will not have the same experience. It will not mean exactly the same things to us. But if we have the same guide, and our attention is drawn to the same things, there will be significant commonalities.
Um, okay. . . not sure what this sentence means: “It’s no fallacy to say that it’s pretty clear that The Grapes of Wrath is not about why we shouldn’t silly fellow feeling toward people like Tom Joad and Rose of Sharon get in the way of maximizing profit.”
If you’re trying to say, by the way, that there are unfounded takes on what goes on in a work of art, I believe I spoke in agreement when I wrote, “What makes this poem so delightful is how it juxtaposes not something airy-fairy/anything goes vs. analysis, but rather real critical analysis with the sort of idiocy I think we get from far too many people, critics and non-critics alike, who believe that there is ultimately a “best” interpretation.”
The phrase “airy-fairy/anything goes” specifically means in that context that everything does NOT go, that the critic can’t simply read a poem and because it reminds him of an ex-girlfriend claim that it’s clearly speaking about romantic relationships when little or nothing else in the text supports such a claim.
I did teach literature at University of Florida for several years. My teaching was VERY focused on close textual analysis. I always told students that they were free to aver anything they wanted about the things we read, as long as they could find reasonable support in the text and help the rest of us see “how that worked” in the context of the art. I was nailed early in my graduate studies for trying to sell big ideas without grounding them in the literature itself, a mistake I never made again.
But I was NOT taught that Hirsch’s view was correct. Have you read any of his critical theory? I urge you to do so or at least read the section about his theory in the Wikipedia entry on Hirsch. If you find it holds water, please let me know how. If find it arrogant and narrow-minded, as well as more than a little ludicrous, particularly in its claim that the author know best what his/her work means. Of course, an author is likely to have “inside” information about sources and conscious intentions. But if that were as far as things went with great art, we wouldn’t still be writing about Shakespeare: his brain would have been picked and all debate settled. If you realize that that is, of course, absurd, would it be less absurd today if Shakespeare were alive AND willing to submit to endless interviews about THE MEANING of every play and every line therein? I think not.
There’s always something new to bring to great art. That’s part of what makes it great, even immortal. The artist is entitled to a perspective. The artist can debunk a ridiculous interpretation that depends on things that are flatly untrue. But that still doesn’t make the artist’s take (or anyone’s) definitive. And Hirsch would have us believe the opposite, not only despite the New Critics, but TO SPITE them. And I think he got it wrong. And not only about criticism.
Diane,
I think this is Collins response to people who want literature & arts taught a la the Common Core. It sums up nicely the difference between how creative writers & artists think about their work & how literature & art history profs think about it. (Historians, I feel, fall in with the artists.)
It seems to me that this is actually one of the biggest flaws of the Common Core Standards. Before (and even in) high school, children are primarily occupied with making rather than analyzing various types of writing, art, curated knowledge, and other products of the mind.
Good teachers take advantage of this. So, for example, kids learn about figures of speech by using them as tools in their own writing. The CCS approach ties the poem to the chair and has the kids whip it by making them memorize the definition of “metaphor” and point out examples in the text. Reading it closely of course.
This kind of teaching is exactly why so many people grow up thinking poetry is just too complicated & dull for them. It’s also why the college students who’ve done so “well” in English arrive in Collins’ Intro to Poetry class, thinking they know exactly what to do.
If only Robert Coleman had been in one of Billy Collins’ classes. Maybe things would be different. Sigh. ;(
Exactly. This is one of the many reasons why the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] are wrong from the start.
Beautiful poem that explains what happens when one reads poetry.
I do not see this as a protest against literary analysis. You can analyze a poem just as gently and subtly as this poem suggests; you can delve into it and find out what it’s about. In doing so, you may pay attention to many matters of form, diction, allusion, and more–but first and foremost, you will be taking in the poem.
The danger lies in trying to force a poem to be what it is not–to subject it to methods that do not bring out its meaning or beauty. Or, to put it differently, the danger lies in treating the poem as a means rather than as an end.
There are many poets (such as Auden) who analyze poetry brilliantly without torturing or forcing it.
It’s not a question of “intellectualizing” vs. not intellectualizing. It’s a matter of honoring what’s actually there. That involves intellect if anything does.
I have this taped to the door of my classroom. In fact, this is the first thing I read with my
AP Lit kids. “Kids: we are going to tie the poem to a chair, but we will honor it.”
❤
http://www.pbs.org/tesla/ll/ll_early.html
At the Polytechnic school Tesla began his studies in mechanical and electrical engineering. One day a physics teacher showed Tesla’s class a new Gramme dynamo that—by employing direct current—could be used as both a motor and a generator. After watching it for a time, Tesla suggested it might be possible to do away with a set of inefficient sparking connections known as commutators. This, his amused professor said, would be like building a perpetual motion machine! Not even Tesla could hope to achieve such a feat. For the next several years the challenge obsessed Tesla, who instinctively knew that the solution lay in electric currents that alternated.
It wasn’t until age twenty-four, when Tesla was living in Budapest and working for the Central Telephone Exchange, that the answer came to him:
One afternoon, which is ever present in my recollection, I was enjoying a walk with my friend in the city park and reciting poetry. At that age I knew entire books by heart, word for word. One of these was Goethe’s Faust. The sun was just setting and reminded me of a glorious passage:
The glow retreats, done is the day of toil;
It yonder hastes, new fields of life exploring;
Ah, that no wing can lift me from the soil
Upon its track to follow, follow soaring!
As I uttered these inspiring words the idea came like a flash of lightning and in an instant the truth was revealed. I drew with a stick on the sand the diagram shown six years later in my address before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.
This was the invention of the induction motor, a technological advance that would soon change the world.
wonderful story!!!
What a perfect poem. I love it!
I love this poem. I have tortured a few in my time (I was an English major), but I still remember the first time I read Blake’s “Tyger”. Transcendental!!
That which is most familiar is that which we know least.
You probably know that there’s a blind spot on the optic disc of the retina where there are no photoreceptor cells because this is where the optic nerve passes through the disc. We don’t experience the visual field as containing these holes, these blanks, because the eyes saccade continually, picking up information from the blank parts of the visual field and filling in gaps for us. We “see” what isn’t there.
This sort of “filling in” is a VERY general phenomenon in our mental lives. At any moment, we are capable of holding in working memory only a few bits of new information, and it’s only those even have a potential for entering long-term memory. Such limitations on attention and working memory are why telephone numbers, in the United States, are seven digits long. Increase the number of bits presented at any given instant, and we can’t grasp them all.
This limitation has profound consequences for our memories of the past, on which we base our understandings of the world. There’s an enormous body of research that shows that when we “remember” a past event, MOST of that memory is confabulation. It is a just-so story that our brains tell us, a confabulation. I was in my car, or my livingroom, or in that lecture hall, and so this and that must have been so. As with the gap in the visual field, so with the even larger confabulated parts of our memories. Except in contrived circumstances in laboratories, we are for the most part entirely oblivious of them but we are largely making stuff up. Our brains are made to do that in order to present to us a coherent picture of the world.
Much of what we think we understand of the world is like this. It is the assumed background, what we take for granted. Augustine thought that he learned grammar and vocabulary because people explicitly taught these to him. But consider these two phrases:
the little, green VW microbus
the green, little VW microbus
If you are a native speaker of English, the first will sound correct to you, and the second will not. That’s because there are complex rules of grammar governing the order of precedence of adjectives in English. Don’t bother looking in a grammar book for them. You’ll have to find these rules, still not entirely worked out, in papers by academic linguists who study the syntax of English. Here’s the point: MOST of the grammar of the language is like that. MOST of it we learned without ever knowing that we learned it. We intuited it. We never thought it through. It was learning that we never knew that we learned.
I bring all this up because it isn’t generally recognized that most of what we act upon in our lives is like this–it is background that we have learned but NEVER examined, never subjected to analysis, to critique. We are born into a world already underway, and for the most part, we learn about it in this unthinking way. We assume, for the most part, that what is being done by the other people around us is not some few alternatives among the infinite possibilities but THE WAY things are. Oddly, therefore, the most familiar is that which we know least.
One of the tricks up the storyteller’s (or poet’s) sleeve is that he or she can defamiliarize the familiar. We can walk the streets of Dickens’s London and see, daily, the beggars there and they can be so much a part of our everyday experience from day 1 that we don’t see them at all. But Dickens describes a scene in which people are feasting gluttonously on one side of a wall and a beggar is dying of hunger on the street on the other side of the same wall, a few inches away, and our eyes are opened. And for this new learning really to do it’s trick on us, it has to be visceral. It can’t be a vague abstraction: “Hunger is a significant problem in this city.”
We have to take the trip. We have to go THERE. Otherwise, we don’t have an experience powerful enough to knock us out of our complacency, we don’t UNLEARN, which is THE MOST SIGNIFICANT KIND OF LEARNING.
Entering into the little world of a poem, short story, novel, play, is like taking a trip to a foreign city. There is much that we can relate to. There are trains and cafes and hotels. People greet one another on the street. They wear clothing (for the most part–we might be among Naga Sadhus in India). But the familiar is at least slightly askew. A trip into the world of the literary work is something like falling down the rabbit hole or stepping through the wardrobe or the rip in the space-time continuum. And it makes us see the familiar in new ways and recognize alternatives. Things are not (or need not be) as I always thought.
There is a role to be played by technical analysis of the storyteller’s or poet’s craft. But this kind of thing is SECONDARY. It is there to serve the purpose of helping us to talk about the experience AFTER WE HAVE HAD IT. But we have to have it first.
We shall not cease from exploration,
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
–T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”
“When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a Guinea?”O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.” –William Blake, A Vision of the Last Judgement
You can listen to Billy Collins read a poem daily on The Writer’s Almanac.
Dominic was a strange child — strange as all children are until the light dies in their eyes and the fire goes out of their limbs, and their strangeness is swallowed by cities and civilizations, and the empty meaning of clocks.” from The Firebird by Edmund Cooper
Robert, your excerpt about Dominic reminds me of Zenna Henderson’s “Come On, Wagon!”
http://lexal.net/scifi/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/henderson2/
Writer’s Almanac is put together and read by Garrison Keillor, not Billy Collins, though your mistake is understandable. They read poetry with a similar cadence and their voices are similar. (Also, Collins has been a guest on A Prairie Home Companion fairly often.)
Keillor has been doing the show for years now, and has collected the poems he reads into at least two anthologies. I recommend them.
If your local NPR show does not carry Writer’s Almanac, or it’s on at the wrong time for you, you can subscribe to it at the website. I assume you can also get podcasts. (It’s only a minute or few long.) Of course, with the written version, you don’t get the nice bit of music and Garrison Keillor’s wonderful voice.
Now that I think of it, any of you who are teaching English/Literature in middle school or high school might consider getting the Writer’s Almanac podcasts to play at the beginning of your classes. As I said, they are only 1-2 minutes long, with some interesting bit of history about the day, and some people born on the day, followed by the reading of a poem. It’s a very soothing little broadcast, and playing it would be a nice ritual for settling a class down & giving kids an opportunity to experience poetry (and Keillor’s excellent writing) with no pressure to do more than enjoy it. If you also subscribe to the written version, it’d be easy to have a few copies around for kids who particularly like the days poem.
Though I have listened to Garrison Keillor just after 5:00 AM for over a year but Billy Collins has been doing the NPR show lately. Today’s poem, “To help the Monkey Cross the River” made me smile as I imagined myself in my classroom tree shooting tests at the smalls-handed monkeys.
http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/?refid=3#
Robert,
Thanks for the clarification. I’m not up early enough to hear the show regularly, so I didn’t realize that Billy Collins was doing it now.