Practicing Poetry: Teaching to Learn and Learning to Teach

Abstract

what I am talking about. My choice of Archibald MacLeish's Ars Poetica is my English major way of affirming that I have a philosophical approach to poetry, that I understand its mysteries, and that I am eager to share what I know on this fine October afternoon. Globed fruit? my students' expressions seem to ask. Really? I learned in the years that followed this scene was that neither my English major nor my methods course had trained me very well to teach poetry to high school students. Gradually I learned how to help my students see that poetry is a celebration of sound and sense, that its music can capture our hearts and minds. So, what did I do in my second year? I began by asking students to recite their favorite poems. Another mistake. Most of them could not recite a poem, and, to my surprise, many of them could not complete the lines of familiar nursery rhymes. Another year I began by asking them to write for a few minutes on What is poetry? I got some surprisingly good answers to that one, the poets in the classroom rhapsodizing on their favorite (and often secret) pastime. Then one year I discovered a gold mine. I opened with Carl Sandburg's Jazz Fantasia; I put students in small groups and sent them off to practice a performance. As I visited the groups in rehearsal, voices buzzed with energy. I heard laughter, spirited suggestions about how to rush this line or slow down that one; I sensed real excitement, even joy. Their subsequent performances were miracles of delight for me as my students launched us into the world of poetry, drumming on our drums, battering on our banjoes, sobbing on our long, cool winding saxophones. We answered Sandburg's invitation to Go to it, O jazzmen (193). Another year I began with David Bottoms's Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump as a way of working against my students' misconceptions of appropriate poetic subjects. I've also used the excruciatingly painful and suspenseful experience described in Bottoms's Under the Boathouse for the