Barbara Bleiman on how poetry teaching needs to change

For many years, when leading professional development sessions on poetry at A Level, I used to say to the teachers at the start, “Don’t think that A Level is something entirely new and different. All you’ve ever done with students aged 11-16 on poetry still holds true.’ Now, I find myself saying the reverse: “You may well find that you have to un-teach many of the assumptions and approaches to poetry that students will bring with them into A Level.”

Why is this? It’s a complicated story and all too easy to over-simplify. However, a few trends stand out. First is a period of intense anxiety about assessment, where poetry for exams has come to dominate all poetry teaching, with teachers both looking ahead to the specifics of a GCSE question, and simultaneously nervously looking over their shoulder at the Ofsted inspector or member of the school Senior Leadership Team who wants to see visible manifestations of learning, progress and ultimately, the promise of results, in every moment of every lesson. This has led, in my view, to over-teaching poetry, to a reliance on formulae, such as PEE, (Point, Evidence, Explanation). It has led to a focus on teaching specific information and ideas about particular individual poems rather than teaching about poems more generally and how they work. Looking ahead and looking over your shoulder means you’re not able to look at what’s directly in front of you – the students in your class, the texts you want to teach, and how to bring them alive for those students in ways that will really develop their understanding of poetry.

This has been coupled with a bigger educational battleground around what we mean by knowledge, whether we think there is such a thing as knowledge without skills, or skills without knowledge, or whether we believe that knowledge, know-how, skill in reading and understanding are all interconnected and indivisible from each other. My view, as you can probably tell, is the latter. For me, learning is a lot more than memorisation or learned facts, and knowing about poetry involves being able to apply understandings and knowledge gained in one experience of a poem to the next one. It’s about becoming better readers of poetry.

Allied to this has been a desire to teach what can be demonstrably learnt, and is highly visible and therefore easy to assess. This, in terms of poetry, is a problem. For valuable knowledge and ‘know-how’ about poetry are not always straightforward to demonstrate and assess, nor are they simple to teach. They are complicated. They develop over time. They can be seen in the work of a student who has read many poems, read them in ways that provoke thought and genuine response. If the aim is to develop insightful readers, who know how to approach any poem with confidence and understanding of how poems work, then this is not going to be entirely visible to a non-specialist Ofsted inspector between the start of Period 3 on a Friday and the end of that lesson. (Surprising though it may seem, English classrooms are often inspected by non-specialists!)

Explaining what a metaphor and a simile are, giving ten examples and asking students to label which is which, is reassuringly easy to measure. Yes, they understand the difference or no they don’t. Period 3 on a Friday looks as if it’s been a great success. But a more complex and important, intellectually demanding task might look rather different. Here’s an imagined lesson that demonstrates some of this:

• They have explored metaphors in many poems, so the simple definition doesn’t need teaching – but if it does, it is taught again briefly. ‘What do we mean by metaphor? Give me a few examples.’
• The students recognise that a metaphor has been used in this poem.
• They make a judgement about how significant that is. Is it an extended analogy that forms the backbone of the poem? Or is it one of many comparisons, juicy little moments to take pleasure in, but not necessarily at the heart of the poem’s particular kind of power.
• They think back to another poem on a similar theme where an entirely different kind of metaphorical approach was taken and they reflect on the differences. This is, perhaps an extended metaphor, or analogy, that twists and turns and takes us somewhere unexpected, making us think differently from our starting-point, very different from the one used by this poet or that.
• They notice that this use of a metaphor is unconventional, and they understand what that means, because they’ve explored metaphor in other poems. They are alive to the tone and the ways in which this poet is subverting the conventions for satirical effect, or to deliberately unsettle us and disrupt our expectations.
• As individual readers, they will inevitably see different aspects of the metaphor, drawing on their own prior reading and experience to take their interpretations further. So, one might unexpectedly compare the metaphor with something from everyday life, and another with a surprisingly similar use of metaphor in an advert for ice cream, and another might tease out something about the metaphor in relation to the sound echoes in another line that link it with that word. Some of these comments might never have struck the teacher and they can then build on them, and build them into a fuller set of interpretations that the whole class has access to. The students bring a rich array of associations and ideas to bear, all of which can take everyone’s understanding of the poem further.
• Perhaps the teacher decides to develop their understanding further, by asking them to strip out the metaphor to see what happens (a form of textual transformation that has proved highly effective in teaching analysis of texts – see the work of Rob Pope, Ben Knights and Chris Thurgar-Dawson and others). Perhaps they ask the students to take that metaphor and write a few lines of their own using it differently. Or maybe they ask the students to write a poem that imitates the use the writer makes of the metaphor, by doing something similar themselves, on a different theme. (This creative-critical angle on poetry teaching has a long track-record stretching back to the Renaissance grammar school education and thriving in some university English departments today).

With this kind of approach, students encountering a poem like Carol Ann Duffy’s Valentine, for instance, might recognise the surprising nature of the image of the onion to represent love. They might bring to it their lived experience of chopping onions and wielding a kitchen knife, rather than sidestepping that. They might appreciate the fact that, as Duffy says, her valentine gift is not a “red rose or a satin heart” and recognise the way in which the metaphor evolves and develops over the course of the poem, offering powerfully ambivalent feelings about love and the emotional damage it can cause.

Choosing a surprising image of their own for love, or another emotion, and experimenting with writing their own poem might allow them to see how a single metaphor can be inventively pulled in different directions, stretching meanings and feelings in dynamic ways. And perhaps then, when they meet another poem about love such as Billy Collins’ Litany, they will come to it with a rich set of understandings about metaphor and love conventions that will allow them to see how this poem, like Valentine is exploring and commenting on the traditions of love poetry, just as much writing a poem to a lover.

In opening up their associations and thoughts and responses in dialogue, and hearing the teacher’s own thinking, in writing poems or experimenting with text transformations, as well as reading them, the students in this kind of poetry classroom are learning what I like to call the ‘terms of engagement’ for reading poetry. Literary terms are the easy-to-test items of knowledge that some have been overly focused on, in my view, while this other set of terms, the terms of engagement for poetry, seem to have been lost. Literary terms are of use, but not as fancy decoration, shoehorned in as supposed proof of academic quality. Great writing about poetry might use some terms but using an elaborate term should not be the object. Terms should serve arguments and ideas.

Many poets and poetry educators have, over decades, tried to explain that the terms of engagement for poetry are not the same as for other texts. Paraphrase, explanation, identifying the theme, explaining what happens in the poem or itemising techniques, can look like they might be poetry appreciation or analysis but actually all too often they entirely miss the point. T.S. Eliot famously said that:

The chief use of the ‘meaning’ of a poem … may be to satisfy the habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet,
while the poem does its work upon him; much as the imaginary burglar is always provided with a bit of nice meat for the house-dog.

And Virginia Woolf, in a BBC lecture entitled Craftmanship broadcast in 1937, said:

Reading [poetry], you know, is rather like opening the door to a horde of rebels who swarm out attacking one in twenty places at -once – hit, roused, scraped, bared, swung through the air, so that life seems to flash by; then again blinded, knocked on the head – all of which are agreeable sensations for a reader (since nothing is more dismal than to open the door and get no response.)

It seems to me that students need to know all of this. They need to know what poetry can do, how one engages with it and what to expect from it. So, in my imagined classroom, there would be talk about this too, and lots of it – talk about poetry being ambiguous, rich in different meanings, requiring multiple readings and, in this classroom, it would be established clearly for students that they aren’t expected to come up with neat, simple ‘answers’, learned off pat from what the teacher tells them. In classwork for 11-14 year olds, the risks of offering their initial responses and building on those are very small indeed. Little is lost – and much is to be gained – by allowing them to “float their notions” about poetry (as the Bullock Report of 1976 describes exploratory talk). As they move towards exams, they will have built up enough expertise and experience to be able to trust those initial responses as the route into the kind of sound, personally engaged critical analysis that GCSE and A Level examiners are crying out for.

Of course, my imagined classroom could be seen as idealistic and idealised. And it’s true that I haven’t emphasised how complex and careful teachers’ judgements need to be and how hard it is to resist prevailing dominant narratives and demands, especially when government bodies like Ofsted seem to be backing them so strongly. But the reality is that this kind of approach can and does occur in poetry classrooms, where dialogue is opened up and students are encouraged to bring their own responses to bear. I’ve seen it happen and I’ve seen the results, in student work. Brilliant teachers are achieving all of this, even in the difficult educational world we all inhabit. And equally, one can see how exciting and lively and expansive these classrooms can be. The teacher in a poetry classroom like this might usually be the main protagonist but the students can, and do, become other major players, or the chorus, chiming in and adding their thoughts, and sometimes even taking over the central speaking role in the classroom ‘drama’ of learning about poems and poetry.

One final point. In my imagined classroom, lots of different things are seen as permissible and can happen. It might be a teacher talking at length about a favourite poem to a spell-bound group of Year 7s, or a cut-up poem being reconstructed with discussion about the implications of choices, or a poem presented as prose and lineated, or students responding to a series of prompts such as:

I like…
I wonder why…
I’m puzzled by…
This reminds me of…
What if the poet….?
For me, the most important line is…
and so on, before opening up for class discussion.

It might involve sometimes doing a close, detailed focus on a single poem but at other times reading several poems and choosing a favourite, for the experience of reading lots of poetry and having a rich intertextual hinterland to draw on. It would build in opportunities to return to poems, reading them after a break, writing first thoughts, sharing thinking, presenting more sustained ideas to others. This kind of classroom has no limits, no ‘you mustn’t do that!’, ‘you shouldn’t do that!’. It offers canonical poems from the past alongside contemporary poetry from a wide range of different cultures and traditions. To borrow Virginia Woolf’s metaphor, this classroom door would be wide open so that the “horde of rebels” could “swarm in”, hitting students on the head with poetry, in the most agreeable way.

*

Barbara Bleiman is a consultant at the English and Media Centre (EMC), London; co-editor of emagazine; and author of What Matters in English Teaching, a book on secondary English teaching.

*
From Magma 85, Poems for schools



Buy this issue for £8.50 in UK (including P&P) » Buy Now