Mountain Climbing in the Poetry Classroom in Malta: Teaching a Stevens Metapoem

Abstract

Mountain Climbing in the Poetry Classroom in Malta: Teaching a Stevens Metapoem Daniel Xerri Introduction THE CRITICAL READING of poetry in a number of international secondary school contexts seems to be restricted to paraphrasing a poem, device-spotting, and discussing themes. This approach seems divorced from a consideration of the aesthetic qualities of poetry. My PhD research at the high school where I used to teach until recently has revealed that teachers’ and students’ approaches to poetry in class are driven by an intense concern with what a poem means. The emphasis placed on a poem’s meaning is partly due to their entrenched belief that a poem has a hidden meaning that can be unearthed by means of a teacher-led, line-by-line analysis. This approach places the teacher in the position of a gatekeeper to meaning, especially since the class discussion of the poem is mostly characterized by the teacher’s explanations of what the lines mean. The belief that poetry is a difficult genre that can be mediated to students only via teachers’ intervention leads the latter to adopt a pedagogical approach to poetry that consolidates their role as gatekeepers (Xerri). This article illustrates the idea that one way of challenging such beliefs and practices is through a consideration of poetry as an aesthetic product. The conception that poetry has a hidden meaning is most often detached from how meaning operates in poetry. The linguist and stylistician Henry Widdowson affirms that “What poems mean cannot be explained, but how they mean can be, and such explanation . . . provides the general conditions for individual interpretation” (71). With this in mind, I set out to teach Wallace Stevens’s “The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain” (all citations hereafter appearing on CPP 435). It is considered one of Stevens’s best-known metapoems, this being one of the reasons why I chose to focus on it. Defined as “a poem about poetry and the meaning of art” (Widdowson 67), a metapoem has the potential to demystify poetry and make students aware of how meaning is generated in poetry. Moreover, my choice of poem was very much in line with the idea that it emblematizes Stevens’s “lifelong project: that of transforming the world [End Page 270] of ‘reality’ into the world of ‘imagination,’ into the world of the poem” (Naylor 47). The poem’s emphasis is “on the transformative power of the poet—the power to compose a world of one’s own making, a landscape of pure acts of the imagination” (47–48). The poem elicits “a fresh realisation of the world’s separate existence from the meanings the poet may temporarily impose on it” (Beckett 202). In this sense, I hoped that the metapoem would serve to broaden students’ conceptions of poetry and of how it functioned. Context The lesson discussed in this article took place at a high school in Malta with students aged between 16 and 18 for whom English is a second language. Malta’s bilingual status is a result of its colonial heritage, and the majority of the population prides itself on being fluent in both English and Maltese. The study of English in Malta has for many decades valued the importance of a literary education, which is for the most part centered on the Anglo-American literary tradition. This means that literature is taught in the same way that it is taught to native speakers of English and for similar purposes. English literature is a staple part of students’ secondary education, with formative and summative kinds of assessment being used to test their appreciation of a variety of literary texts and genres. The pedagogical practices that teachers adopt in schools are necessarily influenced by the fact that literature forms part of an assessment-driven educational culture. The lesson was conducted with three classes of students being prepared for the Matriculation Certificate examination in English, an Advanced Level examination that students usually sit for at the age of 18 after following a two-year course. This nine-hour, high-stakes examination consists of a number of language and literature components, including two focusing on poetry. One of the poetry...