Poetry's Place and the Poet's Participation with Fields of Knowledge

Abstract

Although the writing-across-the-curriculum movement has demonstrated the effectiveness of expressive and transactional writing to assist subject matter learning, poetic writing remains nearly absent in classrooms and research studies. Yet, when the first theorists of discourse in composition— James Britton, James Moffett, and James Kinneavy–worked out the theoretical models for discourse that became, and remain, central for the research and teaching of writing, they included poetry (in its broad meaning of all literature) as a major mode and function of discourse. These and other theorists and researchers advanced arguments and evidence that poetry offers learners a way to imagine (and to image) through sudden global insight, to organize their experience, and to connect new knowledge to other areas of knowledge; yet, their appeals for poetry’s place in a full curriculum have been only rarely heard beyond the elementary school level. Why this neglect? In an essay published in 1983, “The Relation of Thought and Language,” Janet Emig demonstrated that even English curricula, as rhetoric and writing textbooks have given evidence since Hugh Blair’s first (1784) text, have suppressed creativity. She concluded that the problem was a view of language solely as a “vehicle of communication” (Emig 35). Since then, some degree of creativity has been restored to composition textbooks, but at the same time literature has become increasingly separated from the teaching of writing, research, and theories on composing. College English, for example, no longer publishes poetry or creative non-fiction.