Transforming Text: Finding the Poem Within

Abstract

“I hate poetry. It is confusing and I despise analyzing what a poem means. I don’t have any idea how I’ll ever teach it to a group of students.” Dustin, one of our preservice teachers, expressed what many future teachers felt. When we mentioned poetry, many groaned. They had bad memories about how they learned poetry. They only recalled memorizing a list of poetic terms in elementary and middle school, analyzing poetry in high school and college, being tested on what the poet meant in English classes and on standardized tests. Often a class devoted to poetry is a discussion in which the teacher asks all the questions and eventually gives the answers. No wonder many teachers prefer teaching prose over poetry. They do not understand what Frances Kazemek and Pat Rigg advocate in Enriching Our Lives: “Poetry helps us understand ourselves and our world; it helps us see. . . in new ways. At the same time, poetry lifts our language. We find ourselves using language in new ways, in ways that are more vivid, more powerful, and more fun” (28). We change teachers’ discomfort by moving from prose to poetry through a creative process that encourages students to read closely, read well, follow their personal thoughts and associations. It is imperative to provide creative, engaging activities for pre-service teachers, so they experience the power of imagination in a way that they can take to their students. We want our pre-service, pre-K to 12 language arts teachers to begin with language that is “safe” and explore its possibilities by making the words their own. By doing so, they begin to understand the power of language that Kazemek and Rigg mention. By creating this link between prose and poetry, the process of working with a poem is demystified. Pre-service teachers find an opportunity to play with language and explore nuance. This approach incorporates what Louise Rosenblatt terms “aesthetic reading” or the “aesthetic stance,” which is a type of reading that encourages readers to read for pleasure. The reader and text act and are acted upon in a reciprocal process of meaning-making. The purpose of this strategy, then, is to encourage students to work creatively with a page of prose text by transforming it into a poem. This shift in genre from what is a narrative or expository text to a poetic one illustrates how the seeds of one discourse may, in fact, be found in another. We find that pre-service teachers need to experience playing with text to understand the transformative heart of the poetic process. They learn the value of personal creativity and are better able to nurture it in students. Paul Torrance captures the transformation process in his 1992 definition of creativity: “Creativity is digging deeper. Creativity is looking twice. Creativity is crossing out mistakes” (5). Often, pre-service teachers use this poetic approach when designing their content units and find ways for students to transform informational texts, like content area textbooks, into an aesthetic expression.