THE OPPOSITE OF READING:

POETIC ENCOUNTERS WITH LITERARY EDUCATION

LORIN J. SCHWARZ

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

GRADUATE PROGRAM IN EDUCATION

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•+• Canada THE OPPOSITE OF READING: POETIC ENCOUNTERS WITH LITERARY EDUCATION

by Lorin Schwarz

a dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies of York University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

©2009

Permission has been granted to: a) YORK UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES to lend or sell copies of this dissertation in paper, microform or electronic formats, and b) LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA -.o reproduce, lend, distribute, or sell copies of this dissertation anywhere in the world in microform, paper or electronic formats and to authorize or procure the reproduction, loan, distribution or sale of copies of this dissertation anywhere in the world in micro­ form, paper or electronic formats.

The author reserves other publication rights, and neither the dissertation nor extensive extracts from it may be printed or otherwise reproduced without the author's written permission. Abstract

In this study, I consider notions of the "poetic" as it encounters literary education, reading strategies and text. Reaching toward a definition of the poetic as an idea central to the project of teaching, learning and making meaningful experiences from literature, I begin with the idea that our early readings form an auto-ethnographic core which influence future inner/outer conversations around textual encounter. Using literature — and specifically poetry—as both data and research methodology, I consider issues of self

and world, aesthetics, pedagogical position, curriculum theory, ethics and psychoanalytic thought as they position themselves around a notion of the reading self in a world waiting to be read, and the kinds of ways we might approach this dynamic in the living space of the literature classroom.

iv Acknowledgements

I've always found it fascinating to consider the ways in which people come into one

another's lives and touch each other so deeply that both find their worlds indelibly

changed forever. I consider myself very lucky to be someone who seems to have had more than his share of these encounters. This dissertation, so concerned with poetic moments of deep exchange and personal meaning, is itself a product of intersections with many people who have left impressions on heart, mind and soul. Too often we keep private counsel and fail to acknowledge those who inspire, challenge and change us; it is

a privilege for me to have the chance to say thank you now to some of those who are carried, sometimes silently, throughout this project.

No endeavour as large and important as this dissertation has been to me could possibly be completed without a thousand different kinds of support. It almost goes without saying that I owe a great deal to my dissertation supervisor, Alice Pitt. I never would have

guessed all those years ago as a student in teacher's college, a student who looked

forward eagerly to Tuesdays when I knew Alice would be coming to lecture, that I would have a chance to work with her, one-on-one, with some of the very ideas that made

Tuesdays so special. I wished for it, though, and throughout this doctoral degree I've been very grateful for the opportunity. Alice, you really are someone who changed my

life in more ways than I can count. Our discussions about theory, your patience and tolerance with my resistances and ways of looking at things, and your own creative,

innovative suggestions have both educated my imagination and allowed me to imagine the familiar in new ways. You really are a "literature person" and you gave reading dimensions I had never imagined before.

It is also important to thank the members of my very fine dissertation and examination committees. Jen Gilbert and Belarie Zatzman responded to my initial drafts with rigour and insight, bringing important new perspectives to the project. I know that both Jen and

Belarie struggled with some of my interpretations, but never without the open-minded grace that allowed for interesting conversations and, for me, the emergence of new points of view. I've known and been a student of John Lennox for over a decade, and his patient and thorough reading of my dissertation reminded me of why our mornings in the York

Library Special Collections Room studying Canadian Literature remain to this day one of my most treasured memories. I was delighted to have Lisa Farley as Dean's

Representative; Lisa, your supportive voice bringing our discussion of the dissertation back to the ideas of Plato and philosophy was one of the cornerstone moments of the defense for me. Your reading of my work was sensitive and personal; I found myself moved that my writing could be taken in the direction you allowed it to lead. It was a particular honour to have Dawn Skorczewski on the examination committee. While we have still never met face-to-face, to Dawn I want to express my gratitude for your deeply thoughtful ideas about the dissertation, your supportive comments and the gentle suggestions (which I needed to hear) that a dissertation might possibly have a life in the greater world post-defense. I find your thoughts on psychoanalysis, phenomenology and the teaching of literature to be complex, compassionate and intuitive. I hope that the completion of the dissertation defense does not bring to an end the conversations and

vi debates I have begun with these diverse and wonderful teachers and scholars, each a role- model for my own research and pedagogical practice.

I also want to say thank you to Rishma Dunlop, a professor and scholar who introduced me new to ways of doing research from and about the heart. Rishma, you were one of the first people to show me that a faculty of education might be home to the literary imagination. From Winter's College to Stirling Castle, you've been an important part of the journey.

Those I've met during my time in the education faculty form a very real kind of community for me, one in which inspiration and understanding arrive in the forms of conversation and friendship. These include Naomi Norquay and the reading group she parented, Deborah Britzman, Karen Krasny, Rebecca Luce-Kapler, Heather Lotherington,

Elizabete Petersons, Emily Tjimos, Deirdre Whitfeld and Ana Uzelac. Fellow students who have become friends include Jeff Lloyd, Xiao Jiu Ling, Arpi Panossian, Jason Guriel,

Farra Yasin, Fang Duan. There's also Colette Granger, who is the best mentor/friend you'd ever want to drive with through a rainstorm on the way home from Windsor. To quote from Charlotte's Web: "It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer." Colette, like many of my friends, is both.

And then there is a wider circle of people outside the university who have taught me that distance has less power than we might imagine. They have names like Lori De

Angelis, Richard Yiu and Lidia D'Angelo, Jeanne Skelton, Mathias Prakesh, Annie Tang,

Wichian "Jack" Chatmontri, and Jimmy Van -himself a talented scholar capable of receiving a document from the other side of the planet, editing, formatting and sending it back all by lunchtime in the original time-zone. Each of you has contributed support and

vii inspiration in countless ways and I am proud to consider you my friends. You've all

"limited the damage" and reminded me of a larger world outside of the one defined by

being a student.

In a large family, it is impossible to thank everyone but I'd like to take a moment to

acknowledge all the people who, in asking how things were, made me feel like the

endeavour was worthwhile. I'd also like to thank Brett Yack for introducing me to Avatar

and Mona Chasin for The Book of Abraham. It's also important, I think, to note a few people no longer with us. Of course my father is a part of any writing and thinking that I

do, and his loss is still keenly felt every day. Patrick Solomon's half of our doctoral

seminar was a perfect welcome into the program. I'd also like to thank my Uncle Tony who passed away only 3 months before the completion of this dissertation. His last words to me at the end of our final conversation were that he'd like to attend my defense; I have

a strong feeling that somehow, he was there.

And finally my mom, Ann Schwarz. Without your generosity and more kinds of

support than I know how to name, this project would not have been possible. I'm so thankful, and grateful too that the opportunity to undertake this degree also afforded us time to reconnect. You've become a friend as well as a parent, and that seems like a very

special kind of hidden curriculum arising from doctoral studies.

viii We can paint a figure without having to scrutinize the type of thought that is painting. We can compose a melody without having to think about what a musical idea is. Or we can write a poem and not have to examine the poetic process.

—Christopher Bollas, The Mystery of Things

IX Table of Contents

Things Being Various 1 Lori Sewell's Notes 26 Odi et amo 47 Reading Daydreams, Together 74 If Just One Moment 121 Rumors of Snow and Alphabets 151 Conclusion 183 Bibliography 195

x Things Being Various: Introductory thoughts on method and ambiguity

To look to literature is to emphasise how important to personal growth are imagination and understanding, how closely related is the capacity to think to the capacity to form symbols and to derive meaning from experience. -Margot Waddell

For many of us who have endeavoured to write a PhD dissertation, there has been a moment of education in which some sort of internal switch was triggered, allowing for a seed of interest to germinate. In that moment, something happens to engender in the student a desire to know more, as well as an urgent thought that study of the topic or subject is a worthwhile pursuit. If they are lucky, this urgency carries with it a lit vivacity, a beacon always in sight no matter how dark the maze and how lost one seems to become.

And there are many ways to become lost: self-doubt, anxiety of influence, the pressures of life outside the university and the disenchanting demands of living within it. There is also the burdensome weight of the actual task of writing a thesis and then presenting it to one's supervisor -whom, if one is lucky, one wants to impress or at least not diminish oneself in front of—followed by the combat-termed "defense" in front of less intimately- known (and thus equally intimidating) academics whom one also hopes not to embarrass oneself in front of. The process is sometimes a dark one; the beacon must be strong.

In my case, that beacon was a number of experiences I've had with English Education.

We might also employ the term "literary studies," and throughout the following chapters

I use the two interchangeably. The truth is, I'd be hard-pressed to pinpoint exactly when my switch was triggered, although I do have an awareness of what did the triggering

—what made me feel, at some point between starting high school and sitting down to

1 write this introduction (after writing a draft of the rest of my dissertation), that the study of literature is worth almost anything the process of formally thinking and writing about it might entail.

The question of what might constitute a certain kind of encounter with literature makes up the bulk of thinking throughout this dissertation. I am interested in the kinds of moments in a person's "literary education" we might call poetic, and the ways in which we occasionally use these times to redefine what literature means in the classroom and in a life. My work centers around the idea that there is something within certain texts that has the potential to ignite a visceral response, usually resulting in a memory capable of altering how one looks not only at the initial experience, but literature and self as well.

These encounters are not always positive ones, and the education arising from any literature-based crisis raises interesting questions about how we come to think about

"hidden curriculum" and the necessary traumas alive and breathing in reading, readers and a world in which the two collide.

Any examination of particular moments of poetic encounter with literary curriculum and literature has profound implications for the teaching of new teachers -and not only for those interested in English. All teachers are language teachers, and we bring our readings of text, world and world-as-text to our classrooms as surely as anything else.

Thinking about the times we were inspired by reading, the times we were hurt or defined by it, the times that reading together meant something different than reading alone, the times when reading gave us something we come to understand as hope or fear, love or hate -this psychical work allows teachers a chance to come to know why they believe what they believe about education and the work of making relations with curriculum,

2 students and -perhaps most importantly—their own identity as a teacher and learner.

What we might hear literature telling us about literature study, especially when it is our own, is at the core of coming to understand the meaning of a teacher's education. The poetic moment, as an artifact of memory, becomes a type of literary theory for the classroom -a way of thinking about how reading and writing together is ultimately one of the most personal acts a student or teacher might do.

The best English classes I've taken were transformative. The texts came from somewhere and seemed to speak personally to issues that were at once relevant and perpetual. But the texts alone did not carry the unusual nature of those experiences. In those courses, there was always a sense that it was essential to first find a language with which to speak about why the texts appealed, and then to do the speaking. At times that speaking took the form of writing or other media, but there was always the imperative of communication. Affect was the starting point; it had to be shared with honesty and creativity. In some very special cases, the ambiguity that arose from attempts to put all of this into language led to friendships that last to this day, or to moments able to keep one afloat in the deepest currents.

Not only did these English courses give me a reason to keep thinking and studying why literary scholarship is an important part of education, they also gave me a format with which to do so. This format led to the first of several methodologies I've used throughout the chapters. Like an English class, I've tried in this long essay to first talk about a text -more on the choice of texts in a moment—followed by the reaction it elicits personally as well as the context it presents in my own encounters and thinking. This is a form of auto-ethnographic research, and it has been a part of my literary studies for

3 longer than I suspected. After the "Reader Response" theory of Louise Rosenblatt, there is an innate impulse in students of literature to react personally to a text, to situate themselves and their own experiences in strategic alignment with a work and allow this to form a cornerstone of critical interpretation. It seems to me a responsible acknowledgement of subjectivity to do so, and in the social sciences at this time in history there is an integrity in acknowledging one's subjectivity. If I may be so bold, it also seems to me to make the dissertation more interesting: punctuating throughout are stories and thoughts on what I consider to be my most intriguing encounters with English education as both student and teacher. I've tried to be very conscious about the complex relationship between memory, truth and the stories we tell about ourselves. There is no doubt that I've used my own history in a very specific way, often for very specific purposes and perhaps even a bit nostalgically. But these admissions hold their own truths as well, and as in any worthwhile English course, it is in the dialogue between what I offer and the meanings my readers take as they bring their investments to the table that creates the experience.

I used four guidelines in choosing the ways I exploited my own stories. The first was an entirely internal one, and perhaps the most noble motive in undertaking this dissertation. Simply put, I wondered what it would be like to revisit encounters of literary studies -again, as both student and teacher—from the reflective, theoretically-grounded space of graduate study in Education. I was quick to realize, however, that this "safe" world had its own perils; as Mary Phillips Manke notes in an essay called "A Queer Path

Across the Straight Furrows of my Field":

In the academic world, the purpose of doing research (self-study or not) tends to become the opportunity to publish or present. Not only external

4 rewards, but also the internal reward of self-satisfaction can only be accessed through putting research out for others to see. However, self- study research has the potential to reach deeper, to see more. It can go so far into the self that sharing it is difficult. I think this difficulty comes from the way self-study can destroy what is taken for granted, and break down the walls that protect us from the pain of self-understanding. (201)

Following the models of those transformative English classes, my project stems from

a notion that the risk involved in self-study research as it springs from textual and text- based teaching experiences holds a potential like the one Manke writes about. The work

felt risky and I was often surprised at where it led.

I pressed my second guideline into service as a way to approach the risky feeling

inherent in breaking down "the walls that protect us from the pain of self-understanding."

In a 1922 letter to his friend Arthur Schnitzler, Freud discussed a significant parallel to psychoanalysis he called "delicate self-observation" (Von Unwerth 203). I've also seen the phrase translated as as "detailed self-observation" (Bonime & Eckardt 211). The

differences between these two translations are interesting but we will leave them to be

explored elsewhere. For now, I will simply posit Freud's phrase as a crucial directive in my use of memory as data -to consider it as an act of both delicate and detailed self- observation, a reminder to be at once rigorous and gentle in encountering other versions

of my reading self.

In any auto-ethnographic self-study, there is a danger of narcissism and I was acutely nervous about writing a dissertation that had too much of me in it. Although it's possible, perhaps even desirable, to argue that autobiography-as-education-dissertation is a valuable form of research, or that we write ourselves by what we read (and how we share

that), neither of these is exactly the problematic I was hoping to consider in my paper. A

5 guideline came in the form of an article by Cynthia Chambers called "Research That

Matters: Finding a Path with Heart." In that piece, Dr. Chambers tells us that "when done well, autobiographical inquiry can be profoundly ethical. When the researcher/writer's life is the site of the inquiry, not the topic of the inquiry" (2). "Site, not subject" became a mantra, and it is my hope that the personal moments I offer are places where something interesting and human might be happening rather than an Ultimate Story for Story's Own

Sake. The distinction relieved a great deal of anxiety and also led to new ways of thinking about how I use my own experiences when considering educational encounters.

Finally, it was important to deal with the complex, often unconscious influences upon the memories invoked. In an article called "Hide and Seek: the play of the personal in education," Alice Pitt augments my reading of Cynthia Chambers in searching for a way that we might "locate the personal not in content that reflects the world but rather as a method for observing how we experience ourselves in the world" (69). Here, the self as site of research becomes a methodology on its own, a way of noticing -both delicately and in a detailed fashion—how it is that we might make meaning in having experiences and understanding what significant resonances they hold as we remember, forget and remake them in the complicated terrain of our own awareness. Complexity itself becomes a subject alongside other characters in the inquiry.

The dissertation started out, in my mind at least, as a self-proclaimed "psychoanalytic inquiry into the nature of public encounters with the private realm of reading poetry." A question soon arose about how to incorporate poetry into both the method and body of the inquiry. My supervisor suggested that each chapter might begin with a poem; the idea

6 sounded interesting to me. I had no idea how my work would change in following

through.

The majority of my paper is about poetry -individual poems and the idea of poetry,

which I began to think about as "poetics." Finding a poem for the beginning of each

section was, without a doubt, one of the most challenging and time-consuming aspects of

the work. I knew from my proposal and other discussions the general roadmap and

concerns for what I wanted to write about; it was a shock to realize how important

finding the right piece to introduce each chapter was. No selection was automatic,

although in at least one case I had an idea which poem might work and that particular piece survived the vetting process -although there were other serious contenders. I went

on hunts for poems I'd read years ago, or heard snippets of in passing, and only

sometimes were these searches successful. New poems appeared and shocked me with

their relevance. I'd go to bed at night debating with myself about which poem to use for

the chapter I was planning to begin the following day, and more than once abject poems

haunted my dreams.

It became clear that reading the poems was a sort of data-collection. Once I had

chosen a poem and placed it in the context of the blank page that was to become a

discussion, I realized that the poems were more than data: they were a way to begin

thinking about the chapter's issues and concerns. And they influenced my writing, as well;

the more I became aware of my own taste in poetry -the selection process was a slow

progression toward this comprehension—the more I found myself striving toward the

same style of privileged ambiguity, tenderness and rich economy of language my chosen

poems spoke to me from. The argument that reading, and especially reading poetry, is its

7 own research methodology became evident in content, style and form. It is one of the unspoken stances my work takes.

As a social science project, and especially a project of inquiry into education, using poetry as data and method has several advantages; I hope these will become clear throughout my writing. One benefit that is, I think, worthy of comment is the almost innate capacity of poetry to say something about human life without sacrificing the uncertainty inherent in living. If we are to take seriously Shoshana Felman's important comment summarizing the Freudian proposal that literature is a body of work that

"knows it knows but does not know the meaning of its knowledge, does not know what it knows" (Felman 1987: 92), poetry must be taken seriously. At its best, poetry searches for a language in which to articulate this unknowing and the ways we continue to exist within its shadow. In fact, there are times when specific poems take this ambiguity as their subject; I think of one piece by Louis MacNeice entitled "Snow" in which the poet heartbreakingly reaches for a description of that "space between" what can be known and unknown, lived and imagined. The poem finally leaves the reader in an undefined area, alone with the sense of knowing's impossibility and yet somehow charged with the poem's effort at articulation:

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay window was Spawning snow and pink roses against it Soundlessly collateral and incompatible: World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think, Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion A tangerine and spit the pips and feel The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world

8 Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes— On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands— There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

I remember once being entranced by a SSHRC poster in the Office of Graduate

Studies. The poster's tagline was, "Life is both a Social Science and an Art." The world is suddener than we expect it to be, incorrigibly plural and various. For those of us who believe that literature is a way of understanding such a world, reading poetry offers a unique form of coming to know. If, as the poster suggests, to reach for a greater understanding of life we must embrace both the social sciences and the arts, I think the crossover methodology of reading poetry as an act of educational research is an important direction to consider. "Meanings are potentially communicated through emotional, embodied encounters that aim to be wholly exhaustive, while tracing their own partial or tentative perspective," Liz De Freitas tells us (269). Poetry actualizes the values articulated in much of the theorizing of social science research.

In addition, the poems often speak for themselves throughout, and there are moments in which the chapter-defining poems speak against and toward other pieces. Using the poetry of others in this way is a marginalized and unconventional stance in circles of

"arts-informed inquiry" and the more recent "poetic inquiry"; those approaches traditionally focus more upon the use of original writing -ie. the work of the scholar—to showcase research. For the purposes of an investigation into English education and how the literature classroom functions, it seems to me that a "poetic inquiry" must include the reading and dissemination of other texts. We are written, often wordlessly, by what we read. I've often thought that the encounters we have on the page are among the most deeply internal experiences possible; what and whom we meet in books are, in the psyche,

9 as true as those we encounter in the "real" world -and the literary figures stay with us

throughout our lives. They change with us as we revisit them, growing and becoming more our own somehow. The relationships we make with literature mirrors other

associations in our lives. This is at once a pivotal and impossible truth of literary

encounter and English education, which my dissertation returns to over and over again:

that in making a relation with a text, we are finding our way around self and world as well. Thus it seems to me that using the texts of others is an original and vital form of

arts-based inquiry.

It is necessary to make a qualification about how I choose to engage with the poetry

on the level of literary criticism. Although I speak a great deal about what the poems mean to my readings, how I appreciate them, what I think they have to say to me and

about all of us, I rarely talk about the formal aspects of poetry-metre, style, etc. This is not because I consider these qualities unimportant. Any serious reading of worthwhile poetry -and I talk a great deal about what this might mean—takes into consideration poetic tropes and form. I believe that part of the elegance of poetry is how language is used in often primal, rhythmic ways to express deep and human thinking. A lot of the magic happens when stylistic constraints and linguistic rules enhance the shock of recognition a text offers. This is a subject upon which much can be said. From the perspective of my work, and how a conversation about ourselves might come from a given reading, appreciation of poetic device comes after the initial grabbing of interest.

I'm not sure if recognition of an iamb or a troche ever brought anyone back from the brink, but they do enhance the experience of literature and have the potential to allow the

10 self a sense of mastery, discovery and wonder. I am not ignoring these potentials; rather, I

think they are better saved for another exchange.

It is the question of this sustained interest in self, so necessary as a precondition for a meaningful encounter with the arts, that concerns me. Often, we hear critics speaking of

"losing oneself in a work of art; for the purpose of education, I think it is the return from this selflessness that is crucial for the making of meaning -individually and collectively—in classroom and curriculum. This is also where the poetic resides.

Thinking about this term -"the poetic"—is another preoccupation of my work. Often used but rarely thought about, writing from and about poetry quickly evolved into questions about what a poem might be, and what constitutes the poetic even as it exists off the page. This was another daunting task; I wanted to avoid any all-encompassing definition because, quite frankly, I think once we define something as "poetic" we not only diminish the object's "poeticness" but we also place unfair and artificial burdens upon its reception. Poetry seems to me to have very little to do with artificiality, and the types of engagements with literary study I value give license to deeply felt, truthful moments. Yet, I had a sense that it was possible somehow to approach some sort of definition that honours both individual reception and authenticity.

My answer came from psychoanalytic readings. By the time it happened, I was

surprised; the work had moved away from its original mandate of using that theory to question personal and public spaces. I'd come to think of the poetry as a more useful methodology for the study. Looking back, however, this seems to be an underestimation of both kinds of study and an attempt to do the kind of inauthentic classification I worried about in the first place. If life is both a social science and an art, if the poetic is to be

11 found on and off the page, the truths that speak to us must be embraced where they're

found. Allegiances are less important than the ongoing conversation, and an ability to

speak back to one's own heart. This may constitute the greatest lesson I've learned in the process of my graduate work.

Nonetheless, psychoanalysis and reading about it have proved invaluable. I'm

somewhat surprised that I did not earlier see the connections between poetry and the greater projects of psychoanalytic theory: both are an attempt to put into language a world of experiences that resist this practice. Josh Cohen suggests that any belief in the unconscious predicates a "zone of experience which dissolves all pretensions to stable and certain knowledge" (9) and later notes that the work of the unconscious is to function as "wily and assiduous exploiter of the intrinsic ambiguity of words" (40). Freud, too, notes the predestination of words to ambiguity; one need only reread Louis MacNeice's

"Snow" to note the synonymous parallels between poetry and psychoanalysis.

There are others that have occurred to me as I've worked. When read as theory, poetry asks its audience to "notice differently" what appears to be the most manifest of everyday details, to see again, more deeply, and demand a new meaning stemming from association and the linguistic tricks of overdetermined thinking. The poetic, and poetry, speak in a sensory language of the internal; theirs is the vocabulary of interiority. Poetry sees and speaks the world in the same way our innermost selves do; if we are honest, it speaks the language of the heart as well -those things we wish for and sometimes fear when we let ourselves be guided by an interior map. This is a fact not lost upon the poets and theorists of poetry; in Why Poetry Matters, Jay Parini states unequivocally that poetry must be considered in "psychological terms as well, regarding its project as an attempt to

12 link the conscious mind to deeper, even unconscious, levels of experience" (179). Other than psychoanalytic thinking, I have encountered very few paradigms that allow for the contradictions, condensations and displacements we find so readily in poetry and poetic prose. Both poetics and Freudian theory demand a generosity of listening and the

"courtesy" and "tact of heart" George Steiner calls for in reception (1989: 147). It seems little wonder, too, that both poetry and psychoanalysis can make people feel better; they both reach toward the theraputic as Beverley Southgate describes it -"provoking doubts and questioning the status and validity of what's otherwise too easily accepted unthinkingly as self-evident, natural, and inevitable" (Southgate 176)—as well as Richard

Rorty's -"aid to creating ourselves rather than to knowing ourselves" (Rorty 69).

It is my belief that the encounter with a self constantly waiting to be re-created and written anew through what we read and its place in a larger reality is at the heart of literary experience and therefore vital to English education; nothing is inevitable, the doubts and questions we read into texts define reader, word and world. The way these re­ creations happen occurs in the space of the poetic. The first chapter of my paper is a restatement of this problematic and some of the theories that have been useful starting- points in my own thinking about it. My inquiry into what the poetic moment might mean for education begins with thinking about poetry and my own education. Here, I also revisit the question of why someone might find the juxtaposition of reading poetry and poetic reading something of value -and when in the course of a life the subject might become a topic worthy of inquiry. In "Odi Et Amo," I go back into two textual classrooms in order to examine the place of emotionality and the genesis of teacher- student (and teacher-teacher) relations from poetic standpoints. It seemed a fair place to

13 visit, as much of my work questions how teaching approaches poetry -this second

chapter gives us teaching from the viewpoint of poetry, and what the poetic might mean

for teachers. My third chapter, "Reading Daydreams" follows the format of a variable set

of surveys; it examines some of the literature and the assumptions many students, teachers and student teachers face from what's been written about poetry as well as the implications of this robust industry. I use the metaphor of the "daydream" to showcase the indeterminate and slippery nature of reader response as well as how difficult it is to mandate a system of evaluation for the personal realm, even within the most casual of encounters. The chapter ends with five daydreams of my own. "If Just One Moment", my fourth chapter, returns to poetry as a genre amidst a larger set of artistic forms and asks in what ways the educational encounter with aesthetics can -or should—be seen as moral, just or equitable, a question that probes into the center of what we use poetry (and the arts) for in our own lives. Finally, "Snow and Alphabets" approaches the question of poetics: how it might be possible to reach a personal, individual definition in the face of mandated public and fiercely private readings. Throughout, I draw on theoretical readings and memory, poems and poetic passages to reshape conceptualizations of what seems to me to be important and universal in my own English education. This dissertation is made up of poetry spawning individual chapters that tell a story about the literary encounter -its

enchanting beginnings; its brush with the human emotions of love, hate and disappointment in the classroom; its struggle to find the courage to make and defend personal meaning against the interpretations of a larger world; its questions about the tensions between beauty and morality; the ways in which an internal poetics might define

itself in the public spaces of learning and creation.

14 The critical work and theorists I've drawn upon seem to me to fall into four distinct categories. The first includes primary sources of literature I've mentioned; not only does each chapter begin with and include poetry, there are also numerous references and quotations from other literary texts as well. Some of these might seem surprising at first glance —the writing of novelists such as Ursula K. LeGuin and Susan Vreeland appear alongside the likes of literary memoir by Azar Nafisi. It seems to me that in a body of writing modelled after an idealized English class, the appearance of literature as springboards for thought and ways of explaining learning is a vital component. Literature and reading are complex theoretical devices, capable of organizing an argument in polysemic ways that includes self-reflection, a tolerance of ambiguity and critique. In a post-modern context, it is both appropriate and unavoidable that the categories of critical theory and the work that has traditionally been the subject of its inquiry begin to inhabit a post-categorical location, together.

I found a number of literary and English education theorists very useful as well. Any discussion of the study of reading must include, either overtly or in a subtle way, a consideration of the ideas of Louise Rosenblatt. Her notion of "Reader Response" defined a generation of English teaching, creating a place for personal receptivity alongside the previously sacrosanct and untouchable class of textual exegesis. Rosenblatt did not suddenly appear out of a vacuum, however; her work respectfully breathes with the prior writings of scholars such as F. R. Leavis, Matthew Arnold and Wolfgang Iser.

Furthermore, the work of literaturists following Rosenblatt builds upon the foundations of

Reader Response Theory and its earlier underpinnings. Northrop Frye, John Willinsky,

Deanne Bogdan and Dennis J. Sumara grow from this tradition and from the work of one

15 another. Sumara and Bogdan in particular have been useful in thinking about the relations we make with literature, a complicated alchemy of interiority forced into the world by

demands as institutionalized as curriculum and as personal as the human urge to discuss

our readings. Each of these writers offers more philosophically than I could engage with

in my dissertation, and my response to their work is limited to how it serves the questions of poetic encounter in reading experiences and education. Alice Pitt reappears, concerned with the personal stakes we carry to any educational encounter -and especially the literary one. I've also taken a great deal from writers interested in the practical and

esoteric theories of poetry. They offer interesting places from which to begin a discussion,

and provide many interesting detours in what seemed at first glance to be straightforward

arguments. Poetry rarely works that way, and it seems appropriate to be reminded of this

fact by the names of Rukeyser, Rich and Empson. They are theorists and poets, teachers and readers alike; their writing is hauntihgly beautiful and a fusion of language and thought often bordering on the mystical -proof that the poetic exists outside the constraints of stanza and verse. Further proof comes from authors such as William Gass, who sees in the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke a philosophy and an ontology, a way of taking beauty to reading and living the world.

Literature is, after all, an art form; for this reason, I've drawn a great deal from writers who are concerned with aesthetics and the arts. Often, these writers themselves struggle to find where literature fits within the larger caste we call the "fine" arts. John Carey's theories about what makes art at all carries over to his radical opinion that literature is

among the "finest" of those arts; I found his work invaluable in my discussion of our own

approaches to literature in the realm of the "useful" as well as the morality of aesthetics.

16 Elaine Scarry is also concerned with art and notions of the "good" -her work plays a pivotal role for me in defining the intersection between what we hope to mandate in

literature curriculum and the more messy terrain of private aesthetic experience. Other

aesthetic theorists who contributed to my thinking on this issue include Jay Parini and

Mark Edmunson, both of whom wrestle with why the arts -and reading in particular— matter. Elliot Eisner, the pioneer of research into arts-education, was an important source

for data describing both what we wish the arts to do in education, and where they

sometimes fail us. Finally, in this category I will include Alberto Manguel, a writer of remarkable and poetic grace. In Manguel's hands, not only is reading a transformative act -reading about reading becomes an aesthetic moment akin to wandering through an

art gallery or hearing a favourite sonata performed live. In answering questions of how, where and when we read, these writers approach the larger issue of why we read -an

important concern for thinking about the invisible contracts of classroom and curriculum.

Of course, it is finally the psychoanalytic thinkers who have provided an integral

framework for this discussion -perhaps for no other reason than the one I've already outlined: that psychoanalysis and reading share a similar space of interiority, and the

inner world of reading exists parallel to the interiority of the mind. "Surely we can understand that we take reading seriously, precisely because we take psychical life

seriously," writes Deborah Britzman in After Education (148). The link is undeniable.

Psychoanalytic thinkers and writers like Deborah Britzman, Paula Salvio and Shoshana

Felman provided a basis from which to launch a conversation about the links between

literature and interiority, and how this interiority translates into larger narratives of

experience. I've used psychoanalytic thinking about education to look at how poetry

17 might interpret the adventure of classroom life as well. Adam Phillips and Christopher

Bollas both concern themselves with notions of "the poetic" and "poetry," so the work of these talented writers helped shape my ideas of how to define these words within a specific context. They often asked the questions I sometimes decided to try not to answer.

(I found this was often the most vital moments in my writing.) Madeleine Grumet, another psychoanalytic thinker, provided a useful definition of "beauty" and how it might encounter curriculum. Finally, I am quite proud to note that it is in the writing of

Sigmund Freud himself where I found the one crucial clue to help my argument come to terms with a questions I felt compelled to address: a comprehensive and yet determinedly individualistic definition of the "poetic", a term that seemed to me must be available to everyone in a myriad of forms -and because of this created real problems to define.

While the crux of my definition of the poetic is based in the psychoanalytic -how the apparatus of the unconscious "listens" to the world, for example—poetics and psychoanalytic thinking do not always meet. Where psychoanalysis sees a limit to language, poetry finds integrity. The failure of theory is perhaps the beginning of affect - where thinking has been, there feeling shall go. The imbalance between celebrated educational theorists and textual fragments or lesser-known writers is neutralized in the equation of poetic thinking; what grabs the attention, what gets a reaction and spawns dialogue is at the heart of any theory about the unconscious, and the subject of much poetry. The use of this imbalance is vital for thinking about the project of poetic education. As Adrienne Rich notes, it is the "fusion of experience with imagination that is the core of poetry" (1993: 147). It may be the core of theory -and especially psychoanalytic theory—as well; "The literary can never falsify the psychoanalytic,"

18 Adam Phillips writes. For him, the literary "never revises a psychoanalytic insight" (2006:

47). Any apparent space between theory and the poetics of fragment thus becomes a question of integrity, a puzzle to be pondered by each reader as they deliberate upon why such a schism seems readable to their experience of text and world.

Throughout the dissertation, I've also noticed a number of sources that seem much more difficult to define or categorize; in a project concerned with poetics, these are interesting and worthy of thought. What is happening when, in the course of a quasi- rational argument, a source enters the discussion in the form of historiography -such as G.

R. Elton's The Practice of History—or Phyllis Rose's feminist literary criticism Parallel

Lives: Five Victorian Marriages—or, even more seemingly random, my five own wishes concluding the chapter I've called "Reading Daydreams Together"? In a 2001 interview,

A. S. Byatt comments that in recent years, literature has become "pseudo-scientific, and I have taken to reading real science as a kind of cure for that, to see people really thinking.. .about things, real things and not imaginary, constructed, over-related things.

And I think this is intensely liberating" (Bridge 44). Byatt's argument is that writing, and reading, when it is sincere and integral to itself, often takes on an organic quality - leading itself in directions charted only by the process of thought itself. This is an exciting prospect, because when we witness "people really thinking about things" we learn more about the people, and perhaps something about ourselves as well. In the seemingly random deviations from categorical theory and the "pseudo-scientific" argument, the reader is presented an opportunity to read something that is offered out of a personal and primal need. The opportunity for shared dialogue begins; a poetic experience becomes possible.

19 This methodology of what has come to be called "literary biography" has a grounded

foundation in both literary studies and curriculum theory. Wolfgang Iser notes the

impossibility of extracting the reader from textual geography; in his thinking, the position

of the reader is a determining factor in how the meaning of reading is constructed -and vice versa. He notes:

We are situated inside the literary text. The relation between text and reader is therefore quite different from that between object and observer; instead of a subject-object relationship, there is a moving viewpoint which travels along inside that which it has to apprehend. (109)

William Pinar takes the reading-as-autobiography a step farther in his exploration of the relationality of self to knowing and the contextualization of these ideas within the

concept of currerre -the "running of the course" at the etymological root of curriculum

(Pinar & Grumet 1976; Pinar & Reynolds 1992). Using the literary, and the ways in which readers -and students—use what they read to create the necessary roadmaps for knowledge relation, Pinar strives to use "autobiographical" notions of reading as a balanced approach to curriculum, a way toward the self situated between oppressive notions of the institution and overly-abstract theoretical dogma. "Extraction from reality," he writes, "from unconscious, conditioned participation in oppressive political reality to

self-reflexive, active movement in order to alter that reality is an important function of the autobiographic work that is the method of currere" (Pinar 1981: 439). It is literature

that operates at the heart of reading-self functioning at the base of this ecology; between

reader (self) and text is the key to connection between learning and world:

In this simple connection is suggested the relationship we hope to uncover. Just as

20 there is one physical continuum between the text and the body of the reader, there is a lived continuum between the text, the reader's immediate response to the text, and his biographic situation. (I am not interested in literary criticism here. I am not attempting to portray phenomenologically the act of reading, insofar as that act involves an "empty" self, an unself-conscious reader giving himself to the voice become print on the page. Such reading is necessary when the motive is only clear comprehension of the text. To understand the relation of the text to the reader, to suggest in what sense reading can be liberative activity, involves a subtle shift of focus from the text itself to the continuum that is the text, the reader's immediate response, and the biographic situation.) (1981:441)

Pinar's reluctance to be interested in "literary criticism" is noteworthy; however, his assertion that reading self is somehow integrally tied in with lived biography, that these components are part of a much larger equation of learning and that the method of currere for thinking about how curriculum narrates and is narrated by the literary -and the poetic—places my work in a tradition of educational theory. While I am interested in literature specifically, this notion of reading biography extends to other classrooms as well; a history textbook, algebraic equation or biology dissection manual are as influenced by the interplay between text and reader as a play by Shakespeare. My notion of the poetic reaches toward those spheres as well. In any subject, the conflation of what we read with who we are when we read it creates and recreates each of those subjectivities. This is the imaginative; it is the poetic.

Foreclosed amidst this transaction is a privileged theoretical perspective; when reading becomes an act of autobiography, the world becomes, itself, a personal text. The details of life -those tiny intricacies that have so often been the subject, the core of poetry—join the mundane, the ordinary, the invisible facets of life and demand our attention and awareness, a relation beginning in the mysterious corners of self. Nathan M. Szajnberg writes of how essential it is to "attend to the subjective curriculum that is evoked by any

21 objective curriculum in order to facilitate learning: we have feelings about what we are

studying, whether about the origins of our universe, ourselves or our feelings" (Szajnberg

4). This is currere, a course allowed to run its own path, demanding attention and

learning, sharing, thinking, dialogue. Poetic inquiry. The poetics of currere.

A creative, ambiguous, sometimes unruly methodological apparatus is needed to write

in a vein mirroring such poetics. The integrity of the process exists in the fact that, while the text is sometimes indefinite, sometimes more open-ended than traditional research work in the social sciences, it gives the reader a kind of credit -a faith that they, too, will have an experience of poetics in making the connections and following them along a

course of learning, thinking and dialogue stemming from what is given. Texts move

along our thinking; their context exists in the meaning we give them as the path shapes

itself.

Psychoanalysis is a useful tool to augment this methodological perspective, and less is

sacrificed by either side than one might expect. The relation between psychoanalysis and

literature, as noted, is solid and neither detracts from the other. Adam Phillips suggests that "if psychoanalysis is not an applied science, perhaps it is an applied literature" (2006:

48) and later suggests that "the literary [is] at once both a refuge from the generalities of

theory and a confirmation of them" (2006: 53). The danger, I think, comes from over- theorizing, from giving too much of an answer so that the path begins to run in an

artificial way. Not surprisingly, it is the poets who seem most threatened by this possibility. Adrienne Rich stands up, quite defiantly, for the other side of theory:

What's also incompatible with such a poetics -with the nature of poetry itself—is the professional project of defining, labeling, categorizing, historicizing, ranking, instrumentalizing the poem. Yes, the history of art is

22 needed, along with other historical and material context; yes, engaged and astute social criticism is wanted; but the rush to theory, the use of the work of art simply as a springboard to intellectual acrobatics and intramural academic debates, the psychobiographizing of the imagination, has been a fever to colonize and commoditize.. .it would subvert the agency and potency of poetry in the life of collective transformation. (1993: 272)

The text must find a way to stand for itself or not at all, and work done on or about it must somehow honour the integrity of affect found therein. That this project is compatible with psychoanalysis is to be found in the work of Mark Edmunson, a

literature teacher, writer and psychoanalytic thinker. Echoing Rich, he calls for ways of reading and writing that speak to "maximum advocacy" for a text; the job of literary

studies and the study of the literary is to find ways to allow a text to speak for itself.

"Freud has seen that Shakespeare poses the question 'What is life?' and he has done his best to construe his answer." Edmunson continues:

And this, in fact, is what literary criticism ought to do. A valuable literary critic is not someone who debunks canonical figures, or who puts writers into their historical contexts, or, in general, one who propounds new and brilliant theories of interpretation. A valuable critic, rather, is one who brings forth the philosophy of life latent in major works of art and imagination. He makes the author's implicit wisdom explicit, and he offers that wisdom to the judgment of the world. (77)

For Edmunson, the English teacher honours currere by speaking/or the text being taught, and then allows students to counter-offer what the text denotes. In this thesis I have attempted to find a voice and a philosophy of life in the literary through both

content and method. I read theory and literature, experience and memory, all on equal

ground in order to allow them to lead where learning and thinking might go. It may well

23 be that a graduate programme in a faculty of education, like the literature classroom

Edmunson writes about -and the ones I remember—is a breed of those special

interdisciplinary and authentic places where one might, to use Ted Aoki's phrase, listen

thoughtfully with the "attunement to the care that silently dwells" (Aoki 22). At its best, I

am hopeful that my thesis is an example of the rich integrity Aoki and Edmunson dream possible in curriculum studies and literary education.

"That order of thinking that is painting," writes Christopher Bollas in The Mystery of

Things, "or composing, is the structure of transformation that transubstantiates internal

objects from the deep solitude of an internal world into altered external actuality" (174).

The currency of this exchange from internal to external is ambiguity; it is at once the price and language of this translation. Whether in literature, art or psychoanalysis, the

spaces in which we find the astonishments that lead us to experiences of ourselves inhabit that human obscurity, that little bit of the unknown tucked so often beneath the unseen

familiar. I tried very hard in writing this dissertation to honour that ambiguity, often at the cost of logic and surety. In an essay concerned with the nature of poetry and poetic

encounter, it seems to me that tidy argumentation or solipsism left little space for the very

subject of my enquiry. What's left over in the space of where certainty might have been is probably the key to poetic readings; it is, rather, this notion of the variable interiority of things -the idea that they may, in fact, be different than they are—and the generous reception necessary for their modification into moments of identity —that really defines

the notion of the moving encounters I've tried to write about.

What's interesting to me about this effect of ambiguity is the residue left behind in

almost every case of its appearance. Perhaps a consequence of the "gentle self

24 observation" I mentioned earlier, in place of certitude came a sensitive openness, a willingness to revisit moments and words and texts that somehow held the opportunity - the invitation—to make meaning from the affects they imbibed. This is, I realize, the essence of the kind of conversation I hoped my dissertation to be. In that sense, I've stayed true to my model; this thesis resembles, quite a bit, those English courses that somehow mattered and continued to matter. At its heart is an exchange between text and reading, world and reader. Writing about the often-pondered parallels between psychoanalysis and literature, Ellen Spitz notes that in both

something new and highly significant is created in the dialogue between analyst and analysand, reader and text, audience and work of art, and that this new and evolving construct, whatever one wishes to call it, is the product of joint authorship. (163)

What I wish to call it is a dialogue, and one that I hope will continue for me in my teaching and readings, and for the readers who come to this work as well. I wish to call it a conversation, as various and poetic as its participants, fumbling in the process of finding words for the world, somehow awake and warm and alive in the space between snow and roses.

25 Lori Sewell's Notes: An Early Biography of Poetic/curricular Encounter

And it was at that age.. .Poetry arrived in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where it came from, from winter or a river. I don't know how or when, no, they were not voices, they were not words, nor silence, but from a street I was summoned, from the branches of night, abruptly from the others, among violent fires or returning alone, there I was without a face and it touched me. --from "Poetry", by Pablo Neruda. Trans. Alistair Reid.

Two distinct moments rise to consciousness when I consider my earliest encounters at the juncture between poetry and education.

The first happened in my freshman year of high school, and it was a turning point in my life. I can't remember the time of year -it must have been later than September but certainly earlier than April. I was wandering the school halls during a lunch period. I don't remember if I was alone or with a group of friends. The memory places me alone in a deserted school hallway and this is almost certainly untrue.

I'd been having a good year. High school had turned out to be far less frightening than

I'd thought it would be; always small for my age, I'd spent the summer worrying about everything from making new friends to fearing for my physical safety. Stories circulated

about students being put in lockers or drowned in toilets. What went on in the locker rooms belonged in the unspeakable terrain of horror movies. Worse yet were the lonely 26 souls who ate lunch alone, unable to find friends or themselves, ostracized for some deliberate failing of choice or inadvertent failure of nature or genetics. There were also stories of heartless teachers who assigned inhumane hours of homework for punitive reasons of unknowable cruelty, forcing their students to reach -and fail—for intangible academic success. I worried about survival in the cafeteria and in the classroom.

The reality of high school proved unexpected. I'd made a good friend and we often ate lunch together along with a group of what seemed to me to be friendly and intelligent people. While my physical size didn't change until I turned seventeen three years later, phys ed. class -while not a cheery fairy tale—hadn't materialized into a nightmare. The teachers were more approachable than the summer's stories painted, and homework was -so far—manageable.

And there was English class.

Nothing prepared me for Grade Nine English. Almost from the first class, the Teacher seemed to me like a sort of divine gate-keeper, a man who had somehow read so much as to be able to make a living reading and finding ways to talk about what he'd read. He would come in each afternoon wearing a full grey double-breasted suit with vest, joke off-handedly —and perhaps just a bit inappropriately, as if he shared a secret acquaintance with the class— and then pick up a piece of chalk and open discussion. The curriculum that year read like many freshmen Literature classes from all over North America; we read short stories, The Hobbit, Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew and Du Maurier's

Rebecca. It was during that novel -right in the middle of reading it, in fact, when the author and the language and the plot offered up a surprise so shocking to me I'd found myself holding my breath even as I reread the paragraph over and over again—that I had

27 a profound and painful desire in the form of one thought: "This is what I want to do with

my life. For the rest of my life."

It was a vaguely formed wish at the time, and I was overwhelmed by the odds against

it. I was only just starting in high school; grades seemed to be something mysterious and

elusive and I had no idea how to maintain them in order to become worthy of what I

wanted; I wasn't even sure how one could make a profession from reading short of

usurping the role of my idolized double-breasted English Teacher, and he seemed out of

my league anyway.

But the desire was powerful and I lived with the aching pull of it daily, sustained by

the small successes of life in high school and the compelling dream of afternoon English

class. And then there was that lunchtime in the hall, on the first floor of my school. I was

walking somewhere and my eye was drawn to the floor by something that reminded me

of a honeybee.

When I investigated, I noticed a small booklet. Its cover was striped yellow and black, with a blue bubble announcing a large white title: Bronte: Wuthering Heights, Notes.

Beneath this was the word: Coles, and a price of $3.95.1 picked it up and looked at the

coarse, thick pages of writing. Intertwined with the yellow lines on the cover, in clumsy,

overly-stylized lettering, was the name "Lori Sewell" over and over again. The name was printed again in stern block lettering on the first page of the pamphlet. A warning: Give

this back.

For a moment I thought about how I might find Lori Sewell and return her Bronte:

Wuthering Heights $3.95 Coles notes to her. I'd heard of these "Coles Notes" before but

the English Teacher had warned us off them saying they were a form of cheating, an

28 unfortunate short-cut for the damned and misguided (his words) and that we didn't really

need them anyway. Maybe Lori Sewell did, though. After all, Wuthering Heights was a book I knew the grade twelve students were reading. Things were more difficult for them; they studied algebra and calculus and something called "trig" in math, sex education in

gym class and the French Revolution in history -the rest of us had a year or more left with the familiar, taken-for-granted territory of the Canadian experience. It was very possible that what I held in my hand was nothing short of a lifeline for someone.

And then I began to flip through the pages. The first portion of the book was comprised of chapter summaries and a small commentary on each chapter. I thought to myself that it would be interesting to have access to commentary on things I'd read, but

since Wuthering Heights wasn't something I'd encountered the commentaries meant little.

The last half of the notes were more interesting, containing character sketches -these people, Nellie and Catherine and Heathcliff and Hareton, must have been the most interesting characters ever, just like in Rebeccal—along with notes on style, some questions (and their corresponding answers) on the text and a large essay on the critical contexts of Bronte's novel.

It was, however, a chart on page 85 that really got my attention. Across the top row of the chart were characters' names; down the side of the columns were corresponding headings as follow:

General Description

Central Motivation

Principal Actions

29 Principal Emotions and Attributes

At the Beginning of Nelly's Narration

At the End of the Novel

The cells contained fascinating information. I especially enjoyed the "At the End of the Novel" category, which read for the five main characters of the text: Dead through self-starvation; Dead through illness; Dead through alcoholism; Dead through illness;

Dead through illness.

Things really were tough in Grade Twelve.

Later that night, reading through the chart in more detail, I discovered something interesting about the categories "Central Motivation" and "Principle Emotions and

Attributes". I hadn't read Wuthering Heights yet, but I began to think about how I might construct a chart like this for the novels I had read in our class. This was a pleasurable activity, so I wanted to continue even after I'd run out of literary characters. I began to mentally build a chart for the people in my life. What were my parents' "Central

Motivations"? What word would I use to describe my brother's "Principal Emotion"? I struggled to come up with a description for "Attributes" thinking about my teachers.

I was amazed by the detail of my mental chart, and how enjoyable it was to think about life in this way. My world and the existence I inhabited within it was like a novel. It followed the same conventions as Rebecca and Wuthering Heights. Thrilled with the idea that my life was a narrative, it would be years before I made the distinction that literature was designed to imitate life rather than the other way around. Deanne Bogdan calls this

30 "the subsumption of life by literature" (Bogdan 87). At the time, I would have thought

the point irrelevant.

Lori Sewell's chart served me well. I began to think of each novel and short story we

studied according to its criteria. I mastered the curriculum essentials of character, setting

and plot this way, and the thinking served me through the rest of my high school

English -and, to be honest, sometimes history—studies. I advanced to an enriched-level

class and continued to love it. Better yet, I'd discovered a way to see the world, a

dialogue I could have with myself that made sense of the experiences and people I

encountered. When I think back, I must have been aching for such an approach. I began

to buy Coles Notes for every novel I encountered. They became a kind of textual artifact

to me, something to be mined for treasure -new ways of seeing the world and

understanding my life— completely independent of the works they described. In

November of twelfth grade, I opened the first pages of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights

with great trepidation, anxious to discover if the novel lived up to its companion volume

of notes, my primal relic.

I never met Lori Sewell but I also never forgot what she brought to me. Her Coles

Notes Wuthering Heights chart helped me to discover a methodology of reading the

world and making sense of the people in it. It's a tactic that probably operates

unconsciously in me today. I have mental charts of each of the novels on my high school

curriculum -a reading list not unlike those all over the Western world. I can name them

still: The Razor's Edge; Hamlet; A Separate Peace; The Diary of Anne Frank; The

Scarlet Letter; The Hobbit; Macbeth; Lord of the Flies; Romeo and Juliet; Wuthering

31 Heights. Many of these are beloved texts populated with characters thought of as friends.

They remind me of people I know. I dream of them sometimes.

I can remember only one poem from high school.

In his book Private Readings in Public: Schooling the Literary Imagination, Dennis

Sumara asks us to move beyond a "transactional" model of reading in which literary curriculum demands a triangulated paradigm of student who studies text to discover meaning, a third article somehow outside the previous two. Rather, Sumara augments what has traditionally been called a "Reader Response" approach, suggesting that "the meaning evoked by the literary imagination is not to be found in the reader or the text, but in relations between the reader and a world that contains the text and the reader"

(221). This model simultaneously demands and assumes an interaction between text and subject. "The literary fiction depends upon the personal engagement of the reader in order for the literary imagination to become invoked," he writes.

For the literature curriculum to work toward the creation of a correlation between the self that is commonly called "reader" and a larger context containing both that self and the text is a radical and important way to think about the work of teaching and learning

English literature. In a sense, this new form of curriculum asks the student of the literary to wonder how a given text might change -or leave untouched—their understanding of, and very being in the world. My encounter with Lori Sewell's Wuthering Heights notes was an innocent and unconscious moment in which a literary imagination made a relation between a text -or a way of reading a text, a basic literary criticism—a self and a world.

Something happened when I read that chart on page 85; the text initiated a reaching out. I

32 count myself as lucky that the world reached back. A relation was made and nothing was ever the same.

Little credit is given to Sumara's idea when we state that it is possible to learn as much about ourselves as a book when a text triggers something within us. It is difficult to assume a credible discrediting of this idea for anyone interested in how reading touches our inner worlds. To assume, however, that literature curriculum might work toward a relation between self, text and a world containing both alters and reinvigorates a subject forced more and more often to justify its own relevance. The Ontario Secondary

Curriculum is punctuated with language suggestive of this sort of justification, calling for learning outcomes that in some way have currency in the real worlds of school and community. Students are continually asked to use "appropriate words, phrases and terminology" for an "intended audience" as they "communicate more effectively" while

"identifying specific purposes for reading." In fairness, many outlines do ask students to consider their "understandings of text.. .by making rich and increasingly insightful connections between the ideas in them and personal knowledge, experience and insights."

However, the instruction-manual style with which the curriculum reads -not to mention its prescriptive models and the assumption of testable outcomes—seems worlds away from Sumara's intended relation between reader, text and world. And it is even more distant from my experience with Lori Sewell's notes.

What Sumara's model asks for is a move away from the exemplar of unexamined narration of encounter with text toward an understanding of the self within a larger sphere.

It is essentially a rethinking of identity as narrated by different factors. Anthony Kerby describes identity as

33 .. .not the persistence of an entity, a thing (substance, subject, ego), but a meaning constituted by a relation of figure to ground or part to whole. It is an identity in difference constituted by framing the flux of particular experiences by a broader story. (46)

The work of teaching and studying literature thus becomes an encounter with this larger narration. The sealed and independent worlds of a text and the private encounter is only a

small part of the meeting. Wondering how a work might change the reader's relation with the world in which both exist raises important and complex -but no less compelling and personal—questions about pedagogy, education and cognition. Who are we in relation to the text, and what does the text tell us about ourselves? What relation can we make with others who read with us? How might we think about the role of the teacher differently in

a world containing student reader, text and teacher? As I discovered in Grade 9, when reading literature becomes a methodology of both knowing and relationality, there is much in the world to be read.

It is important to note the prevalence of the idea of narrative in this discussion. "To the extent that we impose some narrative form onto our lives," writes Phyllis Rose, "each of us in the ordinary process of living is a fitful novelist, and the biographer is a literary critic" (Rose 6). Indeed, each of us must "impose some narrative form onto our lives"; the risk of not doing so is to face the peril of madness (Butler 2001). To organize the world by plot is to exist within the fundamental stricture of life: temporality. "When we

say a ticking clock goes 'tick-tock,'" notes Jonathan Culler, "we give the noise a fictional

structure, differentiating between two physically identical sounds, to make tick a beginning and tock an end" (Culler 79). Narrative is important because it humanizes time.

34 The weight held by narrative form -by the idea of plot—is integral to the approach of curriculum and pedagogy to literary education. Sumara speaks of "literary fictions" in his post-transactional model; fiction implies the necessary device of plot. Novels make up the bulk of my own memory of high school English. The notes for Wuthering Heights captured my imagination, but I remain unaware to this day whether such commentary exists for the poetry of e. e. cummings, Robert Frost or Muriel Rukeyser. I have seen

Coles Notes for Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, but the criticism functions much the same for these epic poems as it does in the 1984 Wuthering Heights edition, focusing on narrative plot development, character analysis, setting and theme. In fact, when I think back to my English courses in high school, these motifs dominated the study of all the texts we encountered. Plays, too, were taken up in terms of character, setting and plot.

While there was some discussion of performance and theatre history, the plays of

Shakespeare were generally approached with the same methodologies as Roberston

Davies' Fifth Business and Du Maurier's Rebecca. I had a sense that something different was going on, that more "reading between the lines" was required, but the curriculum seemed to regard plays as novels written in a different way.

*

There was an exam in Grade Eleven English that stays in my mind. It included questions on the novels we'd read, a section on grammar and a "sight passage" asking us to analyze a poem. We had no idea of the poem beforehand but the teacher had assured us it was one "we hadn't seen before."

35 The exam held few surprises, containing three-hours' worth of "identify and state the

importance of questions concerned with the novels we'd read, identification of

quotations from Romeo and Juliet, subject-predicate recognition and an essay question.

As I turned the page to the final section of the test, I wondered what the sight passage might be. It was Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ozymandias":

I met a traveler from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert.. .near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: 'My name is Ozymandias, kind of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

I read the poem through twice before I realized how terrified I was by it. My first thought was an association with a song I sometimes heard on my parents' radio station called "Dust in the Wind". The song frightened me as well, but not so much as this poem.

Here, I was confronted -in the middle of the sterile, familiar routine of my Grade Eleven

English exam—with my own mortality and the hopelessness of time's erosion. There was no beguiling music to dull the painful truth of Ozymandias' fate; no cheerful radio personality appeared to announce the name of the song and promise more to come after a

commercial break. There obviously was no more to come. I was left alone with the cruel

arrogance of an ancient dictator and its complete failure to save him from what Camille

36 Paglia calls "nature's total victory over culture" (Paglia 72). If the great and powerful

Ozymandias was to be left broken and alone in desert obscurity, I realized there was no hope at all for me. Or my friends. My family. My teachers. We were just too small. We were all to be lost.

Dutifully and not knowing what else to do, I answered the questions on the exam. This was a 14-line sonnet similar to the Petrarchan form; it contained both an octave and a sestet; it was written, like most sonnets and Shakespearean plays, in iambic pentameter; the rhyme scheme was A-B-A-B-A, C-D-C-E-D, E-F-E-F. The memory of writing out the rhyme scheme and trying in vain to think of something interesting to say about

Shelley's concluding rhyming couplets suggests to me that we must have studied a great deal about poetry in that course. None of it, however, mattered. My vulnerability was absolute; I felt completely unsatisfied by my answers to this ruthlessly personal and eviscerating passage. The rhyme scheme offered no protection; knowing the lines to be iambic pentameter left me as vulnerable to time's "godless apocalypse" (Paglia 75) as

Ozymandias himself.

I do not remember how I did on that exam, or my final grade for the course. What I know, what I remember clearly, is how my hands were shaking as I turned in the paper and headed home. It was the first time a poem had moved me to terror. I was completely unprepared for the intensity of Shelley's piece. Familiarity has made "Ozymandias" more passable for me, but the poem stays with me as a reminder of something frightening. It is an experience I am able to narrate, but as a memory it is far from safe. The poem's appearance on my Grade Eleven English exam remains an enigma, and I realize I am angry at the teacher for putting it there.

37 *

This incident is an interesting and confusing moment in thinking about the difficulties mandated curriculum encounters when it approaches poetry. Even in the memory of my meeting with the poem, I can see that there was no external failure. The teacher had clearly done her job quite well; I was able to take the poem apart stylistically, talk about its historical context and easily map the linguistic structures, tropes and form of the piece.

My visceral reaction to the meaning of the poem suggests that my comprehension levels were at least developmentally appropriate to the expectations of the exam. The failure of that moment -manifested in the literal horror of a 17-year old student as he encountered life's unrelenting transience on an inopportune occasion—was an internal, psychical one.

The shortcoming came because Shelley's poem triggered an affect and our study of poetry had done nothing to prepare for it, defend against it or allow it to be worked through, cognizable or classified. I had no way to make a livable relationship between the poem and a world in which we both existed. On that afternoon, in that exam, I suffered a failure of "bringing the events of the world into poetry, and poetry into the world"

(Herzog and Kaufman xv).

What had we been taught that was to be tested during that sight passage? Certainly, specific facts about poetry -its history, how it might be recognized, what it might sound like. To think that an "enriched" eleventh grade English class was tested on which words rhyme in the verse does little for what I think back on as -hopefully—a fairly comprehensive high school literary education. Similarly, knowing the difference between

38 Elizabethan and Petrarchan sonnets hardly approaches the tautology of "poetry"; how

might that difference save anyone's life, express their feelings of love or hate or dread?

What news of oneself can be found in a rhyme scheme? "Many learned books on poetry

have been written," writes Czeslaw Milosz in The Witness of Poetry "and they

find.. .more readers than does poetry itself (Milosz 3). This same phenomenon seems to me to characterize the experience of that fateful exam; we were asked to critique and

classify poetry without really encountering the poem. I had tools to meet the poem head

on; what was unexpected was the arrival of the poetic.

There are, perhaps, many reasons for this critical circumnavigation. William Flesch notes that "students aren't very comfortable looking at a poem on a page" (Flesch 184) while Joseph and Lucy Milner, in their important English Education textbook Bridging

English, tell us that new teachers are often faced with students who "barely notice poetry" and who will "consent to a handshake with it but rarely to a kiss." They note, too, that their own students -presumably future literature teachers— "often bring strong biases to poems, and those biases are often more negative than positive" (150). For both

students and new teachers of literature, poetry is approached with a sense of resistance

and trepidation; students are uncomfortable, indifferent and/or afraid. Their teachers bring preconceived anxieties, perhaps from their own experiences as students, to the

genre.

Natalie Goldberg suggests that poetry has been traditionally taught "as though the poet has put a secret key in his words and it is the reader's job to find it" (31). Knowing that poetry works differently -and perhaps less intuitively—than narrative, the suggestion that

a poem might be a coded puzzle might undoubtedly at times feels both intimidating and

39 overwhelming to students attempting to succeed academically and teachers who strive to meet mandated teaching outcomes. In excluding the complexities of the poetic, the rush of affect is diffused, leaving the student free to fear the unsolved puzzle while the teacher worries about failures in elucidation and transmission of the "secret key". But the affect returns. Poetry often approaches an intensely personal topography; readers come to poetry with a sense that something important, personal and larger-than-life is about to be encountered. That they may miss the point, find it irrelevant or, worst of all, discover that they are incapable of understanding the message being presented to them might well raise any number of defenses. "An over-stocked mind is amassing secret reserves against phantasized attacks or the fear of inner impoverishment," writes Mary Jacobus in

Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading. "So much for indiscriminate readers" (29).

And so much for the tabulae rasae so often presumed to be the minds of uninitiated young scholars waiting to be filled by benevolent educational programming. With such

"negative biases" faced by both students and teachers, it is little wonder that curriculum should fall back on the safety of historical contextualization and rhyme scheme.

There is another problem faced on both sides of the classroom. Because poetry often speaks in a personal, almost psychical language about issues from the private realm -

Shelley's "Ozymandias" is an excellent example of a piece that reaches toward the heart of a deeply important and delicate concern to each person: their own transient mortality—the larger problem for both students and teachers is not resistance to poetry or misunderstood poems; indeed, it is almost normative practice to decry these phenomena.

It is a far more precarious moment when a reader does grasp a poem's larger affair. What might have happened if "Ozymandias" had been studied in our class? How would my

40 own intense and shocked reaction to the poem have disrupted, derailed or dislocated the teacher's lesson plan or the class' expectations for a "normal" period of English? Would my own terror, triggered by the poem, have upset what was mandated by ministry guidelines and the personal desires of the teacher and other students to take place during a normal weekday afternoon? It is easy to understand that both teachers and students might prefer discussing a rhyme scheme or the differences between types of sonnets to the larger questions raised by that poem. The appearance of "Ozymandias" on the English exam -a format where there was no discussion whatsoever, and the exegesis of the passage remained rigidly controlled, under the strictest penalty for deviation—was perhaps the safest route to take.

However, it is in the personal potential of poetry where the greatest possibilities for experience and learning reside. Gerry LaFemina, a poet and teacher of literature, writes about this singularity. "Teaching literature means more than teaching structure," she tells us. "I teach influence and how the poem is a product of its literary time" (433). And yet, there is more to what LaFemina sees as a meaningful educational encounter with a specific work of poetry, including the choice of work to be

passionate about -and passionate in a different way than literary critics are. It is a passion born of the shared experience of composition in the art form, a passion for poems that invigorate.. .or challenge.. .1 pick poems that I care about to emphasize certain points; whether I am discussing form, meter, alliteration, extended metaphor, or the various arguments for a logic of the line, I pick poems as illustrations that interest me...In this way I supplement what the critic brings to students. (LaFemina 33)

This idea of "interest" is crucial. In The English Teacher's Companion: A Complete

Guide to Classroom, Curriculum and the Profession, Jim Burke suggests that English

41 teaching and curriculum must make a space for the personal in order for students to feel

investment and engagement with text. Burke uses the concept of ownership (Burke 134).

Nathalie Goldberg relies more on a paradigm of relationship to argue for how poetry might become meaningful for the classroom. "We should go closer and closer to the work," she writes. "Don't step away from their warmth and fire to talk 'about' them. Stay

close to them" (Goldberg 31). For each of these invested literature and literary educators, the idea of feeling -from interest to passion, from the investments of ownership to the uncertain underpinnings of relationship—remains at the elusive heart of the poetic

encounter with education.

Staying close to the "warmth and fire" of the personal literary encounter is, however, not a novel concept. Following the work of Louise Rosenblatt, the reader is almost unquestioningly seen as "the site of individual meaning and development" (Willinsky

114). Almost from her first published writings in the 1938 work Literature as

Exploration, Rosenblatt advocates the encounter between education and literacy as intimately transactional, an endeavor "to be judged in terms of its effect on the actual life of the student; the ultimate value of any knowledge depends on its assimilation into the very marrow of personality" (Rosenblatt 1978, 215). It is impossible to judge the widespread influence Rosenblatt's "Reader Response Theory" has had on English

Education; from my own work with students learning to teach the language arts, I would offer that I have rarely met a new teacher of literature who would argue with the fact that literature should be approached from an aesthetic of personal, lived and felt experience.

Dennis Sumara points out his own classroom observation that when English teachers use the technique of "tucking" -a periodic "thinking out loud" of a teacher's own feelings

42 and relevant experiences triggered by the reading of a text -student engagement, test scores and class attendance all improve noticeably (Sumara 193).

It is not, therefore, an overt lack of transactionality between poem and reader living at the heart of education's resistance to poetic engagement -although poetry and the

"tucking" method of Reader Response Theory have, at best, a difficult relationship. As noted, it is far easier to describe a rhyme scheme than the complexity of affect so often at the heart of a poem. Following Rosenblatt, students and teachers alike desire an intimacy with text -indeed, they may even feel an entitlement to it. Poetry asks of its readers a new approach to the intimate relationship, a different one than that offered by narrative. This struggle for a new approach has manifested itself educationally in three questions. The first is an issue of language and how reading words -and reading words together, in a classroom, when the words are sometimes mandated by a curriculum—might offer access to inner worlds. Turning from Paulo Friere's often quoted dictum of reading the word as reading the world (Friere 1970) we might instead wonder how the affect of poetry and poetic language can lead us to wonder, as D. W. Winnicott notes, about the work of keeping "inner and outer reality separate yet inter-related" (Jacobus 4), especially in the public spaces of literary curriculum and literature classroom. How might we find a vocabulary to talk about what reading poetry does to us that is acceptable to schooling?

The second question I want to ask about reading poetry in English classrooms is one that has become a concern of the "arts-based" education movement. This paradigm often privileges the creative act as a way of knowing; how is reading a poem such an act? In what ways is reading poetry a method for learning? What research is actualized when the space between feeling and intellect is encountered in an ode, a sonnet or a line of free-

43 verse that resonates deeply within its reader? Can this methodology be translatable to

systems of evaluation and mandated curricular guidelines?

In The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis,

Julia Kristeva wonders about the nature of astonishment. "I think we all need an

experience," she writes:

by which I mean something unknown, surprise, pain, or delight, and then comprehension of this impact. Is it still possible? Perhaps not. Perhaps charlatanism is today's currency, and everything is both spectacle and merchandise, while those we call marginal have definitively become excluded. In this context, obviously, one has to be very demanding, that is, disappointed. Personally, once over the disappointment, I prefer to welcome these experiences: I keep my curiosity on call, expectant. (11)

This notion of "curiosity" is, I think, the active component in my experience with

"Ozymandias" -although there was no disappointment. Kristeva is calling for an

encounter with text that goes beyond the easily categorized, the moment in which

something in us meets something equal in its refusal to conform. How might a poem be a

surprising, impacting educational experience different from the "spectacle and

merchandise" of plot? In what ways is it possible to encounter the abject readers of poetry, those left out of its eccentric range of rhythmical signifiers and affective

representations? How does what is novel about novels grab us in ways that we resist in

what is poetic about poetry? How can we talk about the ways it is possible to consider the

poem a "lived experience" as theorists such as Deanne Bogdan suggest, one that might

keep us curious about the world containing text and reader? (Bogdan xxx).

Each of these questions speaks directly to my experience of both Lori Sewell's

Wuthering Heights notes and my encounter with "Ozymandias" during the English exam. Somehow, and for some reason, I was able to integrate the Coles Notes' methodology of considering Bronte's classic novel -a book I wouldn't even read for another three years—into a way of seeing the world and living within it. This frame awaiting a canvas allowed for a type of dual thinking -or "metaxis"—to occur, a simultaneous doubling of perspective creating a bridge between self and self-in-world. I read the world before even reading the word; the approach suggested by the notes' rudimentary criticism became an immediate bridge between inner and outer realities for me. It needed no translation because seeing my own life as a story was an immediate and familiar vocabulary I could use to think about my encounters with people in the world and simultaneously explicate texts in English class. My memory of the encounter with "Ozymandias" suggests to me that no such bridge ever developed for either poetry or the poetic impulse. It may be that my own disposition is simply not one geared toward the intricacies of this genre, but I doubt that. Why else would I have reacted with such force to Shelley's poem? Clearly something inside me understood and reached out; that there was no connection coming from the other direction is the most interesting feature of this story. What lack in the world prevented me from ever finding a Coles Notes that could teach me how to react to poetry in a way allowing it to be integrated into my life? What was it about my own literary education -one that, as mentioned, I've always considered to be of a good quality—that left me unprepared for the power of a 14-line passage written exactly a century-and-a-half earlier? My English teachers of the time were educated at the height of Rosenblatt's influence, and their English-teacher training almost certainly carried the legacies of other great Literary Gurus of our time -including Matthew Arnold, F. R.

45 Leavis and Northop Frye. Where did the theories fall short for one student on that one

exam? What was left out?

If literary education is to aim toward an experience of transactionality between reader, text and a world containing both, there must be an equal and organic concern for all three elements. The world has a tendency to define and take care of itself. As much as we might like to think of texts as dependent on us for their existence, even the most devout reader must at some point admit that all experience exists in relation to something that carries a reality independent of our own. How we feel about what we read -and here I am talking about more than an immediate reaction to a specific encounter, an affect beyond Reader Response—might well tell us something important about ourselves. The ways in which we put into words our reactions and resistances to the literature we

encounter is the most important link among world, text and reader. I think, therefore, that looking at the personal ways we react to poetry, the means we use to define it and let it tell us something, the tactics we employ to resist it or hold it close to our own experience, has much to tell us about literature curriculum and literary education. These are crucial considerations for the English teacher and her classroom. This relation underpins the

space between the literary and the self. It reminds us what is elemental about reading and important about the connections of literature and life. And, perhaps most importantly, poetry has the power to reach that one faceless freshman student, wandering the lunchtime halls of a high school or returning alone, desperate for a new way of seeing the world. Waiting to be touched.

46 Odi et amo: Teachers, and Teachers of Poetry

A poem is what happens when an anxiety meets a technique. —Lawrence Durrell

Odi et amo. Quare idfaciam fortasse requires? Nescio, sedfieri sentio, et excrucior.

I hate and I love. Why I do this, perhaps you ask? I know not, but I feel it happening and I am tortured. --Catullus, Poem 85

There are differences between the people who consider themselves primarily teachers of poetry and those who consider themselves teachers. This became clear to me at a poetry conference in Sterling, Scotland after attending a panel called "Poetry and

Pedagogy." Three talented, eloquent poets who were also university professors spoke about the challenges of teaching their craft to English and Creative Writing students.

Some of their complaints were familiar to anyone involved in education: students resist new knowledge; students resist old knowledge; students are only concerned about grades and don't listen to criticism; students won't read. Other comments from the panel stayed with me as unique -ideas such as the distinctive tensions emotional response elicits in students, the place of language and art in a curriculum based on outcome/skill acquisition and how poetry might be made meaningful to new generations.

At the end of the presentations, a voice from the back announced itself as belonging to

an elementary school teacher. The voice then asked each of the participants for their

qualifications and teaching positions -each had a PhD; each held tenure-track positions at

47 established universities—and then wondered aloud how the information the panel had presented might be in any way applicable for her own classroom of third-graders. The presenters were generous in their responses, and several expressed their own uncertainties in poetry's translation to a younger audience of Language Arts students. In the hallway after the panel, however, other delegates were far less munificent to the teacher's question. Several mentioned that she seemed bitter or angry to make such demands on the panel; one even wondered aloud why an elementary school teacher would come to a conference on poetry at all.

As a student involved with English education and the preparation of future English and Literature teachers at different levels, I found myself unsettled and interested in the debate. There was also a sense of outrage that what teachers of poetry at the university do is so much more exclusive and important than the encounter with poetry in elementary and high schools. In fact, if students had rich and successful early encounters with poetry, wouldn't many of the crises that so worried the university professors take on more interesting dimensions?

It became even more evident to me, as I joined a few of these discussions, that the debate was overdetermined and multi-dimensional. It seemed to be a conversation that began with poetry and led to an anxiety about education itself. A few delegates, when I told them that I was a graduate student in a faculty of education, responded with anecdotes about how the education students they've encountered have difficulty with writing and often are far behind the abilities of other students in English classes. This complaint -a common one, I've found—belies an apprehension about something much bigger than the writing skills of future teachers. After all, concurrent students, in a

48 Canadian faculty of education at least, must major in an area outside of teaching as well

as take the required education courses. They have the same skills and training as other

students; if anything, they take more specialized courses than their classmates who are

English majors. In Ontario, "Consecutive" pre-service teachers already have a full undergraduate degree and many have completed graduate work as well. The same conference delegates who wondered why an elementary teacher would come to a poetry conference -essentially laying a claim that any true study of English Literature can only take place in a high-level seminar—saw no dissonance in complaining that education

students lack the adequate ability to function in a university English course. Where, I wanted to ask them, are people supposed to learn the skills to become a student of literature? Is it a self-taught capacity -or, even more exclusively, is it a calling available only to a chosen few outside of the field of education who have the innate skills and

abilities to successfully perform exegesis on literary text and then write about their

findings?

The answer in any faculty of education would almost certainly be "No." The normative opinion for teachers and those in teacher education is that a skill set is

something cultivated and nurtured through the process of education -a complex mixture of curriculum, pedagogy, self-other relations and culture. This is the crucial flashpoint that underscores the differences between those who teach poetry and those who teach. It

is the starting point for an intricate and deep struggle involving personal investment, identity and assumptions about what the literary might serve to do to teachers and

education at large.

49 An interesting place to begin thinking about this schism might be with poetry itself.

As an epistemological way of knowing, reading poetry satisfies methodological aspirations from a wide variety of perspectives. A poem is capable of illuminating the facts of the world in a personal and profoundly delicate way. "We have begun to realize that human feeling does not pollute understanding," writes Elliot Eisner in his often quoted manifesto "The Promise and Perils of Alternative Forms of Data Representation

(8). "We have poetry, that linguistic achievement whose meanings are paradoxically non- linguistic: Poetry was invented to say what words can never say. Poetry transcends the limits of language and evokes what cannot be articulated" (5). Madeleine Grumet agrees.

For her, the "deep comfort of the beautiful is the promise that we can get back what we gave up, so that we can keep form and reclaim that buzzing confusion that it replaced in our cognition" (1989: 227). In addition to its unique ability to add human dimension to perception, poetry is a useful research tool because of its vast scope of subject matter.

"From high to low," Jane Hirschfield reminds us, "from the most impersonal to the most intimate, there is no part of existence poetry fails to touch" (84). Little more need be said about the poem as a form of data.

In order to examine some aspects of the differences between "teachers of poetry" and

"teachers," I've chosen two poems directly concerned with the experience of life in the world of education. The first, San Diego elementary school teacher Al Zolynas' "Love In

The Classroom" -a piece the poet dedicates to his own students—is at first glance a reflection of the bond a teacher might feel for his students during a routine lesson on

English grammar. Priscila Uppal's "My Ovidian Education" gives us a glimpse of life at the opposite pole; this piece acknowledges the intimate thoughts of a university professor

50 of poetry following a presentation on poet Paul Celan. Both poems are confessional and written in first-person; among other similarities, they offer us the familiarity of a shared experience. A deep reading of both pieces tenders the reader with two puzzling limit cases of life as a teacher encountering student and curriculum and living with the unmet desire, frustrations, fulfilments and fantasies that this intersection provokes. The poems also unsettle traditional and unquestioned perspectives of the teaching life. These two poems are perfect case studies for the encounter between poetry and education. In the same way that strong art presents the ambiguity of human experience, "limit cases do not stand as representative or sovereign versions of 'good teaching.'" Paula Salvio tells us in her book Anne Sexton: Teacher of Weird Abundance. "A limit case is a critique of that position and the knowledge and truth produced through it. Or to put it another way, limit cases can function to expose the insufficiency of viewing teaching and learning from normative standpoints" (6). As we shall see, these two poems expose what is perverse and transgressive under the everyday world of teaching.

First, the poem by Al Zolynas:

Love In The Classroom —for my students

Afternoon. Across the garden, in Green Hall, someone begins playing the old piano— a spontaneous piece, amateurish and alive, full of a simple, joyful melody. The music floats among us in the classroom.

I stand in front of my students telling them about sentence fragments. I ask them to find the ten fragments In the twenty-one-sentence paragraph on page forty-five.

51 They've come from all parts of the world -Iran, Micronesia, Africa, Japan, China, even Los Angeles -and they're still eager to please me. It's less than half way through the quarter.

They bend over their books and begin. Hamid's lips move as he follows the tortuous labyrinth of English syntax. Yoshie sits erect, perfect in her pale make-up, legs crossed, quick pulse minutely jerking her right foot. Tony, from an island in the South Pacific, sprawls limp and relaxed in his desk.

The melody floats around and through us in the room, broken here and there, fragmented, re-started. It feels mideastern, but it could be jazz, or the blues -it could be anything from anywhere. I sit down on my desk to wait, and it hits me from nowhere -a sudden sweet, almost painful love for my students.

"Never mind," I want to cry out. "It doesn't matter about fragments. Finding them or not. Everything's a fragment and everything's not a fragment. Listen to the music, how fragmented, how whole, how we can't separate the music from the sun falling on its knees on all the greenness, from this movement, how this movement contains all the fragments of yesterday and everything we'll ever know of tomorrow!"

Instead, I keep a coward's silence. the music stops abruptly; they finish their work, and we go through the right answers, which is to say

52 we separate the fragments from the whole.

I've read this poem to students in my Faculty of Education courses on several occasions, and each time the piece is met with approval. Students clap when I finish,

sometimes they weep and often they ask me for a copy. Zolynas' poem satisfies something innate within the student teacher; it clearly affirms an impulse these new teachers have either already experienced with their own students, or it sustains an impression they have formed about the bond a life in education might offer between student and teacher. They are certainly not alone and not entirely wrong. In her famous piece "Scholae Personae: Masks for Meaning", Madeleine Grumet sums up the experience of grading her students' papers as she returns the work, "each with a typed sheet of questions and responses appended. See how much I love you?" (Grumet 1995:

160).

Although the "sudden / sweet and almost painful love" for his students is crucial to the poem, it is not the only feature that renders this moment in education notable. What creates the conditions for this flash of love between teacher and students is crafted carefully and with skill, and the result is a familiar sense of classroom as finite point on a timeline of converging narratives. In the moment described by the piece, there is a recurrence of the idea of diverse parts moving toward coherent unity. The grammar lesson itself is on sentence fragments; the reader is given a palpable sense of

fragmentation in Zolynas' curt, lesson-plan style of the activity's description as students

are asked to find "ten fragments / In the twenty-one-sentence paragraph on page forty-

five." He then goes on to describe the geographic diversity that has contributed to the population of this small drama, citing a list comprised of countries, continents and the

53 city of Los Angeles. This inventory of origin is as fragmentary as the task the students

focus upon; Zolynas invokes the exoticism of places like Japan and Iran, Africa and

China. His incorporation of "Micronesia" is interesting; the designation of "micro"

suggests a fragmentation within a fragment. And, of course, there is the unique and humorous idea that students come "even from Los Angeles" -perhaps the strangest place

of all. The classroom of this poem is a patchwork of geographic destiny, eccentric even to itself.

But then there is a subtle shift. The names of these diverse students exhibit once again their multiplicity and the melange they create as they come together that afternoon: there's Yoshe, presumably from Japan, and Hamid, perhaps from Iran. But there's also

Tony, a comfortably familiar name belonging to a boy from far away -"an island in the

South Pacific." What these students are doing is also strangely recognizable to Zolynas' audience, and my own groups of student teachers. Hamid reads silently to himself as he tries to grasp the English syntax. Yoshe "sits erect" and erratically bounces her right foot

as she works. Our friend Tony "sprawls limp and relaxed in his desk." These are students we know -many of us have had them in our own classrooms—and perhaps we fall a bit in love with them too.

They are united by the strange music that opens the poem, "a spontaneous piece, amateurish and alive / full of a simple, joyful melody." Like the students, it literally drifts

across space to fill the classroom -and strangely, it is only the teacher who acknowledges it. The music -or, at least, the teacher's awareness of it—directly mirrors the divergent unity the poem creates for its motley cast of characters. While the song is somehow

exotic -we are told that it is "broken here and there, fragmented, / re-started. It feels

54 mideastern, but / it could be jazz, or the blues" —ultimately the poem concludes "it could be / anything from anywhere." In the same way that these diverse students from Africa,

Micronesia and Los Angeles become human and familiar, the music too converges comfortably and whole in the classroom moment.

This precipitates the teacher's sudden feeling of overwhelming, powerful love for his class. He wants to "cry out" to them to ignore all this talk of fragmentation, because of course "everything's / a fragment and everything's not a fragment." The stop-and-start music, from somewhere else and of a different tradition, exotic and strange yet so familiar and whole, is beautiful as it reaches their classroom. It is an embodied realization of this teacher's own feelings for these wonderful students, a projection of their own diversity and wholeness as they work together on the project of an ordinary grammar lesson on an average afternoon. This teacher is clearly familiar with John Dewey's

Experience and Education; "What avail is it to win prescribed amounts of information about geography and history," Dewey asks, "to win ability to read and write, if in the process the individual loses his own soul: loses his appreciation of things worth while, of the values to which these things are relative?" (Dewey 1939: 49).

I've often asked myself what it is that so attracts faculty of education students -and, to confess, their teachers as well—to this poem. It may well be an acknowledgment of the very real love that teachers do sometimes feel for their students. In my own experience, this powerful feeling usually happened just as Zolynas describes it: sudden, without warning, during ordinary moments, after noticing small, intricately human details of the

students -how they sprawl in their desks, how they wear their makeup. This strong affect is a part of the teaching and learning life. As Shoshana Felman tells us, "Teaching is not a

55 purely cognitive, informative experience, it is also an emotional, erotical experience"

(1997: 31). She goes on to explain, somehow maintaining the tenderness of the

experience. Quoting Lacan, Felman tells us that "the person in whom I presume knowledge to exist, thereby acquires my love" (1997: 31). The poetry of Zolynas' piece

is both a confirmation and a comfort to new teachers as they face the powerful, often

uncomfortable "hidden curriculum" of "love in the classroom" and the emotional factors that so powerfully punctuate lives lived in education. There is little I can say to student teachers to prepare them for such experiences. My own stories are seen as too specific, or

I come off as a character-type. (Great teacher? Overly-soft-hearted teacher? There's no way I can ever know what they think.) It is only a poem that helps these students find news of their own adventures, thereby rendering the difficult and uncontained moments translatable and thus acceptable.

This poem in particular offers much more. While the teacher in "Love in the

Classroom" falls powerfully in love with his students, the piece assures us in return that the students feel the same. Even though these students have "come from all parts of the world", the teacher notes that they are "still eager to please me" even though the quarter

is half over. In fact, this revelation comes before the intense and overwhelming love the teacher feels. In essence, we might read this poem as a powerful fantasy of restored

equilibrium: the students love their teacher and then, due to an intensely transcendent moment of music and awareness, the teacher is able to return their love even to the point

of wanting to throw out curriculum and a boring grammar assignment -'"Never mind,' I want to cry out. / 'It doesn't matter about fragments. / Finding them or not.'"—in favour

of a much larger, more important life-lesson: '"Listen to the music.. .the sun falling on its

56 knees on all the greenness.. .all the fragments of yesterday / and everything we'll ever know of tomorrow!'" Students love the teacher, the love is returned and wisdom becomes possible for all. This reading is a template for the normative standpoints of what pedagogy and education might be.

Zolynas' poem is, however, much too clever to offer only this much, and I am often tempted by my own moments of transcendent awareness (and maybe love) to make other demands on students as they cry over this piece or ask me to email it to them. "What are you hearing in the poem?" I want to ask. "What is it saying to you?" Because to me, the piece actually works against the unexamined traditional perspective outlined above. Its confessional nature, the mutinous, malcontained and unconfessed emotions at the end of the piece expose how complicated personal affect is when it surfaces in the drama of the classroom.

Priscilla Uppal's "My Ovidian Education" begins at this point of insurgence:

After a long respite in the lavatory trying to get my head around how so many twenty-somethings and a few older ladies can think of nothing better to say after a presentation on Paul Celan than "That was deep I guess, was this guy gay?" I emerge with a blazer as white as chalk dust and a pencil case as dour as a coffin and looking into the mirror discover I have aggravatingly beautiful cheeks and deep-set Firestone tire eyes but a nose with a hook as sharp as the old hermit in my Renaissance plates dictionary. Under the neon lights of the chemistry hallway, eating an orange, a banana, and a box of SunMaid raisins, I would sell my soul for a student worth Platonizing about and a stack of letters urging me to adulterize my standards just this once and leave them all sitting there without a second act after intermission to their exercises on metaphor and lists often questions to ask of their poems, including "Why should anyone but you care about what you've written?" and dive off the top

57 of academe's steeple breaking my nose on the concrete waiting for the one with the shiniest apple to sing me and Paul back to life.

In this piece, we have a very good poem about what might be considered very bad teaching. I have never read "My Ovidian Education" to students in the faculty of education, and I am very curious about what they might think of this poetry teacher's dismissal of the students in this seminar, her consecrated yearning for that one imaginary-and, as yet absent— student who might inspire an "adulterization" of her standards and allow for a dramatic and metaphorical suicidal disruption of class so that this teacher might "dive off the top / of academe's steeple" only to be revived by a disciple worthy enough to intellectually "sing me and Paul back to life."

The part of my own teaching psyche influenced by the normative standpoints and unquestioned idealizations of the profession invoke in me a revulsion brought about by the poem. This teacher's narcissism is at first glance stunning. Horrified by what seems to be a flippant comment by the "twenty-something" students and "a few older ladies" - surely they should know better?— in this seminar, this professor retreats into a bathroom.

There, she has a revelation moving her from the world of education as she notices her

"blazer as white as chalk dust" into a more profound and morbid place, in which a commonplace item of the classroom -a pencil case—becomes "dour as a coffin." From here, she notices her "aggravatingly beautiful cheeks and deep-set / Firestone tire eyes."

Indeed, the shock of her own appearance becomes a defense against those unworthy of

Paul Celan and the cultured world of poetry. Her worst feature -her nose—is nonetheless

"a nose with a hook as sharp / as the old hermit in my Renaissance plates dictionary."

The teacher's body mirrors the entitlement of her position; her classical beauty, and even

58 the less attractive features, place her alongside the poetic and historical privilege of

teaching culture and poetry. In fact, the disruption fantasy even takes the shape of a

suicide in which her classical nose is broken. The class breaks what is cultured and poetic

about this teacher's body. Her life -and, presumably her nose—can only be restored when the students rise to the occasion and meet her "standards".

What is it in me that is so turned off by this poem? It must surely be a common

experience for teachers to find themselves wishing for a higher level of engagement from

their students. I've felt it myself talking to eighth graders about the Diary of Anne Frank

and being met with insights of their own quasi-racist encounters on Internet chatrooms. I remember, too, teaching The Chrysalids to that same class and hoping for discussion on

intolerance, xenophobia and the inequity of social norms. Instead, the students responded with questions about the novel's one sex scene (it took place behind a shrub and I must

admit I was also intrigued) and the violent, paralyzing phaser-beams shot from helicopters in the novel's concluding battle -which, once again, I will confess to thinking more than a small amount about. Unlike Uppal's professor of poetry, my experiences of

disappointment with the student's responses changed my mind. Instead of imagining metaphorical suicide, I decided that the students were in fact quite right in their

comments. Perhaps Anne Frank's experience is parallel in some ways to what happens to

teenagers on-line. More importantly, I came to the conclusion that The Chrysalids is not

the strongest novel from what Roland Barthes might call a "readerly" perspective. A part

of me believes that maybe the shrub and helicopter scenes were the best parts of the novel

after all.

59 Instead, it is interesting to think of the violence of Uppal's poem. She is so shocked by the comment from these students that she is forced to retreat into the safety of a lavatory where she imagines coffins and a metaphorical suicide. She "would sell [her] soul" for a student better than the ones she has, for a student who could literally bring her back to life with a response deemed by her standards worthy. The real students figure very little into this drama; a diverse group of them is characterized only by the question about

Celan's sexuality and then the poem is all about the teacher -her desire, her appearance, her imagined disruption, metaphorical broken nose and death, and the wish to be brought back to life by the student she wants but does not have. Personal desire runs rampant through these lines, and it runs counter to all the fantasies of education the normative standpoint allows. "Teachers' personal lives must be kept private," Alice Pitt reveals,

"because they do not map neatly on to dominant assumptions about who teachers can be, given the demands that they serve as role models" (67). Unfulfilled desire and hate have no place in these assumptions, especially in the form of a poem lamenting an absent student and a wish to be rescued. In the dominant standpoint, it is the teacher who rescues.

In this poem, however, we have a teacher who seems to love the curriculum and not the students -at least the very real ones she is confronted with. She is the opposite of

Zolynas' teacher who loves the students and not the curriculum. Is it that she loves poetry more and simply deems these students unworthy? Or is she protecting something within herself that allows her to feel dominant and omnipotent? I would argue against this, as her powerful fantasy -perhaps the strongest desire at the heart of the poem—is a wish for a student at least as intellectually astute as she is. Thinking psychoanalytically, it becomes possible to wonder what is really at stake in this teacher's retreat and the

60 subsequent images of death and resurrection she produces. The teacher's actions and the poem itself speak of an anxiety common in education, the "not good enough" teacher.

Her metaphorical broken nose and the wish to be revived by a worthy student response can be read as an angst about her own failure to teach. "A pervasive anxiety that finds work in education is the fear of failure," writes Deborah Britzman in Novel Education:

Psychoanalytic Studies of Learning and Not Learning (129). "There may be pervasive feelings that in schools, something is missing, that education feels empty" (130).

Britzman argues that it is a continual circumstance of working in an institution such as the university, or education itself, that precipitates such crises, and that it is the human condition that occasions a propensity for the kinds of experience we see in this poem.

Once again, we might see this professor's retreat as an acting out of another inner drama.

If Uppal's poetry teacher is acting on her own history of teaching -a history that must inform her own desires and expectations—it is not difficult to understand the origins of the poem's transgressive wish. "It is never easy to get rid of the hostility one once felt toward an authority," writes Britzman. "It is hard to forget having to accept harsh lessons" (132). We see in "My Ovidian Education" a teacher playing all the roles in the harsh lesson of institutional education: frustrated desire, the hopeless position of being the one presumed to know, the impossibility of making a personal relation with invested knowledge and other people simultaneously. Suddenly, the teacher's retreat into her own appearance and its alignment with the fantasy of a worthy Renaissance significance is a much more complicated and human occasion.

This poem is, in fact, a small miracle. In spite of her violent retreat and the wish for suicide off the nearest ivory tower, this teacher collects herself enough to bring the real

61 details of her teaching life -the neon lights of a university corridor, an orange, Da banana, and a box of SunMaid raisins—as well as the minute strategies she sees as so unworthy in her fantasy - "exercises on metaphor and lists often questions D/ to ask of their poems, including "Why should anyone but youD/ care about what you've written?"—into her thinking about the metaphoric suicide and revival. She never quite leaves reality completely behind, and one senses that the inclusion of these details -like Zolynas' keeping of a "coward's silence"—will allow her to transcend the astonishing moment in the lavatory and return safely to life in the classroom. The narration of this moment in the poem, if it is seen as a thought-process by itself, is the instrument of sanity. This teacher's awareness of her desire is enough to save her insomuch as any teacher might be saved. "To be sane, one works from within the awareness of one's own madness,"

Britzman tells us (124). The poem's symbiotic employment of the concrete and the psychical, its use of language and fantasy together, are an example of how "education may become a potential space made from people who can narrate their experiences and survive the needed destruction of object relating and object usage" (Britzman 122). For

Uppal's poetry professor, the use of students to precipitate a destructive fantasy becomes a grounding for her own survival in the institution of education. Uppal's courage in penning a poem that admits a discourse so contrary to the pervasive norms dominant in the unquestioned assumptions of educational life is, to me, admirable.

Yet I am still unsettled by the encounter with education this poem describes. I realize that it is not the subverting of the dominant discourse about teaching that is so disturbing or the apparent violence and narcissism of the piece that stays with me. As I've noted, these aspects might be read in various ways to elicit both compassion and a sense of

62 appreciation for the sincere confession at the heart of the poem. When I thought about it further, I realized that the personal plays into my own interpretation -as, indeed, it must always do. As Alice Pitt notes, it is "useful to locate the personal not in content that reflects the world but rather as a method for observing how we experience ourselves in the world" (2000, 69). Reflecting on this poem, the personal becomes an interpretive strategy as well -a way to notice the means by which I find myself in a text. I am less unsettled by the encounter with education this poem describes as I am with an encounter of my own common with the piece. The simulacrum occurs with the question the students pose about Paul Celan: "That was deep I guess, was this guy gay?" In my reading, it is the professor's horror at the apparent shallowness of this question that precipitates her retreat and subsequent violent fantasizing.

As a student in Grade Eleven English -the same fateful course in which Ozymandias reared his arrogant and doomed presence—we read two novels: The Razor's Edge by W.

Somerset Maugham, and John Knowles' A Separate Peace. Both novels were written in first-person narration, and I remember my own fascination with these narrators. The access to their inner thoughts was very compelling, and I think the voices of both

Maugham and "Gene" became more important to me than the primary stories the books were trying to tell. {A Separate Peace is essentially the story of Gene's best friend Finny and the warlike deterioration of their friendship; The Razor's Edge is the story of "Larry", a friend of Maugham who undergoes a spiritual crisis and rebirth.) In a sense, I fell in love with the tellings of these tales, and the tellers. I was inspired to do some of my own research for both, and in the course of reading, I found something interesting. Much of the criticism for A Separate Peace described the novel as a homoerotic tale, a story of

63 love between two young men that goes tragically wrong. I rented the movie version of

Knowles' book and, perhaps because of my newfound awareness of the novel's

heteromorphic dimension, I found this critical reading confirmed: Knowles had, to me at

least, written a queer love story. It seemed to me that the camera lingered on the boys' bodies, especially during shirtless and beach scenes -there is a protracted and memorable

one in the film—much longer than it had to. As a young man struggling to find my own

identity, I was thrilled to find that this story and these beloved characters had much to tell

me about myself.

Research into Maugham's history was no less fruitful. Reading about the novel and its

author yielded many facts, including that Maugham himself was gay, as was one of the

novel's primary and most interesting characters, Elliott. As I had read and reread The

Razor's Edge, I found myself envious of the lifestyle of these men: they traveled freely

through Europe wandering through museums, art galleries, dinner parties and jazz clubs.

This was a life I wanted and could only wish for. Like Finny and Gene, there was hardly

a mention of girlfriends or the distractions of marriage and family -a future I had almost

never envisioned for myself. I was thrilled with these findings and could hardly wait to bring them to class and ask the teacher about them.

I struggled to find a way to bring up the subject, however. I was a 17 year old boy, it

was the height of the Reagan years and my high school was the largest in a small,

working-class city; I had no desire to cast suspicion on my own quietly popular existence.

I wish it had been different but I understand my apprehensions. I wish I had been more

courageous or creative in my approach. I felt, though that there were things to fear even

within the sacred confines of English class. And so, I decided to use a question I'd been

64 wondering about as a way to move toward what I really wanted to discuss: I would ask the question, "Was Elliott the lover of the narrator in the novel -or in real life?"

In private, the question seemed thrilling. That these two articulate, cultured, interesting men could have that kind of relationship in the midst of an interesting narrative like the one told in the novel was validating and hopeful. Yet the question offered me a safety- route. There was no personal stake in the asking. I even decided to phrase it in a way that would showcase my extra research, thinking that the teacher would be impressed and the other students might be amused. It seemed to me a winning proposition all around.

I don't remember if I was apprehensive asking the question, just the time spent feeling excited about what the answer might be, and the deep deliberation to figure out the exact wording. On the afternoon of class, I raised my hand and did my best to use a voice both nonchalant and concerned to demand of the teacher: "I was doing some extra reading about W. Somerset Maugham, and I found out that he was gay. I was wondering if he and

Elliott were involved?"

Or something like that. I've lost my original wording. What I haven't lost, however, was the look on my teacher's face as she turned to face me full-on. I remember her turning slightly red although this might be a melodramatic upshot of time's affect upon memory. "NO" she said, as close to shouting as I'd ever heard her. "they were certainly not lovers, and that has nothing to do with the book at all. I'm amazed that you would waste time with that question."

I didn't believe her, about the men or her reading of the novel. That was my first silent response. My second, almost simultaneous reaction was a feeling of hurt. How could she have misread my intention so acutely? The last thing I thought this question represented

65 was a waste of time; to me, everything depended on it. Other students were turning around to look, possibly because I had never raised a teacher's anger in such a way. They were surprised but I didn't know why they were looking. Did this teacher not care about my extra research? How could she shut down my question so quickly, or think that I had asked it with any malice? I could feel myself turning red, struggling with the urge to explain, or cry, or fight back telling her that the critics certainly disagreed with her dismissal of my suspicions. Instead, I kept my own coward's silence and the class proceeded. The two novels stayed my own private terrain and the event of my thoughtfully-worded question an enigma.1

What went wrong for me in that class seems very close to what happens to Uppal's poetry professor in "My Ovidian Education". Something was shut down, some line of communication between student and teacher failed to work, instead creating a miscommunication of personal emotions and histories neither is aware of. In both cases, nobody on either side -student or teacher— takes the time to consider that the misfire holds a depth that may be a chance for opening, for communion between two people who need it -indeed, for education—rather than the abrupt desistance we see occur. "In the context of the classroom," Paula Salvio tells us, "public and private life can combine to provoke shame or legitimization" (65). For the professor of the poem, her retreat can be read as a shameful fear of her own failure as teacher, or a shame at her struggle with a life

1 Until years later when I found myself teaching A Separate Peace to my grade 7 Literature class. We read the novel together aloud, and at one point, a boy in the class asked me, in a serious tone, if I thought Finny and Gene were gay and involved. I was amazed at how brave he was to ask, and how sincerely interested the others in our class seemed to be as they looked to me for an answer. Had things changed so much, or was this student simply so much stronger than I had been? I was humbled, and I remember thinking that if reparation was ever a possibility, it had just happened for me. 66 inside institutional education, or perhaps something far more hidden the reader might

only guess at. In my own case, the encounter with my teacher was a reach for

legitimization that ended with my own shame at trying to be clever in asking a question to show off my research while simultaneously discover an answer that meant a great deal to my own identity. It may have also been a moment of shame about that identity, about who I was.

As it turns out, perhaps I wasn't the only one. In the decades since that afternoon, I have learned in my own classroom that there are many reasons a teacher might fly off the handle at an undeserving student. As well, I have a friend common to both myself and my

former 11th grade English teacher. I have a much better understanding of how complicated lives are now than I did at 17, and I can say that perhaps my life and identity were not the only ones threatened by my question that day. The failure I experienced was a defensive mechanism -a necessary one perhaps—that has since, hopefully, given way to a more expansive understanding of how complicated and overdetermined even the most simple classroom question or teacher's answer might be. Salvio notes Melanie

Klein's assertion that "a good relation to ourselves is a condition for tolerance and wisdom toward others" (Klein 1961, 342; Salvio 101) and that

this ability to love has developed from those who meant much to us in the past, even if they have betrayed us, [Klein] is calling on us to learn to live within the tension of opposites -within the tension of love and hate, of innocence and guilt. (101)

Now, as an adult nearly twenty years later, I have a much more generous reaction to what happened in English class that day, quite possibly because of a more fully

67 developed tolerance of my own identity. This "good relation" with myself allows me to consider this situation from a midpoint of love and hate -I both love my teacher and hate her for the shame and missed opportunity of that afternoon—and between innocence and guilt. I see the teacher's inducement and my own motivation for the question as both innocent and guilty. This is the Kleinian Depressive Position; instead of thinking back on that situation as one of being victimized by a persecuting, hateful authority figure, it exists in my mind -and my heart—as a poignant, difficult and interesting moment in which two people who may have needed one another far more than they knew missed an opportunity to connect and benefit from each other's idiosyncratic personal histories. To use Salvio's language, we responded badly with each others' subjectivities, disrupting the potential of an educational setting to realize "a process of inquiry through which to achieve deeper level of interchange" (Salvio 102). I hope this teacher, if she remembers the incident at all, feels the same way and can forgive any shame my manipulation, however sincere its core, may have caused.

There is no sense for the reader that the professor in "My Ovidian Education" has moved beyond simple and unexamined polarities. In spite of the generous readings a psychoanalytic consideration of the poem provides, as well as her ability to function in the classroom setting, the teacher herself remains closed to her students as holding any depth or complicated emotional lives. Whatever her reasons for doing so, this poetry teacher casts herself as the victim of a persecutorial narrative in which her unworthy students push her to want to (violently) disrupt class until someone who aspires to her standards can rescue her. The professor's own identity as teacher -as keeper of standards, guardian of culture—is so entrenched that this figure begins to align her own morphic

68 body first with the classroom and then with the classical standards of a Renaissance

dictionary. Her own pedagogy becomes fixed in the terms of this constructed identity; she

longs for a student worth "Platonizing" about in a Faustian (she would "sell her soul")

drama (she casts the time after the class break as a "second act after intermission"). As

noted above, the danger is not to her sanity or a capacity to continue teaching but rather

to a view of the world that is punctuated with absolutes and the fantasies they entail.

Naturally, this has consequences for pedagogy and pedagogue. Dennis Sumara notes that

these "strong and well-developed fictionalized versions of ourselves [mean] we become

adept at maintaining classroom relations around attention to subject matter and not

necessarily to the way in which subject matter was attached to us and to our students"

(226). Curriculum and knowledge becomes static and other, a difficult and

unapproachable terrain. If the students in this poetry seminar are as small-minded as the poem leads us to believe -and I very much doubt they are; people are usually quite

surprising in their complexity —there is little wonder they resort to such tactics. They are

reaching for something to hold on to as well.

Nor is the teacher free of consequence. In shutting down openings and the possibilities

of complexity between people and interpretation, there is a risk of loss as well. "My

experiences have led me to believe that teachers who construct pedagogical relations

around a counterfeit identity seldom learn very much about their students," Dennis

Sumara writes, "nor do students learn very much about them" (227). While there is a

looming question about how much the personal is necessary in an educational setting, it

is easy to see how the personal investment of an overly constructed identity functions as a

defense -in the most warlike connotation of the word—that threatens to harm its author

69 as well as keep others at bay. It is a personal choice as much as sincere revelation. Citing

Madeleine Grumet's notion of the classroom as bunker where teachers hide their true desires behind the door of a classroom, Sumara writes:

The trouble is, often only the self who is the teacher is allowed into the bunker, leaving the non-teacher self waiting outside the closed door. And although this other self-the one that is not the teacher—waits patiently, the day eventually comes when, after final bell has rung and the classroom door is flung open, there is no other self waiting. Counterfeiting has its consequences. (228).

In terms of the frightening image of the "authentic" self abandoning the constructed identity of the teacher at the door of the classroom, the violence of the poetry professor's fantasy of disruption in the form of a suicide becomes much easier to understand. Indeed, the suicide can only exist in the form of a metaphor; the almost non- human body of the Poetry Teacher, shrouded in its "blazer white as chalk dust" and her troped nose, "with a hook as sharp as the old hermit in my Renaissance plates dictionary" hold so little reality that they face brutality only in terms of the non-existence they themselves hold. Is this teacher truly wishing for a suicide in which a worthy disciple might sing her and the precious cargo of poetry she holds back to life? Perhaps. It seems likely, especially in the context of the myriad anxieties and shocks of teaching, that the poem offers something else. Instead, we might read it as an embodied wish in which its protagonist "kills" off a constructed self and reaches toward genuine and sincere engagement, allowing her "real" self to make a relationship not only with her invested texts and the difficult unexpectedness of students, but with a complicated world containing all three.

70 These two poems are insightful cases of the transgressive interactions between

emotion and the space of education, past and present, authentic and inauthentic teaching

selves. Both pieces are embodied moments of "the messy and contradictory ways in which the individual past of the teacher neither maps neatly onto the present of practice nor ever becomes fully present in the strange time of classroom interactions" (Pitt 69).

For Zolynas' classroom teacher, a moment of love for his students results in his

"coward's silence" and an unfulfilled desire to abandon the proscribed curriculum in

favour of something more whole, personal and transcendent. Uppal's poetry professor

faces her emotional reaction after overhearing a student's comment on Paul Celan by retreating into a lavatory and fantasizing disruption. For both, personal emotion results in withdrawal; upon returning, the end of Zolynas' poem leaves us with the teacher in his

fragmented classroom, a space of individuals ripe with the possibility of becoming a whole. The teacher of "My Ovidian Education", on the other hand, sees her students only as a "whole" entity with no possibility of individual history or dimension -a reading of the others that might well be a projection of her own constructed teaching self. Students, and perhaps teacher, remain a whole with no possibility for the fragmentation necessary

for individualization. Zolynas' classroom is the exact opposite, perceived by the teacher after a moment of affect and vulnerability as an interactive arena alive with fragments pulsing in and out of wholeness.

What these poems might tell us about the differences between teachers and teachers of poetry remains to be seen. It is an injustice to draw generalizations from the cases of one teacher and one teacher of poetry; as we have seen, even in these poems teachers are complex and individual creatures living with their own defenses and histories with text

71 and education. I have no doubt that there are classroom teachers more like the professor in "My Ovidian Education" and I have personally encountered many university professors reminiscent of "Love in the Classroom." The poems might, however, open up a space to wonder about the differences between teaching poetry and teaching poetically.

Uppal's professor teaches poetry. She remains closed to her students, and the action of the poem remains, with the exception of one question asked before the narrative of the poem even begins, limited to her psychical reality as a metaphorical fantasy hiding a wish.

We see no real interaction between teacher and student other than the teacher's withdrawal and subsequent whimsy. We learn little about the students and, interestingly, little about the curriculum. What poems of Paul Celan were discussed? Why these, specifically?

Zolynas' piece offers us a different narrative; here, we learn about the teacher's desire, but we also know the names of his students and even some of their histories. In fact, part of the poem's power is Zolynas' ability to allow the students to become intriguing even as we read their names, nationalities and certain facts about them. The poem, like the teacher, respects their ambiguity and what is mysterious and unknowable about them as people. We read where they are, what lesson they are doing, what sounds they hear on that afternoon, what they see. We can even imagine what they look like. The reader of this poem becomes open to the scene as teacher and students are to each other. In an essay on life as a teaching poet, Chris Llewellyn writes:

What do we see? Can we agree that to be a poet is to promote others to use their imagination? To see things in many different ways? To find the common ground? To seek new solutions and resolutions? If so, then through our own poems and through our teachings of poetry we will empower others to imagine. Alongside she who is caretaker, teacher, and Shade,

72 we will prevail as poets of vocation, avocation and evocation. (Llewellyn 90)

By these standards, Zolynas' teacher is the more poetic and his classroom is a space full of the imaginative possibilities, common ground and empowerment of what Maxine

Greene might call "teaching for openings." In an essay by that name, she tells us that as a teacher, "I want us to work together to unconceal what is hidden, to contextualize what happens to us, to mediate the dialectic that keeps us on edge, that may be keeping us

alive" (Greene 1995: 115). True to the credo of aesthetic education, Zolynas' poem offers the possibility of seeing in new and different ways; the poem is about the

integration of what is difficult, other and uneven during a moment of such vision -in spite of the return to fragmentation and the keeping of a coward's silence. An ordinary grammar lesson becomes a poetic experience. Taking Zolynas' poem and Llewellyn's observations as markers, we might say that teaching poetically involves a vulnerability to all the elements of classroom reality -complicated student histories, the space of learning, the emotional and personal life of the teacher, the possibilities and limitations of curriculum along with so much more—and an understanding that these "fragments"

contain within themselves the prospect of something further: something uncontained, personal and messy, entangled and alive, tender and ambiguous, fleeting and unbroken.

Teaching for openings, with openness, concedes the possibility and complexity of the human as well as the prospect for communion between people as they create meaning and relation together. The fragments move toward a whole and "and everything we'll ever know of tomorrow"; teaching poetically becomes worthy of poetry.

73 Reading Daydreams, Together: A Manifesto

No one can tell me that I'm not enjoying myself; they can only tell me that I shouldn 't be.

-Adam Phillips

Readers

Of that gentleman with the sallow, dry complexion and the knightly disposition, they conjecture that, always on the edge of an adventure, he never actually left his library. The precise chronicle of his campaigning and all its tragicomical reversals was dreamed by him and not by Cervantes and is no more than a record of his dreaming. Such is also my luck. I know there is something essential and immortal that I have buried somewhere in that library of the past in which I read the story of that knight. The slow leaves now recall a solemn child who dreams vague things he does not understand. --Jorge Luis Borges Trans. Alastair Reid

I. An Invisible History of Reading

"Poetry," Shoshana Felman writes in Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight, "is precisely the effect of a deadly struggle between consciousness and the unconscious; it has to do with resistance and with what can neither be resisted nor escaped" (51).

Felman's claim is a complex and insightful one for many reasons, and it places an interpretive burden on the reader. What the statement might mean is at least as interesting as its subtle assumption about poetry -an assumption outside the implication of Felman's

74 statement. The claim that poetry as a body of text, or as an act of reading and interpretation, is an internal and individually private process carries a tautology of its own.

The idea that poetry might be an interior occurrence is an interpretation of what happens when people read. "The reader's unconscious is both provoked and pushed back," Henk de Berg tells us:

aroused, yet kept at a distance. Reading is a battle between drives and repressions, between the desire for expression and the need for censorship. It engages the mind in its full complexity -as long as the tension between the reader's contradictory impulses is maintained. This, indeed, is the psychoanalytic criterion of esthetic value. (94)

De Berg's mention of the psychoanalytic criterion as it applies to reading is an important moment; it is little wonder that most psychoanalytic thinkers consider reading to be an internal, psychical struggle. There may be no better way to think about the act of reading than through the psychoanalytic lens; central to Freud's theory is the idea of

"reading" people and dreams in the same way one might approach a poem. Reading is integral to the psychoanalytic approach. More applicable to those uninterested in methodological concerns, however, is Deborah Britzman's assertion that we "take reading seriously precisely because we take psychical life seriously" (Britzman 2003:

148). Yet, the psychoanalytic critics are not alone in approaching reading as an act of solitary struggle and interpretation. Mark Edmunson, Peter Abbs and Gregory Orr each make the claim that reading -and sometimes, in the case of Orr at least, reading poetry— in their own words, saved their lives. They join many other voices, from Isabel Allende to

Virginia Woolf to Sven Birkets who writes, in his often quoted and eloquent The

Gutenberg Elegies, that reading holds "something vital to our well being" (Birkets 191).

75 Edmunson goes on to assert that we read to learn how to live (73) and live better (121). In

his book Real Presences: Is there anything in what we say? George Steiner discusses the private location of reading's salvific capability. "The pressures of political exaction," he

writes,

the detergent tide of social conformity, cannot tear it from us. In solitude, public or private, the poem remembered, the score played inside us, are the custodians and remembrancers.. .of what is resistant, of what must be kept inviolate in our psyche. (10)

Steiner is not alone in his insistence on the private and inviolate location of reading's power. Eve Sedgwick suggests that we read "in order to surprise ourselves" (27). Harold

Bloom writes that reading helps to "enlarge life" (28) and to "prepare ourselves for

change" (21), the only inevitability in a world constrained by time. And, Umberto Eco theorizes that each of us reads to prepare for death (Eco 15). Between reading to learn how to live and reading to learn how to die, any number of reasons abound: we read to discover ourselves and to learn the self s language; we read for a second chance; we read to travel where we might never reach; we read to speculate, to feel, to dream, to improve

ourselves, to share in nature, to learn, to invent, to care, to rediscover irony and emotion

and originality.

There is something interesting at work in coming to define the outcomes, and the act, of reading as a personal site where interpretation occurs individually for the purpose of

solitary gain. In his book The Process of Reading: A Cognitive Analysis of Fluent

Reading and Learning to Read, D.C. Mitchell links the intrinsically human experience of reading to a definition that is startlingly hermetical. He notes:

76 Reading embraces so much more than work or web. What music is to the spirit, reading is to the mind. Reading challenges, empowers, bewitches, enriches. We perceive little black marks on white paper or a PC screen and they move us to tears, open up our lives to new insights and understandings, inspire us, organize our existences and connect us with all creation. Surely there can be no greater wonder. (7)

In spite of reading's ability to "connect us with all creation", Mitchell goes on to define the act as "the ability to make sense of written or printed symbols" (11) in which the reader "uses the symbols to guide the recovery of information from his or her memory and subsequently uses this information to construct a plausible interpretation"

(12). Divorced from the potential of its connectivity, this kind of thinking represents a movement in the modern world that has come to characterize the act of reading as a closed act of self, an undertaking brooked within the cloistered confines of the psyche.

We do so at our own risk. Mark Edmunson notes that "with a certain kind of exclusive attention to the page, life disappears. The connection between word and world goes dark"

(37). He notes the serious consequences of this disconnect visible in his own students at

The University of Virginia. "With this remove comes timidity," Edmunson suggests, "a fear of being directly confronted. There's an anxiety at having to face life firsthand" (10).

He adds that the culture affirming personal interpretation at all costs does damage both to students -"expressions of exuberance now seem to occur with dimming quotation marks around them.. .there's always self-observation, no real letting-go" (10)—and the educational potential the literature seminar might contain. "The classroom atmosphere

[these students] treasured was relaxed, laid-back, cool," he notes:

The teacher should never get exercised about anything, on pain of being

77 written off as a buffoon. Nor should she create an atmosphere of vital contention, where students lost their composure, spoke out, became passionate, expressed their deeper thoughts and fears, or did anything that might cause embarrassment. Embarrassment was the worst thing that could befall one; it must be avoided at whatever cost. (11).

Needless to say, this presents obvious obstacles for the teacher of reading; a classroom of literature is rarely conceived, especially in the post-modern conventions of teaching, as a space of solitary selves quietly "making sense of printed symbols" and we see in

Edmunson's fearful observations the outcome a program of disconnected personal response might offer. In an essay called "The English Teacher's Decalogue", Wayne C.

Booth describes the core of the problem. "There can be no meeting of rootless minds," he tell us, "determined to be autonomous, original, creative personalities at all costs.. .to me, there is only one kind of false prophet, and this is the prophet who has frozen himself into his formulation so that he can no longer improve his capacity to meet other minds"

(Booth 97, 99). Both Edmunson and Booth, experienced English teachers, suggest that the function of a class devoted to reading must move somehow beyond the confines of the personal and become a space for meeting the shared interpretations of others. While reading does hold the individual potential cited by Eco, Bloom and their compatriots, the public space of the English classroom is rather an adventurous act of creation building upon the salvation that reading literature to learn how to live -and die—inspires.

One guide to which the teacher of literature might look is the etymology of the word itself. Interestingly, almost any translation of "reading" holds a public dimension as well as a personal one; across history and culture, reading carries a communal implication in addition to its sense of being a private act of interpretation. Often, translations are

78 surprising, encompassing the broadest definitions of what we consider reading. The ancient Sumerian word sita, commonly translated as "to read", also translates as "to count, calculate, consider, memorize, recite, read aloud". Sdj, the ancient Egyptian word commonly interpreted as "to read" is also used as the word for "to recite". The ancient

Greek anagignosko means "I read, I recognize, I read aloud" -and later, in Ionian Greek,

"I convince" (Fischer 50).

The trend continues in other early Western languages. The Hebrew word qara is most often taken as public reading, translating as "to call, to call out; to recite, to proclaim"

(Fischer 62). The Latin word lego, "I read", also means "I gather, collect, choose, select, peruse, read aloud, recite" (Fischer 67). (Another Latin word for reading, evolvo, also doubles as "I unroll, unfold" as in a papyrus scroll, in addition to "I study or peruse."

Here, the physical act of reading is integral as the psychical, interpretive one. Modern

English considerations of the word tend to neglect this dimension of the act.) The Old

English word raedan carries an original meaning of "to consider, interpret, discern, read" as well as "to advise, plan, contrive or explain" (Fischer 148).

In Japanese, the wordyoww is an even stronger example of the inter-mutual suggestion carried by the concept of reading. Steven Fischer translates the word primarily as "to read aloud, recite, repeat, extol, understand, realize or compose" and notes that

"the original concept clearly embraces the oral performance [of reading]" (115). Reading as a solely private exploit belonging entirely to the terrain of the psyche is thus a relatively recent concept in the millennia-long chronicle of human reading practice. In his book A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel presents evidence that the first instances of

79 "unwitnessed communication between the book and the reader" began in the monastic

scriptoria of the ninth century (50, 51).

In spite of modern conceptualizations of reading for psychical benefit, the history of the word is really not that far removed from modern English. In writing this chapter, I often tried to find synonyms for the word "reading" in order to provide a more varied

experience for my own readers. Interestingly, there are few words that provide the solely private connotation of "reader". Rather, the Roget 's New Millennium Thesaurus offers a variety of words that read quite a bit like the etymology discussed above. Synonyms for reader are listed as: clairvoyant, medium and mind-reader; prophet, soothsayer and psychic also appear. The word clearly maintains its shared, communal component even in contemporary English, and reading's synonyms share a root with the world of Manguel's ninth-century scriptorium at least as much as they do our own. "Reading" has an unconscious allusion as deep as its own history.

Moderating between the model of public reading and private experience, astute critics

and philosophers of reading have made note of the complicated relation between inner

and outer worlds implicit in the act. "It's not surprising that representations of readerly

interiority should draw on the same dialectic of introjection and projection which was for

Freud himself the genesis of the crucial distinction between subject (or ego) and object

(or outside world)," Mary Jacobus writes in Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading

(23). Her fascinating chapter "The Room in the Book" is a meditation on the internal-

external divisions in reading we use metaphor to describe. Among others, Jacobus

discusses reading as hypnosis, invitation and oral consumption. "Both talk and reading partake of the primitive," she tells us (29). Skillfully, Jacobus outlines the blurry

80 relationship readers command between page and world; "The seepage of fiction into

everyday life is a reminder that the private lair of the skull (like the room in the book)

opens onto the streets," she tells us:

Print capitalism turns an individual, psychic economy of reading into a way of relating to others -anonymously, as befits the subject of modernity. But if the room is imaginary, so too is the community.. .Reading enters the public sphere at the cost of making readers, as well as newspapers, a visible fiction -exact copies of one another, a collectivity of reading heads replicating the same activity. The very move to figure the social and material dimensions of cultural consumption proves to be the point at which fiction enters most unmistakably and insidiously to shape our relations to ourselves, to others, and to reading. (35)

Like Edmunson, Jacobus makes us aware of the bilateral interplay at work between

reader and world, inner space and outer reality. Our uses for reading eeriliy mirror how

we see others, and perhaps how we come to think of ourselves. The physical is always

implicit in the psychical act of reading. Add the interpretations of others and things become heavy with the weight of opacity. It is the density of making meaning and

relation.

Naturally, it would be ridiculous to suggest that English Literature instruction revert to

an entirely performative-model of textual engagement. It is, however, useful for the

English teacher to consider the complexity and depth of the act integral to this curriculum.

Reading is at once a physical act -as the Latin evolvo reminds us—and a psychical

gesture of assimilation and interpretation. As well, reading is a social act; even the

solitary reader of Borges' poem introducing this chapter must face a collective construal by, at the very least, the writer of the poem. Reading aloud -recitation—is not the same

as shared reading. When we read alone, we are written by other minds; when we read

81 together, the possibility exists to meet the minds of others in an amalgamation of ideas

and impressions, reading histories, interpretations, missed readings and the complex

interplay of translation. The relationship we make with one another in the act of reading

together, so crucial for the concept of English Education -which includes, but is never

limited to, reading silently—holds a poetics of its own. Examples of this are explored

further in a later chapter. The integration of reading silently and interpreting together is at the core of literature curriculum and teaching. At once active and passive, emotional and

efficacious, the conjunction of the reading self in a world of other readers might be the

fundamental intent of what a literary education stands for. As Wayne Booth reminds us,

When we have succeeded, our students practice a kind of sensitivity to language and to other people as they employ language -a kind of listening and responding that in its combination of sympathy and criticism is always, in every society, in short supply. (78)

In a very real sense, the task of the English instructor is to remain profoundly aware of this interplay between inner and outer readings, to continually wonder what language it is

that we are reading when we read world and text with world, and how we might share,

fail to share, and understand the potential exigencies of these experiences of reading together. For the teacher of poetry, the personal worlds of reading together often begin in the terrain of strange resistances and interesting moments of convergence. This unique

entity -the teacher of poetry—must be an expert at a new kind of navigation. As a medium contingent upon the idea of personal association and the intimate act of metaphor, poetry offers a new economy of inner and outer dialectic even as it is forced to

exist within the confines of what we call curriculum. Often without the seductive bulwark

82 of narrative to act as defense, the varied experience of a shared reading of poetry offers us the dissimilar entanglements of ourselves.

II. Resistances

I've noticed that poetry elicits a strange phenomenon in English and English

Education students. The same teenaged readers who fearlessly offer the admission that they "haven't really read much" of the assigned Dickens novel just before they boldly state -and defend— their opinions about character motivation or authorial intention will

fall back, helpless and shuddering, when asked what they think of a three-line Haiku. My experience with faculty of education pre-service English teachers is similar. Necessary experts at reflection and analysis of their own educational histories, over and over student teachers respond with a fearful "I don't really understand poetry" when asked how they've integrated poetry into their teaching time. Often reflection kicks in and they

suggest to me that their own teachers failed to successfully inspire a passion or understanding of poetry, thus rendering them unable to arouse any joy in the subject for their own students. This is a relatively modern phenomenon; Baron Wormser and David

Capella note that only one hundred years ago, "poetry comprised a full 50% of the reading material in standard school texts; today it is less than 3%" (Wormser and Capella,

341). It's disturbing to me to think that a generation of high school English teachers is reticent to bring poetry to their students; for many, the high school English class is the only space in which they will encounter poetry at all. At its most gloomy, it seems to me that an entire generation is being denied what poetry might offer, on dubious grounds.

Is poetry really so difficult to read and to teach? Shorter than most novels, if literature is, as Leonard Jackson claims, a "portable psychosis" (Jackson 9) than surely poetry is

83 the "most" portable. A homework assignment to read a poem -or even a couple of poems, if they are the right ones—would certainly take less time out of the lives of busy students than a novel, short story or play. Even if students arrive with their homework incomplete, a teacher could read a poem aloud with the class -at once ensuring the group as a whole has a common point of reference, while providing shared experience and a strong foundation for discussion. To do so with a longer literary text would take vast amounts of time and energy. Furthermore, the necessary ambiguity of poetry -a factor that writers such as William Empson suggest is so integral to the poetic enterprise—leaves space for generous readings incorporating personal interpretations, private associations and affect, all of which might hold the possibility of a pleasurable moment of literary encounter.

Granted, the forms of poetry are complex; iambic pentameter notwithstanding, the stress of creating a coherent thought in the form of even a haiku -with lines of five, seven and five syllables—adhering to the constraints while aiming towards meaning that is at once human and beautiful, is no doubt a daunting task. Yet for the reader, the experience should lead to pleasure and appreciation, the difficulty of form only adding to the depth of encounter. While poetry is, therefore, that difficult, the difficulty seems to fail as an excuse. A more interesting question might be, what are we using the difficulty of poetry to do for us? Resistance to poetry "doesn't mean that children aren't really interested in poetry," writes Kenneth Koch in his definitive book Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?

Teaching Great Poetry To Children. "But only that something is interfering with their feeling that interest as strongly as they might" (Koch 10). What difficulties do we use the

"difficulty" of poetry to hide?

84 When I look at my own English teaching, I didn't fare much better. While poetry was

always present in my literature classroom, I realize now that the bulk of my material was narrative text -poems like Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" or Alfred Noyes' "The

Highwayman." For the purpose of amusing the students, and to inject some Canadian content, I would often include Robert Service's "The Cremation of Sam McGee." There, within the safe confines of narrative cause-and-effect, I could define terms like metaphor and simile; students would discuss personification, rhyme scheme and alliteration while

simultaneously drawing plot graphs for Sam McGee's unfortunate freezing (and re- warming) or writing about the setting in which the "pallid bust of Pallas" sits in Poe's

Plutonian prose. We researched the historical facts on the outlawed English highwaymen of Noyes' day, and wrote character sketches on Bess —the landlord's daughter who loved her own gallant, atypical highwayman of the poem. I was teaching the conventions of the novel or short story with some poetic device thrown in for good measure as well as curriculum (and personal) satisfaction. Faced with the nihilistic prophecy of Shelley's

"Ozymandias" as a site passage, my students were no more prepared than I was to meet the force and affect of poetic encounter. I am haunted by these missed conversations; where were Rilke, Walcott and Naruda? Does the complex human insight of Shakespeare depend on the contextualization of his work within the narrative unity of staged action?

Could the tender accountings of Constantin Cavafy, as sensitive to a cup of tea cooling in the light of an autumn afternoon as to the fall of an empire, have reached students when they needed to be touched in a way that even story failed to do?

What is lost in teaching poetry as roman manque is necessarily difficult to determine.

There is no set line; much prose writing might strike one as poetry, and as Jane Hirshfield

85 reminds us, "in any good lyric poem -even one as brief as a haiku—a tiny narrative exists" (Hirshfield 185). It is more compelling, for the purposes of thinking about teaching and learning, to wonder why teachers and students find narrative so much more accessible than poetry. From a theoretical perspective, the answer may reside in the larger question of how we think about time; poetry makes new demands on how we conceptualize living within that framework. Paraphrasing Frank Kermode, Jonathan

Culler asserts that plot-based narrative "humanizes time by giving it form" (Culler 79).

Alice Fulton succinctly outlines what more poetry demands; "Fiction is about what happens next," she writes. "Poetry is about what happens now" (Fulton 7). If narrative humanizes time, the function of poetry might well be to humanize narrative -to render the present moment, if not understandable, at least relevant, compelling, substantial. "It does this, "Jane Hirshfield writes, "by posing again and again a question that cannot be answered except with our whole being -body, speech and mind. What is the nature of this moment? Poetry asks, and we have no rest until the question is answered" (Hirshfield 53).

What is at stake in this demand is a kind of existential awareness of self; moving outside of the commercially-binding exigencies of "Who/What do you want to be?" and "Where do you want to go?" the present moment demands of us who we are, right there, in that instant -what about us is flawed and limited, great and inspiring. Amidst light and shadow, there is nowhere to hide. "What is the nature of this moment?" asks a great deal ofus.

Upon that question so much depends, and so much is unanswerable. Other than poetry, few languages exist to articulate an individual response. For this reason, the best poetry remains often unquantifiable -and here is a problem for education. How much

86 easier is it for the teacher to place the demands of a rubric upon a character sketch or plot graph than the fears and hopes an individual moment might contain? It is a task worthy of trepidation to consider how a teacher might grade the relief a student feels at recognizing the humanization of time. Peter Abbs, in his meditation on the state of contemporary urbanity Against the Flow: Education, the arts and postmodern culture, notes how students

spend their lives frenetically preparing for assessment or being assessed or waiting to receive the results of assessment -or, of course, being entirely alienated from it and, hence, disruptive or withdrawn. In a milieu of endless testing and instant accountability it is impossible for profound levels of creativity to be released.. .Quite simply, the teacher has no time to allow a digression into fresh symbolic ground; even worse, the teacher is too preoccupied with what has to be done next -and next and next—to even notice the true educational opportunity which has been forfeited. In this grey institutional world of delivery and assessment teachers are reduced to technicians, managers of inert knowledge, distributors of pre-selected skills; operators, not educators. (Abbs 59)

In an age of standardized testing and "accountability" -products of a society for which the individualized moment holds less and less engagement with possibility; as Terry

Eagleton notes, we live in a time of "fleeting perceptions and instantly consumable events

[in which] nothing stays still long enough to lay down those deep memory traces on which genuine experience depends" (Eagleton 17)—it is the brave teacher indeed who demands of poetry the personal, visceral reverberation. Where poetry threatens to take us, curriculum knows not how to go. Creativity, with its risk of ambiguity and failure, is required -and in the panopticon of public schooling and teacher education, the liability must often seem too great.

87 Poets have made an effort to help. As noted, the work of Kenneth Koch strives to offer

a template of admirable "best practice" examples in which students read poetry and respond by writing their own; he strategically avoids any heavy-handed guidance on

classroom implementation. In Rose, Where Did You Get That Red, writing in response to poetry is the prime interpretive reading strategy. Other than his directive to aim for "the individual student responding to the individual poem in his own way," Koch offers - perhaps quite wisely—little advice on assessment (Koch 28). Others are more bold. The

suggestion to use orality and music to teach poetry is widespread (Kennedy 1976; Perrine

1988; Collom and Noethe, 2007; Meyer 2007). Poet Craig Czury suggests a number of questions to stimulate thinking about poetry, most originating from a reader response

schema. These questions include:

-What does the poem remind you of? -What did you think about while listening to it? -How does the poem make you feel? And what has ever happened in your life that has left you with a similar feeling? (Lockwood 1994: 67)

Among the most detailed "best practice" advice, Diane Lockwood (1994) collected the

advice of poets participating in the New Jersey East Brunswick High School Poetry

Celebration to compile the following suggestions on how poetry might be approached in the literature classroom:

POET'S ADVICE ON WHAT NOT TO DO WITH POETRY:

-Do not explain the poem to students. -Do not give tests on poetry. -Do not be overly concerned with techniques. -Do not approach a poem with historical matters.

88 -Do not impose the critics on students.

POETS' ADVICE ON HOW TO TEACH POETRY:

-Expose students to beautiful, powerful language. -Allow time for multiple oral readings of a poem. -Lead discussions that encourage a personal relationship with a poem. -Teach contemporary poetry first and then go backwards in time. -Teach poems you don't fully understand. -Teach poems that are accessible to students. -Allow students to choose their own poems. -Provide opportunities for students to write poetry. (65 - 70)

Interestingly, the advice given follows a model of reading that is individualistic and interior; without tweaking, each of the suggestions encourages the necessary step of allowing the reader to form a relation with a particular poem -and does little else. No relation with world or other readers evolves. Patrick Dias asks what happens in the transaction between young reader and poem, and outlines four types of possible response -paraphrasing, thematizing, allegorization and problem solving (Dias 1996).

"Students will come to realize that their own experiences are relevant to uncovering the experiences presented in the poem," he writes, suggesting a structural model of

"uncovering" personally relevant answers hidden within the body of a text (85). Poets and poetry educators alike agree that the interiority of a poem is essential to meaningful reading; how this interiority might translate into the public space of classroom and curriculum is a much murkier area. Contrary to Dias, Carl Leggo offers advice, warning against heavy-handed interpretation, noting that "students frequently reflect their teachers' reading orientations. In other words, students learn to read poetry from experiencing the way teachers read poetry, and teachers are often paraphrasers,

89 thematizers, and allegorizers intent on revealing the meaning.. .and closing down the transaction with the text" (Leggo 1991: 58). Later, he offers a strategy of writing questions about individual poems and then initiating a class discussion not to answer the questions, but to decide if each should be answered at all. It is an interesting approach, and one that recognizes the integrity of poetry's vital ambiguity. "The advantages of doing nothing with the questions are multiple," Leggo writes. "The poem remains open, the questions hint at tantalizing ideas and experiences and people and places to pursue, and the questioner remains open" (60).

"To learn which questions are unanswerable," writes Ursula K. LeGuin in her classic novel The Left Hand of Darkness, "and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness" (LeGuin 151). The work of not answering the questions of poetry -as suggested by Leggo and LeGuin—is an essential part of thinking about the transaction among poem, reader and literature classroom in the stressful and traumatic experience of learning. As it reflects the interior world and presents language that approximates the strangeness of experience, poetry leaves room for what is unanswered and unanswerable -and makes a space for these to become a shared adventure.

Quantifying these phenomenon, assessing them, suggesting that there is a "right answer" or an answer that is "better" than another, does violence to what the experience of reading offers. It is little wonder that both students and teachers feel threatened and resist this contract. Asking students to map a rhyme scheme is a much safer project.

Sokka and The Poetry Institution

If students and teachers are reticent about attempting to share the personal resonances of a poem, the "poetry institution" may be partly responsible. How poets, publishers and

90 the artistic community talk about poetry is often inaccessible and intimidating. "Thus," writes Shelley in his Defense of Poetry (1821) "Poetry, and the principle of Self, of which

Money is the visible incarnation, are the G-d and Mammon of the world" (Shelley 69).

Ntozake Shange (1978) tells us that a poem should "Fill you up with something.. .make you swoon.. .stop you in yr tracks.. .like cold water or a kiss" (57). In their high calibre poetry anthology/textbook Inside Poetry (2002), Richard Davies and Jerry Wowk tell their adolescent readers that poetry "is like a mirror that gives us insight into experience, human nature, others, and ultimately, ourselves" (1). Following, they present other opinions of what a poem might be, in the voices of famous poets and writers. "A poem should be a part of one's sense of life," Wallace Stevens tells us (2), and Edith Sitwell agrees: "My poems are hymns of praise to the glory of life" (3). Robert Frost notes that a poem "begins in delight and ends in wisdom" (30). In an essay included in the volume,

Edwin Hirsch notes that poetry "opened up an unembarrassed space in me that would never be closed. I had stumbled into the sublime" (53). "Poems lead me into myself,"

Canadian poet Lorna Crozier writes in a similar essay from the anthology, "Poetry is closer to prayer than prose" (97, 98).

Obviously, what we call "poetry" is a resilient and important phenomenon. It has survived throughout the ages of human history, pictorially predating language and, like water through stone, finding its way to all aspects of life. Kings and prophets have written and read poetry; it has touched political prisoners awaiting execution and those imprisoned by the constraints of their own lives. If asked his profession, Shakespeare would have answered "Poet" (Widdowson 8). It is, perhaps, this long and enigmatic history that students find so daunting. What poetry asks of its readers is to share an

91 experience of their own lives; education often holds that experience up to scrutiny. If

students find their own reminisces don't match with the poetic, if they are told their

associations are incorrect, if they don't understand a poem -or, if they don't like a poem,

or poetry at all—what does this mean according to the pantheon of criteria laid out by so

many illustrious and important historical thinkers, many on obvious display in high

school textbooks? Does it leave them outside Stevens' "sense of life", Sitwell's "glory of

life" or Frost's sense of delight and wisdom? Perhaps it closes the space Hirsch entered to

encounter the sublime, or renders one unworthy of prayer, human nature, experience

and -worst of all, most alienating and terrifying—ourselves. If we don't understand

poetry, if we "fail" a poetry unit, if a teacher is unsuccessful at inspiring a love of poetry

and its entire tautology in her students, what is it that has been lost? Nobody wants to

lose those things, and certainly to lose them publicly is contemptible. The anxiety of

poetry's influence weighs heavily on us; there is a burden of history and eminence that

must be overcome.

There is a memorable moment in the popular animated Nikelodeon series Avatar: The

Last Airbender. During the episode "Tales of Ba Sing Se" the character of Sokka leaves

his friends one evening to explore the new city in which the main group finds themselves.

Sokka is fifteen years old, the only title character without supernatural ability and thus an

easily empathetic figure for viewers. He often provides comic moments in the series, and

is a kind of allegorical type to the popular, familiar young teenage qualities we see in the

media.

Venturing out, Sokka finds a sign advertising a poetry club. He becomes genuinely

excited, happily exclaims, "Poetry\" and enters. Inside, he is surprised to find a number

92 of geisha-styled girls speaking to one another in Haiku -following the form exactly, each counting out the syllables as they talk. Immediately, Sokka joins them, counting out syllables to introduce himself, ridicule the establishment's strict matron and charm the geishas. The conversation becomes musical -almost like a kind of muted rap between the characters—and the girls giggle and flirt with a delighted Sokka. As things speed up and his success with the poetry mounts, Sokka becomes overconfident and misses a syllable.

Suddenly, the giggling and flirting stop. The geishas become silent and turn away as two surly and muscled guards appear to toss Sokka out of the club and onto the street. The vignette ends with an image of poor Sokka laying in the dirt, humiliated and alone, as he groans in a defeated mumble, "PoetryV

The tale of Sokka seems significant for a number of reasons. That character is a young, athletic and witty figure; he describes himself as a "warrior" -and, without the help of any otherworldly abilities, he often distinguishes himself in battle. He is a popular "good guy" who is loyal to his friends and frequently meets new ones on the myriad adventures of the show. Sokka's "cool". In "Tales of Bah Sing Se", we see him become excited by poetry, happy to enter the club -before he even knows there are giggling geishas inside— in order to investigate what kind of poetry event might be happening within. Once there, he is not only instantly aware of the form and conventions of Haiku, he becomes immediately excited and happy to make use of poetry as an act of social interaction. He uses it to initiate a conversation, introduce himself, charm and woo the attractive geishas.

If Sokka is a role model, poetry is presented as a fun, attractive pastime; like him, poetry is "cool".

93 Yet, the scene ends with Sokka punished, banished and bruised -and alone—for violating the strictly enforced, socially imposed rules surrounding poetry. Whatever leads cool Sokka to poetry, and to the fun interactions inspired by it, is less important than what is "right and wrong" about the genre. He makes a mistake and the party ends. Poetry is no longer exciting for him.

Sokka's story might serve as a cautionary tale for those involved in the teaching of the genre. Perhaps, we might come to see our students as having a natural affinity for poetry; for them, it might be something exciting and useful, accessible, fun, and perhaps even cool. In the classroom, we can make public space for poetry -to share and talk about it, to allow poetry to inspire questions, wonders and desires in us, to stimulate the kinds of interactions that are enjoyable, challenging and fun. As teachers, we do not want to give into the model the geishas provide, withdrawing our approval or affection whenever a construct is breeched or form is ignored. (After all, many people credit poetry as life- saving; I've never heard anyone say that a 5-7-5 syllable count staved off the darkness, no more than a rhyme scheme or the beat and meter of iambic pentameter inspired them to live another day.) And we certainly do not want to act in the role of the surly guards, expelling someone from the possible fun and interaction of poetry simply because they acted outside the boundaries of conventional restraints.

How might the teacher strive to cultivate the Sokkas in our classrooms? A sensitivity to how daunting the mythos of poetry is comprises a good start. Instead of setting up the genre as a life-altering, good-against-evil pathway into the sublime (there's time for that later; it has uses too), we might instead start with a simple and accessible definition such as the one Terry Eagleton provides in How to Read a Poem: "A poem is a fictional,

94 verbally inventive moral statement in which it is the author, rather than the printer or word processor, who decides where the lines should end" (25). This unpoetic -Eagleton's own description of his definition—approach, the antithesis to much of the elegiac

explication of poetry we often encounter- is a fair starting point at which the possibility of inspiration, interest and questions begin. It is also valuable in that the students who are genuinely baffled by poetry -which is not necessarily a bad place to be—or those who sincerely dislike it are not excluded from something vital and absolute. It is certainly less risky to venture an engagement with a "fictional, verbally inventive moral statement" ending at the author's discretion rather than Shelley's notion of an incarnation of the divine. After all, people have been excommunicated and burned at the stake for less.

In terms of education, sepulchral approaches to poetry do the genre a disservice.

When poetry becomes an orthodox religion, conversation is shut down. Placing poetry higher than the life it describes has a function, but it is not one that leads us to understanding and listening to each other with empathy and compassion, cherishing the act of expressing experience in language, interpreting together. We might take the words of Adrienne Rich as a mantra of how to move toward the genre in our own lives and classrooms, in human terms:

I hope never to idealize poetry -it has suffered enough from that. Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy. Neither is it a blueprint, nor an instruction manual, nor a billboard. There is no universal Poetry anyway, only poetries and poetics, and the streaming, intertwining histories to which they belong.. .Poetries are no more pure and simple than human histories are pure and simple. Poetry, like silk or coffee or oil or human flesh, has had its trade routes. (Rich 2007: 21)

95 For poetry to enter the communal space of education, the English classroom, for it to be a recitation, a performance, a prophecy or an understanding achieved together -as the original connotations of the word "to read" intimate that the experience might be, we must move poetry from its distant and impervious meridians. Those heights have integrity; poetry is a human phenomenon worth noting. But when the heights become an imposition, an obstacle, we must see them as something else: part of an institution seeking to protect and advance itself for all too human reasons. Adrienne Rich reminds us of this. For the poem to be a living and possible part of curriculum, for what is eternal about poetry -and the poetic— to connect with the student and teacher, for it to be relevant and interesting and our own, poetry must be approached as something comprised of us -of the daily struggle and wonder, unsayability and emotion and language that establish the work of life and living. In that space, we can read poetry together, and -as the poet regards the knightly gentleman in Borges' poem—perhaps, notice something about each other in the process.

A Confusing Tyranny of "Strong Work"

Several years ago, while team-teaching an English class with a colleague, I was assigned the task of choosing a short story for our students to read. Delighted, I decided to use one of my own favourites: Gregory Maguire's piece "The Honorary Shepherds."

There were many reasons for this choice, not the least of which was my own preference. Ostensibly a story focused on compassion and tolerance, Maguire's composition centres around two young men at a strictly conformist, religious private school who, with the quiet collaboration of their own literature teacher, push the boundaries of their English class. The boys produce a short film revisiting the Nativity scene; in their rendition, the birth of baby Jesus holds the possibility for connection and communion between people. The story had touched me based on my own beliefs and ideals. As a teacher, this is a powerful factor in choosing work to bring to ones' own curriculum; wanting to share that which has touched and changed us is a virtually undeniable aspect to literature teaching. Maxine Greene notes, "We must make way for the unexpected. I believe it is by selecting out what they themselves have come to prize that teachers can offer their students opportunities for transformation of experience"

(Greene 1995: 136).

There was more than idealism and kinship with the subject matter at work in my choice. I believed -and still do—that Maguire's writing was beautiful in its mirroring of the events he recounts. It seemed to border on the poetic, the best of what the blending of language and experience might offer readers. Consider the gentle humour, sensitivity and attention to detail Maguire uses to describe the pivotal scene of the boys' revisionist film:

The Virgin is, of course, graceful and pure as an egg. The cow is placid. The angels look like Munchkins, disproportionately small to Mary's looming loveliness. Seen through the door of the stable, in the background, is a white blur in the sky, and this is the messenger angel. The distant shepherds are silhouetted, dark forms against the lighted hillside. One is on his knees in fear. Two are standing near each other, shadowy, shoulder to shoulder, close as a couple of lovers. Maybe those are female shepherds just on the other side of the hill, and handicapped shepherds in wheelchairs just out of sight. And Buddhist and atheist and vegetarian and every kind of shepherd you can think of.. .myths, like faith, are wide and capacious and of their nature generous. (Maguire 82)

Excited to hear the students' impressions of "The Honorary Shepherds," I was startled, the night before the piece was due, to find a class-wide email from my teaching colleague

97 including an attachment of another short story to be read for tomorrow. It was a small text of two pages, an established and well-known story that has taken on the moniker of a classic piece.

I wondered what had happened. Was Maguire's story too racy, challenging the conventions of dogmatic interpretation of the Virgin Birth? Was the question of a subversive English teacher too much to include in a curriculum choice? Had I perhaps unwittingly stepped on the beliefs or cherished ideals of my colleague?

I was surprised by the answer. "It's not strong writing," I was told.

It is not difficult to imagine that this reaction may have been a cover for something else. But I have no reason to believe that it was. Between us, there had never been disagreement on the kinds of literature that might be brought to the class -and we had certainly used what might be considered "controversial" texts before. In a way, it would have been less surprising to find myself faced with the religious beliefs of a fellow teacher; I would have been able to understand that more easily. What I found myself struggling with was how two of us could disagree so intensely about what "strong writing" might be. It was shocking to feel the personal sting of what seemed like an attack in that criticism. I loved "The Honorary Shepherds." I found it moving and beautiful. Labelling it as less than "strong" work was a strike on the cellular level; it was indisputable. We might argue as to whether the Nativity was an occasion for inclusion, whether it was right or wrong for an English teacher to go against the values of the school in which she taught, even whether religion has a place in the literature classroom. I could have taken on any of those arguments. Making a case that the work was strong enough writing to be brought to our own students -to someone who made no bones about making

98 the claim that it wasn't—seemed a much more impossible task. And worst of all, I began to wonder if I had missed something in my own reading of the story. What is at stake in labelling writing "strong" or not is nothing less than shutting down the conversation; it is a form of privilege, a categorization of exclusion stemming from ideas that something, somewhere, was missed. When it occurs on a personal level, there is little that can be done.

The idea of "strong writing" is a problem for the teacher of literature, and perhaps it reaches its most problematic with the teaching of poetry. This might be because there is simply so much poetry, and not all of it will be to everyone's particular taste. This is the larger issue. The smaller issue, which is equally enlightening, I think, has to do with a strange phenomenon almost unique to the teaching of poetry: that writing and reading often intermingle between themselves in the teaching of a poetry unit. As I've cited, both

Diane Lockwood and Kenneth Koch, in their important contributions to poetry teaching, suggest that writing poetry is an integral part of studying poetry. This is an interesting and curious idea for a number of reasons. How many music appreciation teachers believe that students must go home and write a concerto in order to value Mozart? English studies suffers a schism in this area as well; I've never met an English teacher who believes a student should write a five-act tragedy in iambic pentameter in order to appreciate Hamlet, or even an episodic volume of prose to reach an understanding of

Great Expectations. To understand poetry, however, our students are told to write poetry.

Yet how many English teachers are qualified, in the most sincere and undogmatic sense of the word, to teach students how to write poetry -poetry that has an integrity unto itself, that is capable of touching the "whispering hinge in the mind where sound meets

99 sign and beauty transacts with truth" (Tucker 443)? If the instructor is not both an expert teacher and an expert poet, how might this enterprise take shape? The worst outcome, it

seems to me, might be students producing work that defies judgment to be presided over by teachers who are incapable of judging, and the subsequent production of students incapable of understanding the difference -or the difficulty—between their work and the texts they are expected to critique.

What are we asking of our students when we assign them the task of being a poet - especially when we do it with little consideration of poetics? I wonder how many English teachers have thought about this question. Do we want students to gain some insight into the complex apparatus involved in the poems we have labeled as somehow truly great, or do we want them to produce small, utilitarian masterpieces to show the world how talented and clever they are? (And what good teachers we are?) The message is antithetical; it is not so easy to write brilliant poetry. There is another tack to take, however; perhaps brilliance, utility and fame are beside the point. "I would suggest," writes Peter Abs,

that there is more fulfillment in reading a new poem to a friend or to a gathering to mark a wedding or a funeral than to have it published in The Times Literary Supplement or The New York Review of Books where any exchange may well be entirely mechanical and as unreal and as abstract as a small cheque in the post some months later. (120)

What Abs is arguing for is a genuine engagement with poetry. His statement suggests that poetry written in honest sincerity is, essentially, better than the "good writing" published in famous literary journals, that poetry capable of an authentic expression of heart and soul, of connection between people, is the truest kind of "strong" work. In this way, perhaps critical reading and writing are not so far apart. When a piece is approached

with the totality of an individual's experience and feeling, it offers something back to the

world. Assessment is once again a real issue, but what better approach might a teacher bring to students writing poetry?

The difficult issue is one of individuality and our discomfort with ambiguity in

education and the world at large. Thus, a return to the greater question of the kinds of

strong work we might bring to our classrooms is warranted. How can a teacher choose texts capable of passing the unstated test that "The Honorary Shepherds" failed for me? Is there a universal criterion for "good work" or "strong writing" that way may rely on?

It is a question for the ages -unanswerable perhaps, but serious nonetheless. To pretend that English "education is an empty farce is to make it into an empty farce," writes Wayne Booth, "but the age-old task of imparting the.. .arts.. .is at least as

important as it ever was, and it is as important as anything else in the world" (Booth 189).

How the English teacher might provide texts to fulfill this important work is thus a crucial assignment. Perhaps it is for this reason that the convention of the "canon" was

assembled. But if the canon is our only guide, it becomes impossible for teachers to

follow the advice of Deane Lockwood's New Jersey poets who tell us to remain unconcerned with technique, not to impose the critics on students -who else authors what we call the "canon" but the critics? —and to work backwards in time from the present.

Canonized work tends to take decades (if not centuries) to achieve its status. Strict

adherence to the standard list of acceptable work also detracts from Maxine Greene's

idea of how important it is for teachers to bring their own transformative texts to students.

101 In his book What Good Are The Arts?, John Carey wonders what exactly a work of art might be. While he values the traditional canon a great deal -"If you stick to the canon you are less likely to waste your time," Carey admits (252)—he traces what is, for him, an irrational notion of universally "good" work back through philosophy. He cites Kant,

Hegel and Schopenhauer as the most culpable, but saves room for many others from

Dewey to contemporary author Jeannette Winterson. Instead, Carey offers the following unconventional model for what a "strong work" of art might be. "A work of art is not confined to the way one person responds to it," but rather

It is the sum of all the subtle, private, individual, idiosyncratic feelings it has evoked in its whole history. And we cannot know those, because they are shut away in other people's consciousnesses. Yet if we do not know them, we cannot really know even a single artwork. So it seems that none of us knows much about art, though we know what we like. (Carey 31)

While controversial, Carey's notion is ground-breaking, especially for the cause of

English teachers. Building from his idea that "a work of art is anything that anyone has ever considered a work of art, though it may be a work of art for only that one person"

(29), Carey suggests that high-brow snobbery at the root of much of the condemnation of

"lesser works" is almost always a function of either self-serving ambition or low self- esteem. Condemnation of work as inferior or lesser is not, after all, the same as building a canon; it's merely the work of exclusion. Like Emerson in Seven Types of Ambiguity,

Carey suggests that what makes a work indeterminate and open to multiple

To his credit, and perhaps the credit of his publishers, Carey allows Winterson a highly- visible chance to respond to his criticism. On the back cover of the trade edition of Carey's book, amidst lauding praise from The Literary Review, The Sunday Herald and The Spectator, Winterson's one word summation of the work appears: "Idiotic." 102 interpretations also makes it a work of art. While he does not suggest that individual response is the be-all-and-end-all of literature or literary study, he values instead that "it is precisely because these networks are arbitrary and personal, precisely because they are not like some mathematical theorem where everyone is on common ground, that they can play such a vital role.. .they make literature an internal thing, special to us" (Carey 245).

He is certainly not alone in this assertion. In his interesting piece "Teaching Ambiguity",

Herbert F. Tucker notes that as a teacher of poetry, he understands "that this ordering of reasonings (critical understandings) varies from reader to reader (from student to student) in decisively characteristic ways makes it a source of self-knowledge, even and perhaps especially when the characteristic ordering tends toward indecisiveness" (Tucker 446).

That "strong" work is writing which allows for ambiguity and leaves room for the independence of the ambiguous and the personal seems a concurrence among teachers of literature.

And for some teachers in general. The ambivalence Carey and Tucker speak of is present in Shoshana Felman's notions of the role of ignorance in teaching. "The truly revolutionary insight," she writes, "consists in showing the ways in which ignorance itself can teach us something, become itself instructive" (Felman 1987: 79). For Felman, what is unknown -and the resistances to knowing—create an ambiguity that offers a possibility for exploration of both self and other. Like Carey, she suggests that the spaces between what we know offer the most valuable experiences. "How can I interpret out of the dynamic ignorance I analytically encounter, both in others and myself?" she asks.

"How can I turn ignorance into an instrument of teaching?" (Felman 1987: 80). That ignorance might become a space for insight, and perhaps the ideal space for mutual

103 understanding as we meet not only our own ambivalences but also the ambiguities of others, leaves us with an interesting notion of the kind of work teachers might bring to their own students. What happens when a teacher brings a work of poetry to her class, a work that she finds profound or perplexing or a piece that opens new ways of thinking for her? In what ways might that teacher embark upon a conversation about the poem -where will she meet her students so that the experience of the personal is narratable for both teacher and students, even in the face of student resistance? How can teacher and student, and student and student, find ways to talk about a poem that they both love? Ambiguity is essential. Canonical works often carry an unspoken imperative to be loved. When this commandment is removed, something is gained. The realm of poetics is approached.

Of course, my argument does not suggest a jettison of the canon in literature classrooms. Furthermore, I don't wish to shut down entirely the debate about what constitutes good work. Carey's argument is an important one, but it is not universal -and

I'm not sure he would want it to be. There are many reasons to argue the case for good and strong poetry, and well-written literature. My concern, however, is that it is not necessarily the place of the English teacher to do so. Aesthetic philosophers, critics, writers, artists and those employed in the publishing industry are more than happy to engage this battle. The "Poetry Industry" takes care of itself, as well it should. The

English teacher must primarily be more sensitive and aware of how any work of art might have significance and meaning for any one particular person. The poetic encounter works differently in the classroom than the bookstore, publishing house or poetry reading. If an

"inferior" poem can touch the heart of a student who needs it, the important work of literary education is thwarted by a discussion about what makes the poem inferior. We

104 become like the heavy-handed poetry guards Sokka encounters when we shut down discussion with harsh judgments. These say more about our own defensive positions anyway, and the tastes we choose to emulate; it is interesting to consider what a student learns from a teacher's condemnation of a text. Instead, we must act to make a space where students come to trust their own intuition about a work, where they feel they can take -and enjoy— what a text offers them under the terms of their own interpretation and context. With a body of work as vast as the one poetry provides, the English teacher must try to offer what they can and allow students to find what they need. "Good writing comes from good reading," Camille Paglia notes, "Criticism at its best is re-creative, not spirit-killing" (Paglia xvi). The work of literary and aesthetic education is to open up possibilities of change and conversation and communion, connections with ourselves and each other. In The Library At Night, Alberto Manguel offers an important axiom for the teacher of literature and thinking about how necessary individuality and ambiguity are in the English classroom. "It may be," he writes, "that there is no book, however well written, that can remove an ounce of pain from the tragedy of Iraq or Rwanda, but it may also be that there is no book, however foully written, that does not allow an epiphany for its destined reader" (Manguel 2006: 232). We must teach so that destined readers might find their epiphanic texts. The sallow gentleman, like the solemn child, must be allowed the dreams he does not understand.

"I think we live so much in our imaginations," writes Maxine Greene in a keynote speech to the International Society for Education for the Arts, "that in some ways the imaginative connection.. .is as close as we ever get to each other" (Greene 2003: 8). It is delicate and poetic work, then, this project of reading together. When a poem is brought

105 before a group, we are asked to read much more than the words and lines before us; the task is to read ourselves and each other, the world we live in and what makes the world adequate to contain, simultaneously, the text and the diversity of selves within it. An expansive definition of the idea of "reading" is a necessity; in reading world and one another, in the attempt to get closer, the inner world must venture forth to recollect, prophesize, gather and announce; we must call out, interpret and declare even as we study and peruse silently. The public reader of poetry must embrace the mantle of critic and philosopher at the same time as soothsayer and performer. To do this, we must act with a sensitive awareness about the current against which we swim, what institutions we work against and how those conspire to play on our fears and worries, how the conversation might be shut down. We must take from poetry the poetic in ourselves, the desire and faculty to reach out and find another waiting. As Octavio Paz writes,

The poem is just this: a possibility, something that is only animated by the contact with a reader or a listener. There is one note common to all poems, without which there would be no poetry: participation. Each time the reader truly relives the poem, he reaches a state that we call poetic. The experience can take this form or that, but it is always a going beyond oneself, a breaking of the temporal walls, to be another. (14)

The aesthetic realities of the poetic are achieved at their highest when something in a poem touches us and we are able to share that experience with others, in conversation and sincerity. For Paz and Greene, the poetic exists in the transaction between poem and readers. Shared reading is thus a most difficult task, as the boundaries of self must give way to the possible ambiguities of others and the ambivalences of the spaces between us.

Without these, however, there is no freedom for interpretation and no true relation is

106 possible -between reader and poem, or reader and reader. Like dreams, the experience of

a poem can be shared only in an imprecise way, but it is the attempt -public, sensitive,

thoughtful, heartfelt—that is essential. What is possible to learn of one another may well

come to be realized in the act of shared reading.

III. Five Daydreams

"Meanings are ways of relating to things," Maxine Greene writes, "Meaning happens

in and by means of an encounter with a painting, with a text, with a dance performance"

(Greene 1995: 139). I would argue that meaning also happens by way of encounter with

others, and that meanings are, themselves, a way of relating to the people we meet during

the shared intersections of aesthetic engagement. When we find one another in the

halfway spaces between experience and interpretation, when one mind opens to previously unimagined landscape and possibility, Paz' definition of the poetic has been

achieved. The Literature classroom is one place where such readings might occur.

English curriculum provides the opportunity for new conversations.

As a teacher, I wonder about the kinds of conversations it is possible to have with

students over poetry. In what ways can I bring poems that inspire me to an imagined,

fantasy classroom, and what sorts of dialogue do I hope for there? This is a difficult

phrasing, because hoping for any specific routing of event denies the poetic possibilities

of the unexpected. The surprises arising from what we offer students are, I believe, the

ultimate goal. The meaning of the dream, after all, is nothing more or less than the work

we do with it. "The dream is whatever we can find to say about it," writes Adam Phillips. "In any interpretation there is always a remainder of possibility. The material that does not submit" (Phillips 1997: 74). This complexity speaks of the poetic.

And so, to end this chapter I offer five daydreams -five starting points of conversation, five poems and the perplexities I bring to them, the wondering I do about where these conversations might go. I know, too, that these are five wishes, wishes to be brave enough to one day teach these poems, to see where the dreamwork takes me together with students, to be sensitive and open enough to learn from the ambiguities and disappointments, fears, and wishes that these sometimes "fictional, verbally inventive moral statements" inspire, to see what meaning we might make against what is left out, left over or refuses to submit.

The (day)dream is a useful metaphor against which to think about the graft of reading poetry, alone and with others. As Phillips notes, our dreams, like our poetic interpretations, are a "unique source of personal news" (1997: 67). Our imaginative machinations for both dream and interpretive work offer to us a sense of those things that are a part of us -but of which, often, we remain unaware. If dreams are, as Freud suggests in "The Interpretation of Dreams," a direct path to the unconscious, perhaps our readings are a more circuitous route to the same psychical destination. This is a useful perspective for the poetry teacher, or the poetic one: it would be a callous and ridiculous act to suggest that someone else's unconscious is "wrong" or somehow inferior -no matter how many shepherds it conjures. Once again, as Phillips notes, the work of the dream -both in dreaming and interpretation—"can be used to protect us from each individual's interpretation of dreams" (1997: 76). In our classrooms and ourselves, the metaphor of reading dreams is a compelling defense against the tyranny of "strong work."

108 First, two technical notes on my choice of poetry and presentation. In Bridging

English, Milner and Milner offer an effective strategy for teaching poetry -it is one I've used with a great deal of success. Combining anthology creation and personal response, the Milners suggest the activity of asking students to create their own anthologies of beloved poems (173). Each anthology is to have a small editorial on each poem made by the students themselves, explaining their choice. In my classes -with both junior/intermediate students and university-level pre-service teachers—I've asked for a two-line summation of the poem and a three-line explanation of why the piece made the anthology. Never overly rigid with the lengths -within reason—the activity has been incredibly fruitful and presents an interesting guideline for this experiment. Perhaps in lieu of a summary of the poem, however, I will here allow myself more space to describe each daydream.

Choosing poems for this endeavor was extremely difficult. I was faced with any number of my own desires about how I might appear choosing this poem or that one. I wanted to look like a well-read student of poetry and a keenly thoughtful student of education all at once. I also found myself worrying about equity in my representations; to paraphrase the passage from "The Honorary Shepherds" quoted above, I wanted Buddhist poems, atheist poems, vegetarian poems and poems from long ago and far away. I became very concerned at my original choices because out of the five, only one was written by a female poet. This felt wrong and I wondered if something was being overlooked. I felt somewhat relieved in noticing that my 20% ratio was on par with

Camille Paglia's allocation in Break, Blow, Burn -an excellent anthology of what she calls in her subtitle "forty-three of the world's best poems" in which only 9 are written by

109 female poets (also 20%). Three of these are by Emily Dickenson so her ratio is actually behind mine. I think the concerns I felt are interesting because they probably mirror the kinds of thinking teachers face when choosing poetry to present to their own students and are an obstacle as much as some of the resistances and fears I've mentioned throughout this chapter.

Eventually, I decided to simply relax and settled upon five poems that I was simply curious about teaching to students in a literature class. Not all the shepherds that I would have liked to include have been represented, but as in dreams -and dream interpretation— what is left out offers both interesting points of discussion for its own sake as well as further conversations to be had. It seems to me that this is the entire point.

1. Sonnet 73, William Shakespeare

That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. In me thou see'st the twilight of such day As after sunset fadeth in the west; Which by and by black night doth take away; Death's second self that seals up all in rest. In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire, That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, As the deathbed whereon it must expire, Consumed with that which it was nourished by. This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong, To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

It may seem odd to include a sonnet by Shakespeare as my first daydream, especially after citing John Carey's idea that that canon —while useful— is only as relevant as its readers find it to be. Yet, there's something about Shakespeare's sonnets that is so

110 compelling and powerful it would seem to me impossible not to wonder about the kinds

of conversations a poem like this one might inspire. There is room to find oneself in the piece. Shakespeare uses structure in an almost miraculous way; that his language is able to dance and shine with meaning in spite of its adherence to the constraints of form creates in his work a quality of the recognizable masterpiece. The constraints of form draw the reader inclusively into the words, and allow us to live there for as long as we want. Words and phrases become like characters, alive in a theatre of signification.

Language is a canvas upon which he seems to effortless paint what we long to know of the world.

The idealization of youth is an act committed by those who intuit themselves no longer young. My experience teaching younger students is that, while they offhandedly "enjoy" the benefits of early life, this pleasure is tempered by their own fears and worries about what it will be like to grow older. They worry about the loss of what they take for granted as people of any age do. And the defenses that arise from these fears seem to me to be often misunderstood as flippancy, cynicism or indolence.

Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 strikes at the heart of our fears of loss. With the prescribed circumscriptions of a form ancient in his own time, Shakespeare uses the sonnet as an instrument of combined self-analysis and confession. The poet's own, widely universal

fears of the deprivals of age are outlined, tragically compounded by the very power of what has been lost. ("Consumed with that which it was nourished by.") For the old, the

sonnet is an acknowledgment, a recognition; for the young, a gentle admonition. Human beings are both "nourished" and "consumed" by the inheritance of loss. Yet the sonnet also contains within it a refusal to be doomed by this destiny -in fact, the inevitability of

111 human loss, like the consuming fire the sonnet speaks of, creates a brighter flame in the

possibility of what we can do with the time we have.

In the concluding rhyming couplet, Shakespeare leaves us with a powerful declaration

that brooks no cynicism in the face of defeat. If there was one philosophy of being I

would wish to pass along -and live by myself— it would be these final lines. In her novel

David and Jonathan, Cynthia Voigt defines a friend as one who "limits the damage"

(Voigt 248). In the sonnet's consummation, Shakespeare provides us with one such friend.

2. Fragment I, Praxilla of Sicyon (circa 450 B.C.E.)

Loveliest of what I leave behind is the sunlight, and loveliest after that the shining stars, and the moon's face, but also cucumbers that are ripe, and pears, and apples.

Like Shakespeare's sonnet, this short poem -an example of the scolia of which

Praxilla of Sicyon leaves behind only eight—deals with the inevitability of death. A great

deal of poetry concerns itself with this subject; poets and critics from Harold Bloom to

Billy Collins state their belief that poetry exists in opposition to the nihilistic finality of

death. "Pick a poem, any poem, from an anthology and you will see that it is speaking for

life," writes Collins. "A poem about mushrooms or about a walk with the dog is a more

eloquent response to September 11 than a poem that announces that wholesale murder is

a bad thing" (Milner & Milner 187; Collins 13A). Death and poetry, two universals of

human experience, inevitably encounter a relation with one another.

Yet, it is simplistic to assume that poetry always stands as an erotic, creative force

against the static weight of limited mortality. There are truly frightening poems about

death, texts capable of staring into the void and reporting that nothing exists beyond. As

noted, I would place Shelley's "Ozymandias" firmly in this category, joined by such 112 works as Lord Byron's "Darkness" (The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave, /

The Moon, their mistress, had expired before; / The winds were wither'd in the stagnant air, / And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need / Of aid from them -She was the

Universe.") and the gradual, apathetic forgetting of life in which narration itself is abandoned as the soul is carried away in Emily Dickenson's "Because I Could Not Stop

For Death" ("Since then -'tis Centuries—and yet / Feels shorter than the Day /1 first surmised the Horses' Heads / Were toward Eternity—"). If we want to frighten ourselves,

Death is the surest route.

In Praxilla's short fragment, however, there is a gentleness to life's conclusion; something of us remains behind. Memories of the simplest experiences of life -sunlight, stars, fruits and vegetables—become a legacy, as if we might continue in the very things we loved while alive, as if they will somehow remember and speak of us in our absence. I think of theologian and philosopher John O'Donohue's writing:

We tend to think of death as a return to clay, a victory for nature. But maybe it is the converse: that when you die, your native place will fill with sorrow. It will miss your voice, your breath and the bright waves of your thought, how you walked through the light and brought news of other places. When the funeral cortege passes the home of the departed person, is it the home that is getting one last chance to say farewell to its beloved resident or is it the deceased getting one last look at the home? Or is it both? Perhaps each day our lives undertake unknown tasks on behalf of the silent mind and vast soul of nature. During its millions of years of presence perhaps it was also waiting for us, for our eyes and our words. (33)

Like the muses to whom she was compared, Praxilla of Sicyon's poem inspires me to consider my own list of the loveliest things to leave behind. It's startling how a small poem written more than two millennia hence resonates so deeply still, and on such a

113 human level. These are the conversations I wish for from this piece: what is it about these words that touches us still? Why do we, too, long to hold the sunlight and the stars and pears and apples as a part of ourselves? What will each of us miss after we are gone, and what will speak for us then, if we could choose?

3. Quarantine, Eaven Boland

In the worst hour of the worst season of the worst year of a whole people a man set out from the workhouse with his wife. He was walking -they were both walking—north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up. He lifted her and put her on his back. He walked like that west and west and north. Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead. Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history. But her feet were held against his breastbone. The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold. There is no place here for the inexact praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body. There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847. Also what they suffered. How they lived. And what there is between a man and woman. And in which darkness it can best be proved.

Eavan Boland's poem "Quarantine" comes from a collection of work entitled Against

Love Poetry. It's a radical idea; for many, love poetry is the quintessential heart of the

114 genre. I've had countless conversations with friends of mine who teach intermediate

English; they mention over and over again how students will hand them love poetry they themselves have written, asking for criticism and validation. Mostly validation, my friends believe.

Asking ourselves, and our students, to rethink conceptualizations of love is a huge undertaking. So often we confuse love with other things, or we leave it vague and undefined. Yet in this poem, Eaven Boland has very clear ideas about what it is and what it is not; while she commands that "no love poem ever come to this threshold" the piece describes a very tender, selfless moment of connection between two people. The final two stanzas somehow hold an almost mocking tone in the direction of "conventional" notions of sensuality and erotic love poetry while containing within the words a kind of quiet plea for re-consideration about what we might ultimately want for ourselves against the backdrop of difficult history. The poem is not erotic in the conventional sense, yet there is touch, flesh and body heat. That there might be this kind of selflessness involved in love, that it might contain the larger sufferings of history and the small deaths of the body, provide a grounding that is both humbling and hopeful, entirely unexpected and original -even as it reconstitutes our expectations of the erotics of human connection.

There are other poems that take a similar stance: Sharon Olds' "Sex Without Love"

("like great runners: they know they are alone... / —just factors, like the partner / in the bed, and not the truth, which is the / single body alone in the universe / against its own best time.") and Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Love is not all" ("I might be driven to sell your love for peace, / or trade the memory of this night for food. / It well may be. I do not think I would.") come to mind. Both of these are worthy of conversation. But there is

115 something about Boland's poem that is striking to me -that at the worst time, so

emphasized, the language doubles back upon itself to remember that "he was walking - they were both walking" together (italics mine). Everything about this piece speaks of

love redefined as partnership and selflessness, from the first verse to the final, self-aware

assertions of the poem's merciless inventory. The poem asks us to rethink an idea so central to life, so marketed and thoughtlessly consumed in a culture bent on selling ourselves back to ourselves —and yet this piece demands that we think with feeling;

against a familiar backdrop made strange -the erotic darkness—Boland asks us what we want and what we might be willing to lose to get it.

4. Dover Beach, Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm tonight, The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits; -on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. Come to the window, sweet is the night air! Only, from the long line of spray Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land, Listen! you hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, At their return, up the high strand, Begin, and cease, and then again begin, With tremulous cadence slow, and bring The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles' long ago Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow Of human misery; we Find also in the sound a thought, Hearing it by this distant norther sea.

116 The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.

I survived the difficult weeks in September, 2001 by teaching. Those days were my first as a seventh grade Language Arts teacher, and I was amazed at how the students used writing and reading to navigate their questions and narrate their fears. The conversations we had in the weeks following the attacks felt -and still feel—like some of the most heartfelt and sincere moments I've experienced.

It was months later, during the first grade French class I'd been assigned to teach that I was startled by a thought. Watching my students, feeling something like Al Zolynas'

"love" for them, I realized that these children would grow up in a world for which the terror of that day was a fact of life. Only five and six years old in 2001, these first grade students would never know a world before the possibilities of terrorism and the subsequent "war on terror." Briefly, this seemed unbearable.

Reading Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach" was solace. The piece is a reminder that mourning for a world "various," "beautiful" and "new," a world of "peace," 117 "certitude," "joy," "love" and "light" is to long for a fantasy. Itself a product of bygone times, the poem reminds us that as long ago as Sophocles' Aegean world humanity faced the difficult problem of wars and the sadness of suffering. Yet, while Arnold leaves his readers on the darkling plane where "ignorant armies clash by night" the poem includes

an invocation. "Ah love, let us be true / To one another" he implores, for it is the world that holds the false promise of peace and the true realities of war in which we live. Adrift in such a fractured world, Arnold suggests that the only salvation to be found is one another. The only promise for meaning and hope is sincerity in the face of the emptiness and the miserable war of struggle. Beauty remains possible. It surprised me to discover this with my own students. I wonder if they would have said the same thing.

5. Going Blind, Rainer Maria Rilke

She sat much like the others at tea. At first it was as if she held her cup a little differently from the rest. She gave a smile. It almost hurt.

And when the time came to rise and talk and slowly, in no special order, pass through many rooms (talking and laughing), then I saw her. She came behind the others,

seeming subdued, like someone who soon will have to sing before many people; on her pale eyes full of joy, light fell from outside, as on a pond.

She followed slowly, taking a long time, as though something hadn't yet been surmounted; and yet: as if, as soon as she was past it, she would no longer walk, but fly.

118 Perhaps two of poetry's greatest strengths are its inclusivity to any aspect of life -

living, dying, war and illness, triumph and loss and everything in between all fall in the purview of poetry—combined with its unique ability to demand a slowing down, a way of noticing differently. Rilke's "Going Blind" is, for me, the best of what poetry can offer.

Here we see a small narrative of observation; an outsider -the poet—becomes aware of something different about a guest over for tea. The tenderness in the poem is palpable; the lady, losing her sight, bravely struggles to manage her situation and maintain normalcy. Her difficulty is noticeable, but beautifully so: consider the poem's confession:

"She gave a smile. It almost hurt." This is a remarkably candid moment of feeling for another person.

The poem continues its sensitive narration throughout. The lady's almost sightless eyes are described as "pale" and "full of joy" and on them "light fell from outside, as on a pond." Rilke is able to use the poetic form to create, out of tenderness and gentle description, beauty for a situation even as sad as the loss of vision. This is maintained until the end of the piece, in the hopeful (and hopeless) prophecy that it seems as if the lady "as soon as she was past it.. .would no longer walk, but fly." The blind lady is given both beauty and dignity; her poise is enviable and the description of the light on her eyes is almost unbearably affective. She is given a loveliness the sighted tea-guests lack.

John O'Donohue writes that "when our approach is respectful, sensitive and worthy, gifts of healing challenge and creativity open to us. A gracious approach is the key that unlocks the treasure of encounter" (24). For me, the strength of "Going Blind" is how it lends sensitive and intense beauty to a difficult, painful situation. This is poetry -perhaps the poetic impulse—at its best, finding something human and delicate even amidst

119 suffering. That life has at least this much possibility, that nobody need be excluded from tenderness, is at once life-enhancing and incredibly kind. "It is imagination that redeems us," writes Matthew Von Unwerth in Freud's Requiem, "that allows us to create within ourselves a world not bounded by time or death" (214). This is a message at the core of aesthetic education and literary studies; within ourselves we have the power to create the conditions for our own survival, our own poetry. And we may somehow, at our best moments, take it outside ourselves and live with grace. How delightful it seems to me that a poem called "Going Blind" might allow us to see in such new and important ways.

120 If Just One Moment: Can poetry be good?

I wish to say that we will not be saved by poetry. But poetry is the type of the creation in which we may live and which will save us. —Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry

A Prison Evening

Each star a rung, night comes down the spiral staircase of the evening. The breeze passes by so very close as if someone just happened to speak of love. In the courtyard, the trees are absorbed refugees embroidering maps of return on the sky. On the roof, the moon -lovingly, generously— is turning the stars into a dust of sheen. From every corner, dark-green shadows, in ripples, come towards me. At any moment they may break over me, like the waves of pain each time I remember this separation from my lover. This thought keeps consoling me: though tyrants may command that lamps be smashed in rooms where lovers are destined to meet, they cannot snuff out the moon, so today, nor tomorrow, no tyranny will succeed, no poison of torture makes me bitter, if just one evening in prison can be so strangely sweet, if just one moment anywhere on this earth.

—Faiz Ahmed Fais Trans. Agha ShahidAli

121 A University Hallway, Toronto

The first class I took as a doctoral candidate in the faculty of education was Rishma

Dunlop's The Literary Imagination and the Curriculum. Feeling displaced from English

Departments where I'd done my undergraduate and master's degrees, it was the perfect place to begin a journey thinking about my own thinking about education. At the very

least, it was the place where I decided that there might be somewhere for me in education studies after all. Dunlop, herself a teacher and accomplished poet, often punctuated discussions about education and the practical considerations of teaching with poetry.

Novels and plays stood in the syllabus alongside curriculum documents and articles on critical pedagogy. I felt at home there.

One week, the topic of conversation turned to the subject of difficult knowledge and education. We'd been reading articles by and about Holocaust teaching and the fabrication of crisis. That particular day, the assigned reading included Shoshana

Felman's article "Psychoanalysis and Education: Teaching Terminable and Interminable"

(1997). The chapter raised a number of questions about the relation between ignorance and virtue, about how learning to "not know" makes teaching one of Freud's

"impossible" professions. If, as Felman suggests, there is a relation between ignorance

and education, surely the teacher's job becomes paradoxical and impracticable. As a class, we wondered how the "unmeant knowledge that escapes intentionality and meaning"

(1987: 77) might speak to the aesthetic experience -what could this new conception of ignorance as a "kind of forgetting -of forgetfulness" (Felman 78) teach us of learning

from, and about, poetry and the other fine arts?

122 As well, the class had looked at Moises Kaufman's The Laramie Project (2001), a

play examining the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming. Shepard, a

young gay man, was beaten beyond recognition and left to die tied to a fence in an

abandoned field. Together, the class watched a film version of Kaufman's piece (2002) in

which the events of Shepard's savage fate were dramatized contiguous with reenactments

of the research process done by Kaufman and his Tectonic Theatre Project as they prepared for writing and performance. It was not an easy film to watch and many of the

students reacted with visible emotion. This continued long after the television had been

turned off and the lights on. Without missing a beat or saying a word, Dunlop opened her

collection The Body of my Garden and began to read from "Copper Moon", a poem

written for Matthew Shepard. "There will be a time for you," we heard her say:

May your breath be resurrected by the human cantos of mercy. May you dance beyond these years, your heart breaking loose in cathedrals of winds. (Dunlop 2002: 70)

For me, it was a moment of essential catharsis. While eternally unredeemable, the

tragedy of Shepard's death became an educational experience pulled from the abyss of

senselessness by the possibility of poetry. Language rendered the brutality of violence

into an interval of compassion and tenderness; "Copper Moon" seemed suddenly a battle-

cry not to save the young man who suffered so undeservedly, but to hold tightly to his

story in order to save ourselves. I left the classroom feeling my own expansive and open

heart, thinking of Rilke's poem "Archaic Torso of Apollo" and his insistence that "There

123 is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life." It seemed to me that my

life had already somehow been changed.

But the world had not. Walking down the hall in that college, I suddenly heard a

violent conversation taking place ahead in the corridor. I couldn't see who, but someone

was having a terrible, one-sided cell-phone argument with her boyfriend. As I approached,

it was impossible not to listen and suddenly the details became clear: the boyfriend

couldn't pick her up at the designated time as arranged. The speaker was clearly very

angry about this change of plan, and I was both surprised and somewhat captivated by my

access to this dramatic interchange. She swore at him -several times, and creatively— before calling him names, brought up past offences and wondered at her own superhuman

tolerance of his obviously flawed character, morality and personal history. The boyfriend

must have had hardly a chance to defend himself as her tirade was almost non-stop.

When I got to the corridor in which the drama was unfolding, I was startled to see that

the speaker was a member of the "Literary Imagination" seminar. This discovery

unsettled me not so much for the fact that a classmate was so angry and displayed such an

easy temper with her friend -obviously I had no idea of the history of that relationship

and for all I knew, perhaps the recipient of her censure deserved at least part of it. The

surprise came because of how I was feeling from the experience of the class we'd just had. This colleague had watched, only an hour before, the same traumatic film about an

innocent boy being ambushed and murdered I had. Together, we'd listened to Rishma

Dunlop read her own poem responding to the question-mark of violence and murder with

soft empathy and poetic grace. How was it that she did not share the feelings of humanity

the class had left me with? Did The Laramie Project and "Copper Moon" do nothing for

124 her? Conversely, if the affective moment I continued to experience in the hallway was nothing more than a private and personal experience, what was the purpose of the film and poetry? What education had been achieved?

These are huge questions. The relationship between education and poetry -or, education and the arts in general—has a deep and contentious history. From Plato onward, those interested in the moral value of aesthetics in terms of educative potential have ranged from dubious to dismissive to hostile. Modem philosophers of both aesthetics and pedagogy take a perverse delight in chronicling the difficult past these topics share

(Scarry 1999; Carey 2005; Parini 2008). Even the loudest advocates of arts-informed education practice share their doubts. In his 2002 book The Arts and the Creation of Mind,

Elliot W. Eisner concedes that the changes wrought by an aesthetically enriched education "cannot now be determined with any degree of confidence" (xii) and notes that the only guarantee an arts-infused education can offer is the capacity for refined thinking about the arts themselves.

When questions of social justice and equity education enter the debate, the picture becomes even more bleak. For many, there seems to be no way to reconcile the arts with the aim of a better, more humane society. Poetry is especially suspicious in this regard.

"Poets are the wayward ones," Jay Parini writes, "the voices of protest against authority, the defenders of powerful feeling over fierce intellection, the abettors of all forms of disgusting and irreverent behaviour" (4). While there is much to say about the bad behaviour of poets -and the various ways in which the arts and the term "artist" are used as excuses for said bad behaviour—there is a far more damaging element in the consideration of the relationship between the arts and social justice education. For many,

125 there seems an irreparable chasm between the desire for beauty and a wish to change the world and help those in need. The two are seen as mutually exclusive quests, as if aesthetic thinkers can only search for beauty and those interested in the possibilities of equity refuse to find anything but. "Seeing a homeless person merely as an aesthetic effect, comparable to sunlight on a wall," Carey cautions us

illustrates the desensitizing influence of aestheticism, in that it reduces a fellow human being, with needs comparable to one's own, to an object of artistic contemplation. If this is what arts education achieves, it seems a good argument for discontinuing it. (102)

From this vantage point, it is hard to agree with Rukeyser's assertion that while poetry might not save us, it is even the type of creation which might save us. If the poets and aesthetic philosophers wander the world in search of only the beautiful, unwilling to admit to consciousness anything else, we can hardly disagree with Carey. To dehumanize other people and use or discard them based solely upon how they feed our own enjoyment or aesthetic affect seems a narrow-minded and immoral ontology.

Carey is quick to point this out. He notes that both sides in the debate are complex and multi-dimensional, compassionately suggesting that at the nay-sayers' worst and the pro- aesthetic educators' best there is consensus at a very strange intersection. Here, we see a shared and baffled concern that while "literature and the arts ought to make us better,

[they] seem not to in practice" (Carey 109). This is half of the insolvency I felt so acutely in that college hallway: why did The Laramie Project and the subsequent, poetic answer to it in the form of "Copper Moon" not change everyone in the seminar into a more open-hearted, forgiving and generous citizen of the world? I felt that it made me

126 better somehow -but had the arts, in their failure to achieve a categorical and uniform metamorphosis for everyone in the class, actually failed?

This shortcoming, Carey argues, comes from the side of the nay-sayers -those who believe that beauty and social justice remain parallel and juxtaposing solitudes, doomed to pass each other by from opposing philosophical directions. An unexamined consideration of this perspective suggests that the purpose of education -and aesthetics, and poetry—is to somehow improve the world and make people better. But the assumption that the arts should make people better, as Carey notes, "is seldom accompanied by any serious consideration of what better people might be like" (Carey

103). To judge if poetry has any effect in the improvement of the world without these considerations is a hollow and impossible task. Without even knowing what a "better" person might be, on a personal scale we can't even know if someone is better than they were unless we are somehow given access to their most private and intimate history alongside with countless other private and intimate histories with which to compare theirs.

What if, for example, my colleague in the "Literary Imagination" seminar had been silently abused by her friend for months until finally the powerful affect of the poem convinced her to speak out at last? Surely this would be a "better" version of her, from my perspective at least. (Many would disagree with me on that count.) Yet I could never know if even this was the case.

Where, then, is it possible to consider a case for poetry as a "type of thing in which we may live and which will save us"? With all the complications of philosophy and the complexities of a human world, is it possible to find an intersection between the aesthetic drive for beauty and a desire for a better world? The voices most insistent on a

127 reconciliation between poetry and the potential for social justice come, tenderly and often with softness, from the within the arts. Poet and anthologist Carolyn Forche was among the first to collect poetry bearing "the trace of extremity within them.. .evidence of what occurred" and call this genre "poetry of witness" (Forche 30). In the introduction to her important compilation Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, Forche notes the difficult tension between the personal dimensions of aesthetic work and larger concerns:

Poetry of witness presents the reader with an interesting interpretive problem. We are accustomed to rather easy categories: we distinguish between "personal" and "political" poems -the former calling to mind lyrics of love and emotional loss, the latter indicating a public partisanship that is considered divisive, even when necessary. The distinction between the personal and the political gives the political realm too much and too little scope; at the same time, it renders the personal too important and not important enough. If we give up the dimension of the personal, we risk relinquishing one of the most powerful sites of resistance. The celebration of the personal, however, can indicate a myopia, an inability to see how larger structures of the economy and the state circumscribe, if not determine, the fragile realm of individuality. (31)

While her concerns are justified, the powerful pieces within Against Forgetting somehow neutralize the dichotomy and offer readers what Forche calls a "third term" -a space between the personal and concerns of impartiality and social responsibility.

Consider, for example, the poem "Requiem" by Anna Akhmatova -a poet Forche tells us lost two husbands to imprisonment and execution for anti-Bolshevik activities. The poem bears witness to her son's imprisonment on similar charges:

No foreign sky protected me, no stranger's wing shielded my face. I stand witness to the common lot,

128 survivor of that time, that place.

"Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway Car" by Dan Pagis describes that poet's

experience of a Ukranian concentration camp. This haunting piece and its unfinished message endures several layers of history at once, collapsing the chaos of the Jewish

Holocaust with a familiar Biblical narrative: here in this carload i am eve with abel my son if you see my other son cain son of man tell him that i

While the fragmentary message of Pagis' poem leaves all questions unanswered, these

ambiguities -like the Shoah itself—are both event and witness to the difficult history of that time. Akhmatova's "Requiem" leaves subtle mysteries in its wake as well. The emotional impact of both poems is a small survey of the vast amount of writing collected in Against Forgetting. Throughout, the shock of language juxtaposed against human suffering provides a litany of "poetry of witness" to the darkest corners of the Twentieth

Century. Forche's bibliographic notes often tell of poets executed shortly after writing a

featured poem -or, in some cases for writing the poem—and her painstaking accounts of personal and world history effectively contextualize the work she chooses to include. It is often chilling to read of a poet's fate or the conditions of a poem's birth. Humbled, one wonders that poetry might come to exist in such circumstances. Forche has done her job well.

And yet. There is something uneasily institutional about a collection so self-conscious

about its own nomenclature. What hopes can we pin upon a "poetry of witness"? Will this new genre substantiate Forche's "third term" between the aesthetic personal and the socially responsible political realms? Or does it simply become another of the "easy categories" Forche warns us about? Can we rely on poetry of witness to change readers' hearts and minds in any real way, for any reliable percentage of time?

There are dangers in such a categorization. I'm concerned about what "poetry of witness" might exclude; in essence, I think the questions need to be asked -to borrow from post-colonial theory—whose poetry, and whose witness? As well, what poetry is not a poetry of witness? Do the love sonnets of Shakespeare witness less than Pagis'

"Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway Car"? What of John Milton's Paradise Lost?

Surely love poetry is witness to an inner world to as great an extent as Akhmatova's

"Requiem" bears testimony to both psyche and history; epic poetry concerned with religious mythology is witness to human belief, desire and potential. Furthermore, must poetry of witness include only suffering? There are events documented in poetry that witness joyful reunion, rebirth and inauguration. These are noticeably, and rightly, absent in Forche's vision for Against Forgetting. Joyous pieces would run counter to the effect of the work she includes; it would contradict the spirit of those poets who write of suffering and loss in the collection. But terminology is important. All poetry is poetry of witness.

This statement is a Pandora's Box and, in its worst incarnation, stands to ignite a polemic about what poetry deserves to be included -a debate we've already seen too often in recent history that questions the sufferings of one group and privileges the witness of others. In the end, I fear that Forche's new category of work ultimately damages poetry itself. Any idealization of poetry, any concrete categorization replete

130 with its commandment of how the poetry must be received, what it must make the reader

feel, is a danger. It somehow "lets poetry off the hook" and creates a kind of shut-down

in readers. The associations that come with the status "poetry of witness" reduce

questions of how a poetry that describes what is basically inexpressible -rape, murder,

genocide; the dehumanization of individuals and races and nations—might bear its own

knowledge, and do so in language. As our expectations for a poem increase, its powers to move or shock or change us diminish. As Adrienne Rich notes, poetry "has suffered

enough from that. Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of

linguistic aromatherapy. Neither is it a blueprint, nor an instruction manual, nor a billboard. There is no universal Poetry anyway, only poetries and poetics, and the

streaming, intertwining histories to which they belong" (Rich 2007: 21). It's crucial, I believe, to question what a category like "poetry of witness" might ultimately be used for.

In education, this is a serious uncertainty. While I believe Carolyn Forche's Against

Forgetting is a master-work of scholarship and anthologization -essentially, an act of

love—when such a collection enters the classroom, it might be taken in dubious directions. On my private bookshelf, thanks to Forche I know exactly where to look when

I want to find poetry concerned with struggles for democracy and against apartheid, war

in Asia and repression in Latin America. Even there, it can be said, my expectations for what I will find diminish the poetry's power to surprise, but in all honesty I find myself consistently moved by the poetry anyway. When an anthology like this is taken into the classroom, however, it faces the potential to become a means toward an end; at the

direction of authority such as teacher, unit or curriculum expectation, a collection of poetry becomes a cause, and readers of this poetry take on specific roles in a drama that

131 might be called "I Care About Social Justice!" Elaine Scarry writes about this

phenomenon in her pivotal work On Beauty and Being Just, noting that often what we

call an aesthetic reaction is in reality an unconscious experience of egoistic self-

promotion. "At moments when we believe we are conducting ourselves with equality,"

Scarry notes, "we are usually instead conducting ourselves as the central figure in our

own private story" (113). A true aesthetic reaction to the powerful language and

summoned emotions of art is more de-centering, a leave-taking from self rather than a

conscious awareness of the value a particular piece has in one's own life story. To open a

collection declaring itself "poetry of witness" in a class about a period of difficult history,

and subsequently becoming aware that "Now I'm going to read a Holocaust poem"

unavoidably casts the self into a role of selfless-purveyor-concerned-with-the-rights-of-

others, when in reality we are -unwittingly, and benevolently— far more concerned with

our own sense of self. What is needed is a sense of Felman's notion of "ignorance," of

forgetting the self in order to reach the ethical ground Scarry describes as the selfless.

Furthermore, using poetry as historical artifact -as collections such as Forche's make

it very tempting to do, organized in chronological order from event to event as they tend

to be—degrades the human element each poem harbors. When we read poems like the

one by Pagis, it is too easy to classify the work as a "Holocaust Poem" -the anthologies

often do it for us. But at its inception, the poem was simply a record of one human life in

a moment of observation. Dan Pagis had no idea he was a victim of "The Holocaust" as he was boarded onto that train heading to the Ukranian concentration camp. Akhmatova's

"Requiem" is more accurately the anguished nostalga of one woman's loss(es) than a

categorized "Poetry of Witness" to Russian Bolshevik and Anti-Bolshevik Atrocity. The

132 voices in these poems are real, and they bear witness to real events precious in the context of their own experience. Categorizing these poems takes away from the individual power of each piece; it diminishes the integrity of each poem and is disrespectful to the people who penned them. In fact, I think part of the horror of living through difficult history is to be found in the utter lack of context. We can never say if the Nazi concentration camps would have been less terrible for the victims had they known the story in which they were unwittingly taking part; far less implausible is that knowing Auschwitz is a "Concentration Camp", part of a larger "Holocaust" -an event studied and written about and anthologized in poetry, novels, plays, films, essays, etc.— distances us historically enough to provide a comfortable sense of mastery. As G. R.

Elton notes in The Practice of History, the events we study in history "happened to real people, people quite as alive as we are and quite as entitled to respect for their humanity.

They may not have known exactly what was happening.. .[only] the historian is entitled to think about his discoveries and to find a significance in them which may well have been invisible at the time" (57). The teacher of literature, if the desired effect is to do more than historicize a poem into a kind of fixed archival record -like a fossil—must remain sensitively attuned to what Elton calls a "respect for humanity". Poetry, that often defiant act of life and language, calls for nothing less. Between the fossilization of being rendered an artefact -a trace of the past existing in the present— and remaining a living, breathing, relevant piece of news for its readers, the literature classroom takes a different path than its counterpart in history.

The point is, I think, that "mastery" of a topic, or even wide reading on a given subject, is not the same thing as an aesthetic experience. A student might read every poem in

133 Forche's section on "War in the Middle East," and be able to recite dates and events of occupations, terrorist attacks and major uprisings, but this is a vastly different experience than feeling for the lives depicted in a poem by Mahmoud Darwish or Yehuda Amichai.

Countless despots, tyrants and dictators have read all of Shakespeare; in what ways they were moved by a sonnet or speech by characters like King Lear and Macbeth is another

story. As a teacher of English, I'd rather my students open Against Forgetting to

Darwish's "We Travel Like Other People", feel the pull of compassion and empathy -a moment of broken-heartedness for how fragile human life, all human life, is—and never touch the volume again instead of reading each poem in the collection, memorizing relevant dates and then demonstrating their knowledge by passing an exam. While difficult to assess, emotion must find a place in the literature classroom or risk fading into the irrelevancy of slickly-packaged buzzwords and exclusive eduspeak. The relations among text, world and reader begins here.

In what ways does poetry sometimes function in opposition to Scarry's notion of the selfless? We've already seen how "poetry of witness" can be used for a purpose that diminishes the human capacities of each individual text. Utility is the first antithesis of the aesthetic experience. "The arts have little room on their agenda for efficiency," Eisner writes in The Arts and the Creation of Mind. "Efficiency is largely a virtue for the tasks we don't like to do; few of us like to eat a great meal efficiently or to participate in a wonderful conversation efficiently, or indeed to make love efficiently. What we enjoy the most we linger over" (xiii). The very essence of a desire to use poetry or the arts to make students "better" -as people or on test scores—moves teaching from the aesthetic realm into another, more utilitarian sphere. There is no proof that the arts either fail or do well

134 in this other arena in terms of education or social improvement. As Carey notes in a careful consideration of theorists including Howard Gardner, Elliot Eisner and

Marghanita Laski, any studies so far undertaken to examine the operation of the arts in society with a an eye toward the improvement of that society have come up at best inconclusive. In spite of what Carey calls "baseless assumptions and pious hopes" these endeavours most often demonstrate no credible proof that the arts "make people better"

(134).

The Theatre District, Glasgow, Scotland

So, why study poetry at all? Perhaps it is in poetry's "uselessness" that we might find its greatest strengths. Having dinner with a friend -Canadian poet Jason Guriel—after a

2006 "poetry and politics" conference in Scotland, I realized the limitations of utility when placed on the arts. It was my first poetry conference, and even though I'd graduated with two degrees in English, I'd never really let myself encounter poetry in any way other than as an alternative to prose-based ways of telling a story. Throughout the five-day conference, I'd been reading and listening to a lot of poems. I'd enjoyed many; some I hated. During that steak-house conversation in the middle of Glasgow's theatre district, I realized how much I was struggling to find a basic footing. The most straightforward tenant of my problem was that I didn't know what I was supposed to do with a poem.

They didn't seem to function by the same constraints as a novel or short fiction. While some of them told a story, other poems didn't. Some bordered on reflection and others on philosophy; many had no "characters" and an obscure "narrative voice". I was often delighted by what seemed to be a rhythm in the pieces, although I would have been hard

135 pressed to identify beats. Other than finding myself taking vague and untrusting pleasure

in the poems, I was basically unsure what to do next. I mentioned this to Jason.

"Did you enjoy any of the poems?" he asked.

"Yes," I replied. I thought of Eaven Bowlan's "Quarantine", which had all but brought me to tears. The experience of hearing Bowlan read the piece in person -although I'd never heard of her before the conference—had been astonishing. I didn't think "enjoy" was strong enough a word to describe the experience. My friend knew about this; he'd been sitting beside me as I fought not to cry during the reading.

"Why isn't just enjoying the poem enough?"

I was dumbfounded by the profundity of this statement. The idea that a poem might

exist for no other reason than enjoyment seemed suddenly like the most improbable and beautiful notion I'd ever encountered. That a text so fragile as a poem -a set of words,

lines, spaces glued together with sound and experience and emotion—could possibly have no utility but the augmentation of curiosity, adventure and delight (to borrow from

LeGuin) seemed to define the poetic itself. With some shock, I then realized I couldn't think of a single other facet of life that existed purely for the enhancement of human pleasure. If there was nothing to do with a poem but enjoy it, I suddenly realized, poetry -and by extension, perhaps the other arts as well—might be the most tender and human entities around. And what were we that we might create something so intimate as

this? The implications seemed stunning in dimension and scope.

At the heart of poetry's non-utility is the idea of metaphor, the "exhilarating shift of meaning that occurs as one thing is carried over, becoming another thing" only available to human understanding (Parini 77). An animal's instinct to imagine danger in the

136 startling sound or the concealment of darkness is not quite the same. Instead, a true metaphor delights in the similarities and differences of things; it asks us to think in a uniquely human way, to make personal and common association out of something given to us. This demand for a reaching into that space where one thing reminds us of another, or might suddenly, magically, seem like something it is not, "represents human thought at its highest pitch" (Parini 67).

An example is in order. Consider the thinking of Alphonsine Fournaise, a character in

Susan Vreeland's Luncheon of the Boating Party -a novel telling the story of Renoir's famous painting:

Once, when she was a little girl, her brother had lifted a stone and pointed to a worm curved into three loops. "Look, it's the Seine," Alphonse had said. "No, imbecile. It's a worm," she'd insisted. "It's the river. The river's a worm." That a worm could be a worm and a river, or that a single word could signify a worm as well as a river, was devious trickery. Her eyes told her it was only a worm, and she'd stubbornly held to that, stamping her feet, until he made their father show them a map. It was as Alphonse had said. For calling him names, Papa had given her the task of memorizing the river towns from the two that their island straddled, Chatou on the west bank and Rueil on the east bank, all the way to Paris. But knowing their names was less momentous than realizing that a person could look at one thing and see another or call it another. That was truly something thrilling. From then on, she'd felt justified in thinking of boats as wooden shoes, lily pads as frogs' beds, and white fungi on trees as nature's meringues. (Vreeland 44)

Vreeland successfully captures the wonder and innocence to which metaphor appears in the receptive mind; for Alphonsine, the "devious trickery" of learning to look at one thing and coming to see it multi-dimensionally -as both itself and something else— changes everything. For her, even metaphor is a metaphor; each shifted perspective brings to mind the detailed memory of her brother's introduction to the trope. Throughout

the novel (and, I think, in Renoir's painting) Alphonsine is the embodiment of a kind of

aesthetic sense: she delights in the ordinary, celebrates connections between people,

events and emotion, and strives to honour complex meaning from what she encounters.

While they have been used to sell automobiles and win elections, at the most elemental

form -unless something is done in the way of appropriation—a metaphor has no purpose

other than to ask for a new way of seeing, a closer, more tender, personal way of noticing

the building blocks of our human lives. Metaphor's lack of utility —other than to arouse wonder— defines and deepens understandings of humanity as well as the creatures who

create and understand it.

In a poem called "Whenever That Happened" Brendan Kennelly writes:

Hell is the familiar all stripped of wonder. Was there a moment When wonder at the world died in my eyes? Had I a friend I could recognize? When did I take friendship for granted? When did I get used to the thought of murder? When did my flesh cease to astonish me? When did my mind become gray-familiar? Whenever that happened is when I knew I could do anything. When wonder died in me power was born. I can change the world because I no longer dream of blue, I can betray a god because I never heard a girl sing Of steps in the street or sunlight blessing a field of corn.

The lines that strike me as most startling are the final three; here, we see a direct contrast

between the desire for change with the selfless event of beauty -and it is the aesthetic that

aligns with a moral sense. In the piece, dreaming of blue is the price paid in order to

change the world, an action equated to the betrayal of a god, also at the cost of beauty.

138 The vocabulary of this surprising, shifted calculus is built upon a parallel dynamic to

Scarry's argument for beauty as a just choice. "The beautiful," she writes, "almost without any effort of our own, acquaints us with the mental event of conviction, and so pleasurable a mental state is this that ever afterwards one is willing to labor, struggle, wrestle with the world to locate enduring sources of conviction" (31). Furthermore, it is the experience of that widely-available beauty - and the human participation within it— that leads to the selflessness perhaps necessary to dream of blue or truly notice the intensity of sunlight blessing a field of corn:

When we land, we find we are standing in a different relation to the world than we were a moment before. It is not that we cease to stand at the center of the world, for we never stood there. It is that we cease to stand even at the center of our own world. We willingly cede our ground to the thing that stands before us. (Scarry 112)

The selfless ceding of ground is a reclamation of Kennelly's betrayed god; it is only when we insist on casting ourselves in the role of "moral redeemer of worlds" that we face the dangers of power "Whenever That Happened" so compellingly chronicles. We betray the god in usurping its power. The true experience of beauty places us outside the realm of the self, and it is only from this ecstatic perspective from which Scarry claims true inspiration and justice arise.

The claim is not only an esoteric one. While the crux of aesthetic experience is the moment of transcendence, the work of an ethical encounter with the beautiful comes when we return to solid ground afterwards, when it is necessary to once again be the heroes of our own story and bear the responsibility for building meaning from what we have seen. Consider John Dewey's pivotal illustration from Art as Experience: A generalized illustration may be had if we imagine a stone, which is rolling down hill, to have an experience. The activity is surely sufficiently "practical." The stone starts from somewhere, and moves, as consistently as conditions permit, toward a place and state where it will be at rest -toward an end. Let us add, by imagination, to these external facts, the ideas that it looks forward with desire to the final outcome; that it is interested in the things it meets on its way, conditions that accelerate and retard its movement with respect to their bearing on the end; that it acts and feels toward them according to the hindering or helping function it attributes to them; and that the final coming to rest is related to all that went before as the culmination of a continuous movement. Then the stone would have an experience, and one with aesthetic quality. (39)

While the aesthetic moment is that instant when we are taken out of ourselves by something salient or remarkable, Dewey reminds us that the aesthetic experience is actually far more complicated. It encompasses a more expansive vista of the excursion from self and back, including the external conditions and objects one meets along the way, how they help or hinder progress -and how they are perceived to help or hinder, as well as the necessary desires inherent in the traveler along with an ability to process these internal and external leitmotifs. In essence, for Dewey the aesthetic experience is attention to what captures our attention. How we are struck selfless by the beautiful, and what we do with that, is at the core of the way the arts become a human event.

"Beauty is a starting place for education," Scarry tells us (31). I think she is advocating Dewey's idea of the reflective experience of the aesthetic in her remarkable statement. That curriculum might provide students not only with these moments of selfless beauty but also with the tools to critique and think about them, a space to articulate and share these thoughts, and a sense of the further avenues open to continue the exploration and mobilize from it in order to accomplish the work of change -of the

140 self, and then, perhaps, the world—is the meeting place between aesthetic and equity

educations. For writers like Dewey, and Scarry, and Maxine Greene, Gene Diaz, Martha

Barry McKenna, bell hooks, Elliot Eisner —as well as many, many others—any distance between the reflective self and the engaged activist need never exist. The beautiful

always holds a vast potential of the moral.

While this latent promise of selfless awakening exists within all the arts, in literature it

exists in a kind of concentrated form. Maxine Greene notes in her speech "The Arts and the Search for Social Justice" (2003) that because we "live so much in our imaginations" the connections available between a text -she includes visual arts and music as well as

literature here—and its audience are possibly "as close as we ever get to each other" (8). I

imagine that teachers and devotees of any particular genre believe that their field is the one to offer the greatest opportunity for communion, to resist fixed notions and go beyond in a unison of reception. As a devotee of all the arts, and a one-time literature teacher, I can only add my voice to that debate. It seems to me, however, that in

literature -and, perhaps, particularly in poetry—we are given unique access to the thoughts of another. In Reading Lolita In Tehran: A Memoir in Books, Azar Nafisi considers this special type of empathy that comes about as we feel compassion from the privileged entry into the imagination of others. It is here, she argues, that the truest meanings of pluralism and democracy begin, noting that a definition of the modern villain might be one who lacks a capacity for empathy (224). For Nafisi, the antithesis of this type exists within the selfless experience of literature. She writes:

It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone else's shoes and understand the other's different and contradictory sides and refrain from becoming too ruthless. Outside the sphere of literature only one aspect of individuals is revealed. But if you understand their different

141 dimensions you cannot easily murder them. (118)

Perhaps. I am wary of Nafisi's claim that it is only in literature the possibility of

selfless empathy or reflection becomes available; in an age of standardized tests and heavy competition for funding in the worlds of both education and culture, a contest between different factions of the creative arts is hardly desirable. There is a great deal to be inferred in the telltale postures of Rodin's sculptures, and the arias of Puccini have touched many hearts. However, there is something in literature which gives a special access not to an ambiguous possibility of empathy, but a kind of request for understanding. Often, it is simply asked for in the form of an invitation, an opening outwards, a reaching for a certain kind of reception. There's less room for personal interpretation and more for empathetic connection and association, perhaps because the medium of literature is the same language we use to form our own thoughts. Ever controversial, Carey suggests that literature is the most aesthetically possible art form because it is the only one capable of self-criticism. "Literature gives you ideas to think with," he writes. Reflecting Shoshana Felman's notion that literature "knows it knows but does not know the meaning of its knowledge", (Felman 1987: 92), Carey tell us that literature "stocks your mind. It does not indoctrinate, because diversity, counter-argument, reappraisal and qualification are its essence. But it supplies the materials for thought.

Also, because it is the only art capable of criticism, it encourages questioning, and self- questioning" (208). Again, I think that the history of fine arts is punctuated with movements capable of questioning and self-reflection, but I agree that language renders

literature capable of its own aesthetic selflessness; like Dewey's stone, literature embarks

142 upon a journey in which it consciously encounters and becomes aware of its path. The

literary is able to both reflect upon and then doubt itself.

The idea that we might lose ourselves in the thinking and expression of another, and

then return to question and resist the easy narratives and given fixities of our own lives places literature squarely within the aesthetic realm -perhaps not more than a painting or piece of music might be, but differently. A poem by C. P. Cavafy illustrates the point.

Consider "Far Off:

I want to speak this memory... But it's erased...as if nothing remains— Because it lies far off in my first adolescent years.

Skin as if made of jasmine... That time in August -was it August?—evening... I scarcely remember those eyes: they were a deep blue, I think... Ah, yes, deep blue, a sapphire blue.

In this piece, the reader is taken, literally, into the realm of memory. The poem begins with a blatantly stated desire -"I want to speak this memory". We know immediately what we are getting; we read and accept the poet's craving for a journey backward. But it

is a dual journey on a number of levels; at once, we go along with the poet, but we take

our own journey, for we cannot understand even a simple word like "memory" without

an association of what it might mean for us. Cavafy takes us with him to his own

adolescence, and ours. Reading about his love, we remember our own -even if it is a phantom love-that-never-was. This is an unreliable expedition into a shifting terrain. The poem's use of ellipsis, and its blatant statement that the memory is impossible because

"it's erased.. .as if nothing remains" join with his questioning -"was it August?"—to

disrupt any easy notions we might have of either his memory or our own. We're never sure if the poem is telling us the truth. Is our own memory? Can it ever? And yet Cavafy ends the piece with a certainty: the conviction of deep eyes, blue as sapphire. The poem begins with a desire and ends with a wish. In between, we find the doubt and self- questioning Carey speaks of. The memory of the poem becomes our own; the unstable loss of the past is familiar, and yet so is the steady yearning for those blue eyes at the end.

We know those eyes; we want them too. Yet, what are we wanting to recover in the deep blue reflection? And what loss and unknowing are we willing to overlook to find them?

Doubt and precision coexist side by side. In spite of facts and memory, the imagination knows its own truth.

The intimacy Cavafy achieves with this small poem is remarkable. The Dewey-like aesthetic possibilities of reading the piece leave the reader wanting and wishing, remembering unsteadily and yet with solid longing. Memory is disrupted for both poet and reader, but we are left with an affect deep-rooted and familiar. Can music provide us with such an effect? Can a painting? It is more than possible, but their technologies of representation and feeling are different. I'm not sure if we can ever know a sculptor or composer the way the poet lays himself bare in this piece. Even if every word of the poem is a lie, even if the sapphire-eyed adolescent lover of August nights is a dream, there is some universal understanding spoken that gives us a confession of ourselves. It is my belief that the intimacy of this kind of confession requires language, and it is poetry - although not solely poetry, but most often poetry—that gives us a language which speaks as a vocabulary of the soul. It is a lexicon of empathy. Like metaphor, it has little function and power -but it is a human moment, and one which might change everything for the open heart. "Becoming literate is a matter of transcending the given," Maxine

144 Greene writes. "We are moved to do that, however, only when we become aware of rifts,

gaps in what we think of as reality. We have to be articulate enough and able to exert

ourselves to name what we see around us -the hunger, the passivity, the homelessness,

the 'silences.' It requires imagination to be conscious of them" (1995: 111). Articulation

is sometimes the necessity. In words, the relation between reader, text and world can be blown apart and reveal a landscape holding each as one, a landscape that is new.

"In a machine-made world," writes William H. Gass writes of poetry in Reading Rilke,

In a world of multiplying masses and increasing commercialism, where heads by the millions are filled with vulgar images, stupid thoughts, and crass pleasures, it is incumbent on those of us who wish to "rise above ourselves" to perform first the hard holy work of the eye and then the painful hidden work of the heart. We are not here to praise the Lord, but to praise the world, to show the Angel -things. In short, an absolute intimacy is required. (163)

The work of poetry, that drawing of attention to the quiet details and demanding

awareness of them, is accomplished in various ways. Text and space, language and

metaphor, intimacy and empathy combine and bring about the possibility of closeness

with a world all too often ignored. Or feared. Or exploited. Those "things" we "show the

Angel" are ultimately an extension of our own ways of being in the world. How we show

the Angel defines ourselves; poetry tenders a model. When it is done with human

capacity -through metaphor, for example—or with an empathetic eye to noticing others,

the realm of the poetic offers us a world of feeling and relation, a safe place in which care

and grace are possible. "Whenever I've tried to enter imaginatively into another person's

life," Alphonsine Fournaise tells us in Vreeland's Luncheon of the Boating Party, "I

found connections that lifted me above mere personal perspectives to a higher

145 contemplation" (428). Alphonsine's notion of "entering imaginatively into another

person's life" is the essential nucleus of the literary project. It might be argued that there

is no higher morality, no more urgent inspiration to work toward social justice.

Beyond equity education, however, and a wish to save the world, there is poetry. I

want to return to Muriel Rukeyser's question -"Can poetry save us?"—and the poem

with which I began this chapter. That poem might rightly be called a "poem of witness",

as it is written by a writer wrongly imprisoned -and even sentenced to death—amidst the

web of politically-motivated conspiracies. The metaphors and images Fais offers are

certainly enough to take oneself out of oneself; the writing is powerful enough to render

at least this reader a moment in which I am willing to "cede ground" to the piece in front

of me, to use Scarry's terminology. There is at once empathy and understanding for the position of this poetic soul, a man trapped by fate who realizes that in the beauty

available in the world there is somehow a possibility of deliverance. For me, this meaning

transcends any of the philosophical rationalizations I've discussed so far. Imagine it:

imprisoned, sentenced to death for his role in a conspiracy -he was later acquitted—the

poet realizes, upon a simple moment of noticing the moon, that the simplest, most

available beauty in the world is somehow an antidote to the tyranny, injustice and

brutality that so often punctuates human life. There can be no loss of self, no bitterness or

suffering, so long as the prospect of noticing that subtle light exists. For Faiz Ahmed Fais,

that one moment of beauty gives his life meaning and saves his heart. In the dark time of

his imprisonment, he finds narratability. Even for those of us one remove from that moon,

his poem might fulfill the same function. It, too, is "just one moment" that holds the

possibility of everything.

146 I am always surprised at how quickly the taken-for-granted structures of life crumble

away in moments of disruption. So important during dark times, the easy stories we tell

ourselves about ourselves become more difficult to access after loss. With these gone, the magnitude of bereavement seems to increase and become even more insupportable.

Survivability itself starts to seem questionable. For me, during those times, it has always been literature that has restored the balance. When I've been unable to find a narratable

story within myself, the literary has always been there to provide one. It is possible to live

in borrowed moments of noticing the moon, leaning into hope and beauty and narration until our own return. Even in the darkest times, literature always holds the potential of becoming that one prison evening "so strangely sweet" that no tyranny of soul can prevail.

If we allow them into ourselves, if we give them license to form and cohere with our own intimate associations, a novel or short story, play or poem might become a reason to continue living if just that moment exists.

In my short time as a literature teacher, I allowed myself the conceit of dividing my

students into three natures. The first were the souls who saw English as a necessary credit; they had to take it. When they did the readings, it was a compulsory task assigned to them from without. The goings-on in our classroom held no possibility of impact upon their lives. Capable of being surprised and often wanting to please me, these students nevertheless approached English in the same way they would study the rings of Saturn or the phylogenic properties of unicellular life: there were moments of wonder, but ultimately none of this had anything to do with them.

My second class of students engaged the texts and conversations I asked of them because there was a purpose to it. Different from their colleagues in my first category,

147 they assumed there was something important in the novels and poetry we discussed

because it was mandated by curriculum. They would read and reread, write beautiful

essays and creatively respond to my questions and assignments knowing that judgment

would soon arrive (often in the form of a grade) and life would never be the same again.

And then there were the students for whom I was completely irrelevant. Grades meant

little, although often they achieved very well. These students would read avidly and then

stay after class, angry at me or the text or the characters they'd encountered and demand

answers. One student I taught in a second-year university literature class attended every

lecture and tutorial, read carefully each text and -to my horror—failed to submit a single

essay until the final seminar. Pleading emails and personal entreaties did nothing to

motivate him to fulfil the obligations of the course as well as engage its material. My

opinion -and, indeed, passing the class—meant nothing. He was an extreme example but

I saw traces of him in Language Arts and literature classes at every level I taught.

What is this order of student looking for? I think they are after that one moment of beauty outlined so well in "A Prison Evening". They want to be offered something that,

once the alchemy of internalization has taken place, will sustain them and hold them in its

hand through the darkness and the goodness and the moments of uncertainty, those times

in which we forget that the moon's light and the rooms where lovers meet continue to

exist somewhere in the world. They want something to remind them that, for just one

moment, the possibility of beauty remains available to everyone and is translatable to

them. They want this unique and consoling solace. With stakes so high as these, it is no

wonder my second-year undergraduate was willing to sacrifice the demands of our

syllabus.

148 I hope he found what he was looking for, that one sustaining text multifarious enough to give him something narratable and survivable, to offer the hope of beauty against the dangerous and pervasive possibility of emptiness all of us face in our own inner worlds.

In his "Seventh Duino Elegy", Rilke writes:

The world exists nowhere but within us. Withinwarding is everything. The outer world dwindles, and day fades from day. Where once a solid house was, soon some invented structure perversely suggests itself, as at ease among ideas as if it still stood in the brain. The Present has amassed vast stores of power, shapeless as the vibrant energy it has stolen from the earth. It has forgotten temples. We must save in secret such lavish expenditures of spirit. Yes, even where one thing we served, knelt for, and prayed to survives, it seeks to see itself invisible. Many have ceased perceiving it, and so will miss the chance to enlarge it, add pillars and statues, give it grandeur, within. (Trans. William H. Gass)

Can poetry save us? It cannot. But it is the type of thing that can save us, because whether it is through the act of witness, metaphor, empathy or language, poetry works from within, from the place in which we crave beauty and communion. Is the search for aesthetic meaning a search for social justice? No more or less than anything else. But the arts -and poetry—might have something to offer us of ourselves, or the world, or ourselves in the world. In its demand to notice differently, perhaps poetry's gift is the generous availability of those things that help us to survive and maintain interest in who and where we are. If beauty is the starting point for education, it must ultimately be its final destination as well. Beauty, poetry, morality, the arts, education -these are

149 companions perhaps, but not saviours. Perhaps they were never meant to be. In the end, we can save only ourselves and one another by those things we take inside, by what we allow them to show us, by how we are changed by them. Nowhere is there world but within. Rumors of Snow and Alphabets: Creative Reading and the Nature of the Poetic

"Every reading is a narration."

—Shoshana Felman

Utterance

Sitting over words very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing not far like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark the echo of everything that has ever been spoken still spinning its one syllable between the earth and silence

-W. S. Merwin

"Poetry may be our cultured natural medium, but something has to be done to the poetry," Adam Phillips tells us in an essay entitled "Poetry and Psychoanalysis." He continues: "Biology is turned by people into poetry, but poetry clearly needs itself to be turned into something else" (2000, 11). The "something else" poetry needs to be turned into is an interesting phenomenon, centrally located between John Carey's assertion that a work of art is indeed a work of art if someone finds it so, and my own supposition that aesthetics can offer solace only if we are willing to take it. What we as receptive beings do with the arts, literature and poetry is as important as the objects we encounter. The core belief that reception is a creative act -and one not at all to be taken for granted—

151 raises questions central to the project of teaching poetry and literature at large. What do we create when we read? How do these creations change us? In what ways is it possible to offer up these new creations to the world? And, finally, what is the nature of a creation that might have meaning for that larger world? The implications for classroom life are profoundly important; reading as an act of creation, whatever it might mean, redefines the

expectations we hold for the private and public spaces charted by the meeting of curriculum with the world of the personal. If, as Phillips concludes, poetry is "not

sufficient; something has to be added to the poetry to make a cure" (12) we might look toward that metamorphic alchemy for a way of thinking about a definition of "the poetic" itself.

Considering reading a creative act is a subtly revolutionary stance in the world of

education. Courses on literature are widely separated from "creative writing" and the other fine arts in high school and university curricula; the writing done in generalized

English courses focuses on the academic forms -itself, I would argue, one of the most creative kinds of writing—and on grammar. Even in the elementary world of "language

arts" teachers delineate between writing, a passive act often addressed with questions of comprehension and rote-style assessment and the more creative acts of writing. In their

expectations, curriculum documents make overtures toward a fusion of the two literary worlds but never seem certain of how to unify them. And yet, poets and reading theorists

from Muriel Rukeyser to Barthes, Iser and Rosenblatt insist that there is a fundamentally creative component to reading. "It is because our powers are like the powers of the poet,"

Rukeyser notes, comparing the reader to the creative artist. "It is not only that we see the

same colors, not only that we relate the action "splash" to the shape of a pine tree: it is

152 because our total activity and the use of our imagination -whatever our experience—are like those of the artist" (141). This is a point restated over and over; John Carey reframes

Rukeyser's proposition in What Good Are The Arts?, and begins to wonder about the implications of the relationship between reading and creation. "The reader creates," he writes, "and feels a creator's possessiveness" (213). Carey's insistence that there is a personal, inner world evoked by the creation implicit in reading, and that this world is one of investment and desire, is an innovative approach.

In A History of Reading, Steven Roger Fischer demarcates the various inner dimensions of the act of reading. His analysis reaches toward a vocabulary of the personal, but it is the force of his writing that clearly demonstrates the desire reading elicits in even -perhaps, especially in— the most rigorous scholars. "Reading challenges, empowers, bewitches, enriches," he notes:

Writing is a skill, reading a faculty. Writing was originally elaborated and thereafter deliberately adapted; reading has evolved in tandem with humanity's deeper understanding of the written word's latent capabilities. Writing's history has followed series of borrowings and refinements, reading's history has involved successive stages of social maturation. Writing is expression, reading impression. Writing is public, reading personal. Writing is limited, reading open-ended. Writing freezes the moment. Reading is forever. (7-8)

More pragmatically, Fischer concludes his argument with a nod toward the essentially creative act of reading, noting the relationship between reader and text as the former

"uses the symbols to guide the recovery of information from his or her memory and subsequently uses this information to construct a plausible interpretation" (12). It is interesting to note that this scholar has also produced a highly-readable and acclaimed

153 History of Writing in which he is equally reverential about composition.3 Moving from

Sumara's suggestion that literary education involves making a relationship between world, text and reader, this interplay is now a given. In Fischer, we see both a definition of reading as a creative act as well as a passionate display of the personal transaction evoked by the undertaking. Along with Rukeyser and Carey, Fischer notes the creative elements involved in reading as well as the personal investment that go into the act and the consequences arising from this sort of contract. The world containing text and reader is created between the two and exists outside of both.

It is a difficult world to contain. This "latitude of the interior" -to borrow a phrase from Carey—involves a complicated and sensitive approach to object relations, especially as it appears between people and, most definitely, when the relation between text and self germinates in the classroom. If we read to find news of ourselves when we read alone, shared readings become a more complex matter; what we are reading when we read together involves a complicated interplay of world, text, self and other selves.

We must read not only ourselves but the inner experiences of others -and the experience created by the combination of these polysemic encounters. It is little wonder that curriculum runs aground against such important demands.

The Book of Abraham

I have a cousin who is an avid reader of history, especially work having to do with

Jewish history. Forced to leave university at an early age after a debilitating car accident left her father unable to work, this cousin became her family's breadwinner but managed

3 Fischer's History of Writing is published by Reaktion Books, London: 2004. 154 to independently continue her education through reading. In our conversations, we often discuss the impact of favourite books and suggest titles to one another.

Last year, one such discussion took on a secretive, whispered edge. My cousin told me that she had found a book detailing the experience of one family who had managed to keep a record of itself for centuries, dating back to the Roman Empire. Lineage of the

Diaspora, they move through the centuries living in Jerusalem, Alexandria, Rome,

Strasbourg, Amsterdam, Warsaw -all the while maintaining their family's history, meticulously adding names and dates at events of birth, marriage, death. Essentially a book about a remarkable scroll's journey through time, my cousin promised to lend me her copy "if I promised to take good care of it"; she was no longer certain if she could find another. She wished she could: during that conversation, she lamented several pages of lost maps in her edition. Their disappearance was a mystery to her; the map was listed in the glossary but strangely absent anywhere in the text.

The news of a clan who had kept such painstaking care to narrate itself across two millennia was interesting and I looked forward to getting my hands on the book. After the initial conversation, inspired by her intense awe at the family of scribes and their scroll, I went on the Internet to find any information I could. Surely an artifact precious as this must be well-researched and documented? How had I missed seeing the scroll itself during the glorious hours I'd spent at museums in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv? If it was there, surely I would've come across some information about it -Jewish history, storytelling, writing; these were things that would not have escaped my attention. Yet I'd never heard even a whisper about the scroll before. And the Internet, that vast post-modern archive of histories past and yet-to-be-written, yielded nothing.

155 A few weeks later at a family gathering, I was called aside for a private and

impromptu ceremony in which The Book of Abraham was handed over. Holding the

novel gingerly, another promise to take special care of the book until I was able to return

it was elicited -and then it was mine. I was a bit shocked; perhaps, from our conversation weeks earlier I'd expected an ancient papyrus scroll, its edges singed from fire, its writing

faded with age. Instead, in one hand I held a small, garishly red dime-store paperback with a worried-looking (but nonetheless attractive) couple dressed in turn-of-the-century

clothing on the cover. They stared off, reverently, into the distance of history as they

clutched one another and a small boy.

Was this it?

When I got home, I immediately went back onto the Internet and did a search for the

author, Marek Halter. In addition to The Book of Abraham -so titled after the name of that first scribe who began to pen his family's lineage—there was a series of books along the same vein including: Sarah: A Novel (perhaps named after the wife of another

Abraham), Zipporah, Wife of Moses: A Novel, and interestingly, Mary of Nazareth: A

Novel. Marek Halter was -is—a prolific writer of historical fiction; but it is fiction. The

designation of "A Novel" after many of his other titles referenced the liberties taken by

these works of historiographic metafiction. The narrator of The Book of Abraham writes

from the first person simultaneously describing the stories of how he found the scroll

among his grandfather's belongings concurrently with tales of the storied lives appended

to the names on that scroll. The literary trope of retelling a story attached to a real-life

historical artifact, so popular in Victorian novels and nineteenth-century gothic fiction, is

engaged; the reader is "let in" on a secret discovery and shares the drama of unearthing

156 the truth alongside characters within the text. I wondered about Halter's other novels: were readers asked to believe that Sarah, Zipporah and Mary had written their own stories?

Somehow, I felt duped. Worse, I felt my cousin had been as well -she seemed to really believe in the existence of Abraham's scroll. For her, the physical copy of the novel had somehow taken on the enigma of the Roman/Jewish scribe's precious manuscript. Adding to the mystery was the lost map, promised in the table of contents but missing from the text. That small absence overlapped the greater mysteries of a mythical

2,000 year old scroll; taken together as a type of common denominator, the history of that missing map served as an invitation to enter the wonder of the larger unknowns carried within the story of Abraham's "book."

Furthermore, there was no need for the doubly-solicited promise of care. Marek

Halter's novel was not only found at libraries all over Toronto -including York

University's Scott Library, where I was quite surprised to find it listed—but the book has recently been re-released (2003) in a revamped trade-paperback version.4 "A family saga with a difference," the publisher proclaims of the novel on the Indigo website where it is listed for an online price of $11.36. Far from the priceless artifact I had expected, The

Book of Abraham was available and affordable.

And not, in my opinion, very well-written. Perhaps this is a result of a problem in translation from the French original; more likely, I found the novel difficult because of its ambitious project. To tell the story of one family over two-thousand years is no mean feat and a lot of narrative has to be covered in just over 700 pages. Each time I found myself

4 Gone on the version of this latest edition is the passionately embracing attractive couple and their child, replaced with Biblical-style Hebrew script. 157 attached to a character or a particular set of circumstances, the next chapter would begin two centuries later and the very people who had held my interest were long dead, reduced to nothing more than names on the scroll. Halter told an interesting story; his narration raised noteworthy questions about biography and memory, but it seemed to lack the kind of rich language and intimate character-development I looked for. In the end, my cousin had given me what I thought was an interesting but average novel.

One which she believed was true. Or at least partially true.

"The literary thing is.. .that which in a text moves us," Shoshana Felman writes (2003).

"It is that which calls out to the reader and makes the thing into a thing that is about us"

(259). Somehow, in the transaction between her own reading and the text, my cousin had been moved into belief by this work. In Felman's terminology, the "madness" of the text had engaged with this reader's unconscious in order create a fiction from the fiction. On one level, I have no doubt that she knew The Book of Abraham was a paperback novel; in a few -very tentative—conversations as I started to read the book, my cousin admitted that the author must have played imaginatively with the intricate historical facts. How could he have known the thoughts of people over the course of such a long period of time?

Even if the scroll existed, was legible and available, it would not have told the private thoughts or hidden details of lives. The novel is populated with characters who become enraged and frightened; they have secret affairs, wrestle with religion, feel jealous with siblings. Even the mystical document of Abraham's scroll would leave these details out;

Marek Halter does not. My cousin admitted that. And yet she swore that the scroll itself is real. When I asked her why it is nowhere on the Internet and not on view in any museum that I could find, she had an answer. As a historical document, she told me, it had little

158 meaning to the public at large. It was the story of one family, so why should a museum

put it on view for anyone else to see? Only the descendants of Abraham would be

interested in his book, and my cousin. And she wanted to share it with me. Moved by the

text, she added herself to the story it told and passed the scroll along. The logic of the unconscious allowed for one reader to take her place within a narrative that touched

something deep within her.

This is not an atypical experience of the literary. Carey notes one of the most

important elements of literature is what he calls the "indistinctive" space it provides;

others, like Empson, have called this ambiguity. In this opening provided by text, the

imagination enters and makes room for identity. The networks of self engaged by the

literary, Carey notes, function and hold us precisely because they are designed to be

Arbitrary and personal, precisely because they are not like some mathematical theorem where everyone is on common ground and that they can play such a vital role in strengthening our sense of self. They make literature an internal thing, special to us.. .with literature we can commit these thefts shamelessly and as often as we choose. (Carey 245)

Because each reader brings a "new imagination to each book or poem" thereby making new connections, Carey understands reading as an act of personal, almost

autobiographical creation (242). As my cousin did, the reader is allowed to bring her own biography to the stories and poems she encounters -and then to find ways of living them

in her own individual world. Each reader becomes a fitful artist, continuing the literary

experiences encountered on the page long after the book is put away. The "something"

Adam Phillips wants added to the poetry to make a cure is the reader's own self.

159 There are heavy implications to this calculus of creative reading, especially for literary education. I discovered them in my own thoughts about my cousin's absolute belief in the scroll of Abraham, and in the projected consecration of the paperback novel in which it exists. Something in the novel touched her; she held it dear to herself, wanted it to be part of her own existence in the "real" world and, from my perspective at least, allowed the small red novel to embody whatever it was that was precious in the story. I care about my cousin, and once I realized how cheap and readily available The Book of Abraham really is, I started to think about perhaps going to the York library and photocopying the missing maps for her. But why stop there? Perhaps I could order a copy of the newest edition of Halter's book, complete with the new cover, maps and all. I felt excited about doing this, but I also realized a dark side to my fantasy. Of course I was hoping to please her and provide a new embodiment of a book she cared about, perhaps even "writing" with her a new chapter in the narrative of her experience with Abraham's scroll. But there was also the possibility of damage. Part of the mystery of the book for her, part of the link between the centuries of record-keeping were the lost maps in her edition. Just as the family's record of itself was damaged and pared by history, her copy of the book also had a story of its own. Her Book of Abraham and the "real" book of Abraham were twinned in their missing elements; their shared history of what was lost provided a gateway to reality, in both directions, for a story that touched something inside her. A new edition would take that away, demonstrating only that this book, so important to her, so indistinctive enough to allow a space for her to live and imagine and dream within, was nothing more than a common and available work of fiction free to anyone with

$11.36 to spend. Why would I want to do that to her? Sometimes, I think, grace is

160 allowing other people their fantasies, especially when these fantasies sustain them. This is

a serious business, as Adam Phillips tells us in The Beast in the Nursery. "Art makes

interest," he writes. "It is a way of investing something that might be called life or

experience, that is a species of risk...somethin g is transformed —work is done on it— in

the service of making interest, sustaining curiosity, keeping one's appetite alive" (5, 6).

To deprive someone of this interest is an act of desire with serious consequences. I wondered why I'd consider it at all.

The teacher who brings literature to his students must be keenly aware of the

sensitivity of how we use our own internal worlds to create interest. That teacher must, I

think, be prepared to contain the wishes and fantasies of students as they bring to life

their own scrolls of Abraham, coming to care about poems and novels, characters and

ideas that ignite the fantasies of their own narrated interiority. While thinking about ways

of being sensitive to the creative readings of students, the teacher must also find ways to preserve his own fantasies about shared works. This, too, is an act of grace and an

integral part of maintaining one's identity as a teacher of literature and one who continues

to be moved by reading. Dennis Sumara questions what the work of teaching literature

does to teachers' reading of fiction, noting that the exclusion of a teacher's reading presents a loss of more than interpretation (Sumara 224). Too often, those involved in

education assume that the teacher of literature is an authority in possession of a natural

"love" of the subject, capable of withstanding resistances, acceptances and integrations of

favourite texts into the lives of others. This is greatly complicated by the fact that, as I

frequently did, teachers look forward to bringing their own favourite works to the

classroom and are excited to share them with students; rarely are the consequences of

161 such a personal offering taken into account. Teaching at York's faculty of education over

the past few years, I've often asked new teachers to consider how they will feel when a

student rejects a book that holds personal meaning for the teacher. In more than one

conversation, student teachers have suggested that it is just as difficult an experience when students appropriate a favourite novel, play or poem by declaring love for the work.

There is a necessary transaction in the offering of literature in education; every reading might well be a narration, but each narration involves a reading as well -and we must be prepared to accept the readings of others while being creative about sheltering our own.

"When we read at our best," Maxine Greene writes,

We project beyond the words a theme or a meaning. We realize through the language something that is never given in the language, whether that language is an Emily Dickinson poem or a Sartre play. We are helped to see that the artist tries to oblige the reader or the percipient to create what the artist discloses, to become an accomplice in freedom with that artist, an accomplice in relating possibilities. It is this sort of action that is at the core of aesthetic education, this sort of action that may (it seems to me) save our human lives. (Greene 1995: 149)

The teacher's life is human as well, and for a sincere and principled transaction between

education and literature to take place in the realm of the aesthetic, the inner worlds of text,

student and teacher must each be inhabited, however briefly, from at least one perspective. When the private space of reading is taken into the public realm, we must be prepared to "save our human lives" and make meaning together with creative acts of

shared experiences arising from the narratives we share.

What my cousin read in The Book of Abraham I cannot know; all that is certain is that

there was a powerful transaction between her reading self and Marek Halter's novel. Her

162 reading is her own business, and its manifestation in the larger world -as a belief in the

reality of a fictional scroll, as conversations with me, as a tender moment between us in

the handover of the book—is also subject to my own interpretations. They are my story

as well, a narration for me to consider and to tell. As an example of how powerful the

experience of reading a novel might be, this story of The Book of Abraham perfectly

illustrates a private yielding of self to text. In her forward to On The Way Home:

Conversations between writers and psychoanalysts, Marie Bridge notes how compelling

this capitulation can be, especially as a "surrender to the text, while at the same time

holding oneself at a kind of distance in order to think about what one is experiencing and

why" (Bridge 7). What, we might ask, might happen when this creative thought

experiment is done collectively in the space of a literature classroom? What has to be

sacrificed? How might we be surprised? What grace is possible there?

A Separate Peace

John Willinsky notes that "English Literature" has been a subject in the schools for

barely two-hundred years (2); during that time, it has served a variety of purposes, each

defined by a context of the society in which its curricula existed. From Matthew Arnold

to F. R. Leavis, to Louise Rosenblatt and Northrop Frye, John Carey and Elliot Eisner,

the literary has brought morality and ethics, cultural fortitude and inclusive readings, new

ways of reading and progressive ideas for making meaning into the lives of students.

English teachers in faculties of education and staff rooms everywhere plan lessons while

debating the merits of "off-topic" conversation, letting the fabric of a course map its own

territory. This unconventional topography is usually limited by the demands of evaluation

and curriculum content. Seldom is the question of desire brought into the dialogue about

163 how an English class might unfold. While we encourage and hope that English teachers

will have a "passion" for their subject -Robert Coles calls the work of literature teaching

"a testimony of experienced collaboration.. .a love encouraged by someone whose job it

is, actually, to do just that" (Coles 64)—we rarely prepare new English teachers to ask

the questions such a strong emotion as love might require. In The Call of Stories, Coles

gives us the testimony of a student as she remembers a literature class that moved her.

"She kept saying she didn't even want to test us on the books," the student recalls.

Instead, her teacher

just wanted us to "take the books to heart." What did she mean? She meant that if you live with a book a while (try to let the book settle in your heads, she'd tell us) then you'll be part of the story, or it'll be part of you, I'm not sure which. Maybe both. (63)

This testimony represents a powerful and familiar sentiment to many involved in the profession of teaching English; I recognize the teacher's words in my own desires -and, I

can say proudly, sometimes in my classroom practice—as well as in what many new

teachers have told me. And yet, I can recall little in the way of training to help me think

about what I was wanting when I wanted my students to be "part of the story" or "let it be part of them." This, in itself, is hardly a gap in my experience of teacher education. To

this day, I believe I was a competent -perhaps even a good—English teacher. We are

able to bring the texts that are important to us to our students, and often the students

respond. Furthermore, Dennis Sumara writes that this sort of shared experience, when the

teacher "dwells with her students in the commonplace location of shared reading" has

actual benefits for student engagement and interest with the work (194).

164 But the teaching of English is a somewhat different animal from work done in other

areas. Asking a student to do the creative work of finding their voice, feeling or

experience in a poem is an ambiguous and risky endeavour; a collaboration of

encouraged love, as Coles speaks of, rests on a precarious tautology of personal

investment and desire. We can never know where we are, exactly, in the "commonplace

location of shared reading" unless, through luck and fortune and a confluence of events

we have little knowledge of or control over, we are told. When this happens, it is

necessary to have a vocabulary for the experience, to be able to render a translation to

ourselves of an event that can change the teacher at least as much as his students. The

"literary thing" itself works against such a vocabulary, stifling efforts of individual readers, curriculum documents and colleges of education to mandate what might come

from an encounter with literature. "The literary thing is always, whatever knowledge tries

to master it, the residue of explanation, the excess or the remainder of interpretation,"

Shoshana Felman writes. "The literary thing is a thing that does something: that does

something with words, does us, and at the same time undoes the hold of our reading"

(2003: 260).

I brought A Separate Peace to my seventh-grade language class with a great deal of

excitement. I've already written about how much the book meant to me in my own high-

school reading of it; the characters had resurfaced as old friends during a year away from

education I'd taken after the death of my father. Grieving and noticing for the first time a

darkness in the world I hadn't expected or thought possible, I turned to literature for

something akin to consolation. My own narrative seemed broken, so for a while I leaned

into the stories I trusted to keep the world moving. Once there, I'd been unprepared for

165 the powerful experience of meeting old friends or how effectively these make-believe souls "limited the damage" of my own traumatic loss. If anything A Separate Peace had become more beloved, more a part of me than before. Its second reading grew to be as much a part of my story as the first. I wanted, among other things, to add another chapter of our shared chronicle by teaching the novel. The symmetry of the encounters were, I thought, elegant: once as student, once outside of school, once as teacher.

We had decided as a class that I would read the novel to the students chapter by chapter. This class was special to me already; they were my homeroom group, which meant that they spent more time with me than with any other teacher. As well, there were only nine students in the class. An intimacy existed within the group that was tangible.

These students shared a bond with one another that I tried to foster and felt fortunate to share in my capacity as their core teacher. Bringing A Separate Peace to them felt more personal than it probably would have to any other class.

I could hardly wait.

The first few chapters were an interesting time. It was not unusual for this class to respond enthusiastically, regardless of the subject material. I almost expected it. From the start, they noted with excitement that the setting of Knowles' novel is a secluded private school, like the one they attended. They loved the novel's descriptions of school uniforms and how the students disregarded regulations about how they were to be worn. My students were having little problem doing the creative work of "finding themselves" in the text. As well, the group responded personally to the novel's characters. I'd been a bit worried about that, as my class was comprised of seven girls -female characters are few and far between in A Separate Peace. I needn't have been concerned; a few of the girls

166 even described the main characters as appealing and wondered why they couldn't find any "Phinnies" or "Genes" in our own school. I was getting what I wanted; my students were making personal connections and writing themselves into the world of our novel study.

There were some darker aspects as well. A Separate Peace is predominantly read as a

"loss-of-innocence/coming of age" tale. Set in the waning years of the Second World

War, the novel traces how symbols of the larger world's difficult history bleed into the idyllic, isolated setting of a New England prep school and, particularly, into the friendship of two central characters. "All others at some point found something in themselves pitted violently against something in the world around them," writes the narrator of the book. "With those of my year this point often came when they grasped the fact of the war. When they began to feel that there was this overwhelmingly hostile thing in the world with them, then the simplicity and unity of their characters broke and they were not the same again" (194). Although the war never reaches their school, and few see combat, A Separate Peace paints a poignant, heartfelt portrait of a time in which the foundations of the world shook even the most personal reaches of life. "I never killed anybody and I never developed an intense level of hatred for the enemy," concludes the narrative voice. "Because my war ended before I ever put on a uniform; I was on active duty all my time at school; I killed my enemy there" (196). In the intensity of a world shaken to its foundations by war, the students of Knowles' novel find nowhere to hide.

Our encounter with A Separate Peace came at a time eerily similar to this, and in a mirrored setting. We began studying the novel less than a month after the American invasion of Iraq and over a year into the "War on Terror." Our school, like Devon School

167 of the text, was an isolated acreage surrounded by fields and forest. The students commented on this. We were not so removed, however, to be perfectly isolated; we were half an hour from the Canadian-American border. Only a year before, during the second week of classes we'd watched traffic bound for the United States began to jam the highways as border-crossings were closed following the attacks in New York City and

Washington. We watched the cars pile up from the windows of our classrooms. We had many students with close ties to American family, and many had accents themselves. Our own wars were never far out of mind. Halfway through the novel, I realized that even with my own personal connection to the novel, many of my students were living an experience much closer to the characters'. I'd read A Separate Peace in the late 1980s -a much different world than the one my students inhabited at the time of their first reading.

When I think back, it was a powerful confluence of textual and lived experience, a perfect storm -and one I hadn't taken into consideration at all. I only knew that because I loved the novel, because it had been important and moving for me, I wanted to share it with the literature group. Class after class we read the chapters together, often stopping to discuss interesting points or share opinions. Dennis Sumara calls this "tucking in" after

Heidegger's notion of "building dwelling thinking" (Sumara 194). When my voice became tired, the students eagerly took turns reading. It was a natural thing to do, and I noticed that the students were becoming more and more personally involved with the novel. I was pleased; I felt somehow that they were accepting not only the text, but my offering of it to them.

One Friday afternoon, near the end of the book, I was walking around the class and reading. It was a sensitive chapter, so I wanted to be the one reading. At this point in the

168 novel, one of the characters dies. I was about three pages from that event, my eyes on the

book, when I felt a shift in the class. Perhaps I'd heard something, a turning of pages or a

whispering between the students. It was nothing out of the ordinary at first. I stopped

reading, looked up from my text and saw that several students were crying. They'd

skipped ahead in their shared text -perhaps I was reading too slowly—and already

discovered the death of a favourite character.

I was ecstatic.

The book had not only elicited an emotional reaction, but these characters -so beloved

to me—were obviously very real to my students. I felt I had succeeded on so many levels.

I'd brought an engaging and interesting text to my class; they'd formed an emotional bond with the characters and probably I'd made forays into "empathy education" because

of it; these students would be changed by the feelings predicated within the pages of the

novel -I'd given them a catharsis! Most powerfully, I felt incredibly close to my nine- member class of grade seven students. I'd brought them something and they'd taken it,

and understood in the exact way I had. It was a personal victory.

Not wanting to interrupt the experience, I grabbed a box of tissue, walked around from

desk to desk handing it out all the while continuing to read. (A few students were

frantically searching through the novel to catch up to the faster, distraught readers. They

knew something was up.)

Following the class, I was on a high all weekend. It was a powerful and heady moment

for me, and one in which all the parts of myself-teacher; reader; feeler—had been

absorbed.

Months later, I realized the narcissistic nature of my reaction.

169 The final exam for our literature course encompassed the entire term and in this capacity I had to think of a way to engage the students with A Separate Peace. There seemed little point in basic comprehension questions; we'd read the novel together, and we'd already done a "culminating task" for the unit. I searched for a way to incorporate

Sumara's notion of "tucking" into the exam question. The novel had been such an interactive experience, I wanted the students to continue to be able to "find themselves" in the exam question. Perhaps I wanted more feelings of being a great teacher of literature; perhaps, I only wanted to continue the interesting story that had begun that Friday afternoon. In the end, I presented the students with a simple problem: "Mr. Schwarz has been assigned a grade seven literature class for next year. Should A Separate Peace be part of the course? Why, or why not?"

The answer that stays in my mind the most, that changed how I look at the teaching of literature, came from a quiet student who rarely spoke in class. Although she did strong work in all subjects -most of the nine students did—she hardly ever participated in the more raucous class discussions that sometimes ensued. She was friendly, but quiet. Even now, I can't think of another word to describe her. Of all my nine students, I realize that she was the one I knew the least.

I regret that, especially considering the first paragraph of her answer to my exam question. I wish I had pilfered or copied her exam, both for the purposes of this paper and my own. To paraphrase, she wrote that no, A Separate Peace should not be on the course for the next batch of seventh grade literature students. "That novel was ours," she told me, and next year's class should be set to a text that would be their own adventure.

170 Her remarks were especially poignant; the school had no eighth grade, so each of my

students were to be separated and would attend different schools the following year -

some in different countries. The quiet student herself would be moving to Hong Kong. I

remember how powerfully touched I felt reading her answer, and writing to her -with

some tears in my eyes, I must admit—that I was at a loss as to how I should respond to her personal and heartfelt reply. I think she taught me more about teaching literature on

that exam than I could have ever hoped to impart to her about the subject. It was an

important realization for me: I had not been the only one to make meaning and insert

myself into the text; our time with A Separate Peace was not simply an episode in the

story of my history of the novel, but also a chapter for the students as well. The impact

of bringing a novel to a class became clearer: if the students embraced the text, if they made it their own, it became a kind of soundtrack to their own experience. That novel was now inseparable from the memory of their time together in our class; it was as much theirs as it was mine, and it was no longer the book I'd read in high school or as a

grieving son. It would always be those things, but now it was more. I could never again

encounter Phineas and Gene and Devon without thinking of that small batch of avid readers with whom I'd shared so much time that year. "A little thing touches a larger

thing," Robert Frost writes of synechdoche and poetic form. Our class had had a glimpse

of this literary calculus: we'd inserted ourselves into the text and somehow, there, found

each other.

Something profound had taken place -not only between readers and text, which I'd hoped for, but between text, at least one reader, and other readers. There had been a breaking of boundaries, a moment of merged feelings and selves. In his essay "The

171 Creative Writer and Daydreaming," Freud writes of this phenomenon as a poetic event,

the most "intimate secret" of the artist. "The true arspoetica lies in the technique by

which he [the artist] overcomes our repulsion," he tells us, "which certainly has to do

with the barriers that arise between each single ego and the others" (33). In this case, the

reticent artists were also simultaneously the readers, a group who had created an identity

within the pages of a novel and then broken the boundaries between one another in the re-

interpretation of that uniqueness as their own collective idiom. "Identity re-creates itself,"

Norman N. Holland writes (332), and "interpretation re-creates identity" (337). Alone we

read ourselves; together, when the poetry works, we read each other.

"One aesthetic conflict that belongs to English education concerns the status of the

concept of the literary in curriculum and teaching," writes Deborah Britzman (2006). She

goes on to suggest that, as Felman notes, literary knowledge

is knowledge that is not in control of itself and because this is so, it must perform its ignorance. Yet this performance defies the script of classroom control and to notice this disjuncture is a key to analyzing the experience of aesthetic conflict. A further tension involves the artist as creator. The creation of a work of art is in excess of the artist's intentions. So, too, is its reception. (110)

The very space in which the literary presents something "not in control of itself' is

where a reader might find an opening in which a poem or narrative brings important news.

This work can be accomplished in the act of solitary reading. However, when the unruly

knowledge -the "madness of the text" perhaps—is brought to a shared space such as a

classroom, it becomes possible that together, readers might begin to question their own

locations within the common setting of a literature that has been taken to heart. "There is

172 knowledge that cannot be in charge of itself yet charges us to wonder about our thoughts'

Britzman concludes (110). When I brought A Separate Peace to my students, and when I asked them their thoughts on whether the novel should be included in my future course offerings, I was dealing with the unruly knowledge of that text. It had already grown, for me, far from the simple story of an adolescent friendship in the closing months of the

Second World War. Instead, it held all the tautological associations of my own high school experience, an encounter with beloved characters during a vulnerable period, and the desires of so many young English educators hoping -for better or worse— to share and elicit emotion from their students. I was flirting dangerously with this uncontainable knowledge when I asked my question on the exam, perhaps wondering in which directions a knowledge not in charge of itself might go. I got an answer more powerful than any I anticipated, and it did, indeed, force me to question my own thinking about many things. What had I expected from the students when they encountered the novel?

What had I hoped for myself from this intersection between personal reading and professional effort? How was I defining myself in ways that were beyond my role as teacher? And, most importantly, how could I discover for myself a vocabulary of this experience so that it might help me to approach the uncontainable aspects of literary encounter for the future? These were -are—exciting questions. Their asking is also a creative act, one arising from the foundational connection somehow generated between a fifty-year old novel, nine seventh-grade students and their bewildered English teacher who somehow got more than he dreamed of during a shared reading with his class. The fusion of world, text and readers created something altogether new. Reading together is an act of creation.

173 It was, for us, also an aesthetic act. In her book Homo Aestheticus: Where art comes from and why, Ellen Dissanayake suggests that at the core of aesthetic experience is

"making special" -a sort of quasi-ritual marking of the importance of lived moments. She

argues that human beings need this type of celebration; it is an impulse within us, a basic

requisite of being human. We see it in the almost primal relation between the arts and

memory; creation is often an act of cataloguing against forgetting. In a very real sense, A

Separate Peace became one such moment of marked personal history for our small class;

my quiet student's exam response is testimony to the act. Furthermore, her answer seems

to me to be a case of Dissanyake's "making special." The novel was ours, she told me. It

was an unrepeatable event in the overlapping lives we shared during the course of an

English class. Wisely, she seemed to warn me of the futility of trying to replicate what we

managed to create together; it was ours, and it was special for being so. Next year's class

deserved a chance to have their own experience but more importantly, what was special between all of us -and the text— should be left sacrosanct in the sacred place of memory

and heart. We'd had an aesthetic experience; we'd "made special" and been marked for it.

Considering that exam response, I cannot think of reading as anything other than an

aesthetic act, and no work done in the traditional "fine arts" can surpass its creativity. I

think it can only be to the benefit of literature teachers to begin to wonder about the

aesthetic components of reception, and to approach reading with the same reverences and

expectations as we might a class on painting, composition or sculpture.

While English education is a unique venture, the entire project of education might be

seen as an aesthetic act. We come together (or we don't) and we are changed by what we

encounter (or we aren't) both inside ourselves and collectively. What we learn or resist

174 learning about ourselves, what we offer one another as teachers and students, what we say about this process and how we think about it -each of these is, in Dissanyake's term, an event carrying the potential for specialness. I think this, rather than rigid arguments and best practice techniques proving that the arts are "good" or that they can "change us" or increase test scores, is the heart of what aesthetic education means. Beyond this term, we can say that an aesthetics of education involves creation, and creation involves connection and memory, feeling for ourselves and reaching out with what we know.

"This is one skill we have not used," Muriel Rukeyser tells us, "reaching that makes a meeting-place." She goes on to say:

Facing and communicating, that will be our life, in the world and in poetry. Are we to teach this? All we can show to people is themselves; show them what passion they possess, and we will all have come to the poetry. This is the knowledge of communication, and it is the fear of it which has cut us down. (40)

During periods of difficult history and in the new realities of urbanization and globalization, the imperative for Dissanyake's aesthetic education and Rukeyser's

"knowledge of communication" become more vital than ever before -although, I think both would argue that the necessity and impulse have always existed. Coming together and reading one another as a shared and special experience of personal narration is the foundation of what we learn in any class of any discipline. We are defined by living as creatures of memory, and education exists within these parameters. In literature and in life, we seek out that which might hold meaning and be offered back into the larger context. "We actively seek out those poems and parts of poems (images, lines) that speak to us deeply and personally," writes Gregory Orr in his aptly titled work Poetry as

175 Survival. "We seek them out and use them to sustain us -to express our innermost dramas

and to regulate them.. .the lines and images we love are like stars and we make them into

constellations by our own positive acts of imagination" (205). The creation of

constellations is a special and aesthetic act. Thanks to one small seventh grade class and a

mass of unexpected, unruly knowledge, A Separate Peace will, for me, always be among

the brightest gathering of stars.

Ars Poetica

So far in this chapter, I have brought into discussion two novels and not a word of

poetry. Yet it has been evoked: Orr talks of the lines and images of poetry as our

imaginative constellations; Rukeyser mentions poetry as the ultimate goal in life's task of

"facing and communication"; even Sigmund Freud speaks of the possibilities of

understanding between readers -between separate egos, people—as an ars poetica, the

essential core of the poetic. There is a strong sense that these writers are not talking,

exactly, about lines of poetry. They are reaching for something more metaphysical, more

elemental that has come to be known as the poetic. What is this term? Why is it useful in

the project of thinking about English education? How does the poetic relate to reading poetry or other forms of literature, such as the two novels I've mentioned?

Both "poetry" and "poetic" share a root in the Greek word poiesis, meaning "to make"

or "to create"; the aesthetic link to both the creation and reading of poetry is present in its

earliest derivation. In terms of the "poetic" and the larger cultural usage of the word, we might begin to wonder what it is that has been "created" or "made" when the idiom is

invoked. We hear, for example, that a piece of music is poetic; but we might also hear the

colours of autumn leaves described this way, or a delicious dinner, or the moves of a

176 teenaged skateboarder in an abandoned parking lot. What do these seemingly disparate phenomenon have to do with poetry? What about them is poetic?

Freud's use of the term arspoetica as an element located in the breaking of barriers between unrelated psyches is a clue to our own associations of the expression. Essentially,

"poetic" refers to a setting of quintessential interiority. This is a shared quality with poetry. Furthermore, both poetry and the poetic reach toward a quality of sensual language capable of meaning beyond the limitations of signified and signifier. Jane

Hirshfield notes that part of what we ask of poetry is to "approximate the actual flavor of life, in which subjective and objective become one" and that when this is accomplished we are changed:

Letting this wideness of being into ourselves, as readers or as writers, while staying close to the words themselves, we begin to find in poems a way of entering both language and being on their own terms. Poetry leads us into the self, but also away from it. Transparency is part of what we seek in art, and in art's mind of concentration that is both capacious and focused. Free to turn inward and outward, free to remain still and wondering amid the mysteries of mind and world, we arrive, for a moment, at a kind of fullness that overspills into everything. One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read -in such a moment, anything can happen. The pressed oil of words can blaze up into music, into image, into the heart and mind's knowledge. The lit and shadowed places within us can be warmed. (32)

Language and being, inward and outward, heart and mind, lit and shadowed places - these are the polarities that navigate the geography of the poetic. In her insistence that poetry both originates from and reaches into this realm, Hirshfield establishes a specific context for the poetic, the internal worlds of people and things. That's poetry. The poetic

177 comes from a different impulse, a connection -as Freud notes in "Creative Writers and

Daydreaming" possible in the breaking down of ego barriers.

In fact, Freud's writing continues to be useful as we hone a definition of the poetic. In many ways, the psychoanalytic and poetic projects share a common terrain. Centred in worlds of interiority, both attempt to reconcile that intimate, mysterious space with an outer relation -both in language, a media simultaneously always necessary and yet

always inadequate. "Words, words," moans a dejected Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard's

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, "They're all we have to go on" (Stoppard 31).

Adam Phillips writes with a bit more cogency, noting that "the life in us can't escape from itself, even in words" (Phillips: 1998, 47). Later, citing J. B. Pontalis, Phillips tells us simply that "words do not come from words" (1998: 54). The poets agree. "Words are never just words," John O'Donohue writes (54).

This anxiety about language is symptomatic of something much larger -the incoherence generated by the post-structuralist disruption of the consistency of self.

Postmodern theorists see the essential being as constructed of language, which is flawed,

ambiguous and always just short of the mark -as noted above. "All that I am is a transient

flickering irony that colours the motion of these signs," Don Cupitt announces (126). In his anti-autobiography Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Barthes notes how far beyond

simple linguistic categories we have gone. "I am not contradictory," he writes, objecting to the understandable relationship between 'this' and 'not this'; "I am dispersed" (Barthes

143). For Barthes and the post-structuralists, there is no lucid, reasoned subject to be

found beyond the limited parameters of words. "The subject is merely an effect of language," Barthes concludes (79).

178 In spite of the deconstructionist insistence upon the fractured self-much of it blamed on the notion of an unknowable unconscious—it is, in the end, psychoanalysis and the poetic that question how much better off we are with knowledge of this rupture.

Furthermore, both psychoanalysis and poetics insist that while language may be flawed in its reach, it is this gap which defines us and in which, often, the truth of who we are is to be found. In the current writings of many English educators, there is a trend against what literature professor and psychoanalytic critic Mark Edmunson calls the "nihilism" of a philosophy for self-serving academics who "believe in nothing (except the achievement of their own advantage)" (Edmunson 46). Citing Goethe, Edmunson notes how much harder it is to find meaning or speak for a text rather than to be brilliant believing in nothing. He is certainly not alone. In an essay entitled "The Creative Word and the

Creative Life", arts educator cum creative writing professor Peter Abbs rails against the uncreative forces at work in undermining the imaginative process of autobiography.

Drawing on what he calls a "history of the psyche", Abbs echoes Edmunson's revolt against nihilism:

In the end, it may be impossible to have an anti-autobiography which does not reveal aspects of the self, whether intended or not. It is, indeed, impossible to consider human life without a notion of a continuing subject -'everything which is still in me'—an agent who acts, who writes, who reflects, who edits, who selects, who develops, who experiences, daily, an intentionality which cannot be reduced to the effects of language, who is always more and other than the discourse, who often seeks in language not his own dispersion, but his own idiom, his distinctive way of being in the world, of telling and spelling himself, a subject with a destiny. (104)

It seems that, for those who are interested in the psyche, there is ultimately a need for the aesthetic act of creation, of finding oneself in text and as text. But how is this impulse

179 an act of poetry, or of the poetic? What must be done to the act of reading world, text and

self in order to find that "cure"?

Once again, a turn to the writing of Sigmund Freud provides an interesting speculation.

Although he has reverence for creative writers -and has often been said to write poetically—Freud leaves questions of poetry largely alone, noting that where psychoanalysis goes "literature was there before" (Vine 1). Rather, in one of Freud's

essays in which he discusses the process of psychoanalysis, I came across a small phrase which seemed to me to hold a truth of the poetic. During the course of treatment, the

Freudian analyst is instructed to give up examination and reflection for "evenly

suspended attentiveness," a surrender in which "to catch the drift of the patient's unconscious with his own unconscious" (1923: 238, cited in Bollas 184). In his

description of psychoanalytic process, Freud may have inadvertently defined the poetic:

that which speaks to something inside of us, catching our attention at the precise moment when we are unaware of our attention needing to be caught. To use the often quoted phrase of Dr. Bion, it is when we actually come to awareness of those "thoughts awaiting

a thinker" that we experience the poetic5. When we find something speaking to a desire

so deep inside ourselves that perhaps we were unaware it existed -an image or the night

sky, a sonata, a skateboarder, a love scene or, indeed, a poem—and when it moves us to know ourselves differently, to write ourselves anew, we are in the realm of the poetic.

Returning to the literary, this notion of the poetic is nothing new to readers -although

it might very well function on an unconscious level; here again, there is an intersection

5 Cited from Joan and Neville Symington, The Clinical Thinking of Wilfred Bion. Hove and New York: Brunner-Routledge, 1996. Pg. 82. Originally in: Bion, Wilfred R. Elements of Psycho-Analysis. London: William Heinemann, 1963. Pg. 35. 180 with psychoanalytic thought. Felman tells us that "The history of reading has accustomed us to the assumption -usually unquestioned—that reading is finding meaning, that interpretation can dwell only on the meaningful." And yet, she claims, "what can be read (and perhaps what should be read) is not just meaning but the lack of meaning"

(1987: 45). Felman later concludes that both poetry and psychoanalysis "exist only insofar as they resist our reading" (51). From the perspective of allowing the

"unconscious" of Felman's writing to touch our own, it becomes possible to notice how the reader maintains attention in a text (as I've tried to show, only sometimes a book) - indeed, keeps reading—not from what is known, but instead because of the surprises and shocks of unexpected recognition. The mastery of meaning offers no drift to be caught with one's unconscious; no evenly suspended surrender is necessary there. In the intense and personal reading experience -the kind in which writers like Abbs, Edmunson, Eco and so many others describe as capable of saving a life—the reader plays both analyst and is analyzed, open to an experience of personal interest that keeps them reading and wanting more. The poetic is not limited to textual experience, but it is a crucial element for those who find reading transformative. We read, perhaps, to know ourselves; we read poetically when we feel news of the selves we do not know. Alone or with others, power resides there; our lit and shadowed places are warmed.

"The universe," Alberto Manguel notes poetically, "is not contingent on our reading it; only on the possibility of our reading" (2006: 237). There is creativity inherent in both reception and construction, and its implication for English education is important. If, as

I've tried to show, in reading we simultaneously find and create ourselves and each other, and in reading poetically we "catch the drift" of what is in excess of the text and our own

181 knowledge, it is in the space of the literature classroom that we bring these understandings to a larger context. We share hidden meanings and create new ones from the work of resistance and dialogue. Here, the relationship is made between text and reader and a world containing both. What has always been difficult about true engagement in literary curriculum may be no more and no less than finding not better ways to be human -the most poetic literature has always resisted such judgments—but more human ways of being human. This includes ways of being together faced with the incomplete and the ambiguous, respecting each other enough to leave one another's fantasies intact, and finding room for the literature that becomes personal as well as the elements of the personal that become our literature. In this, the notion of the poetic I have ascertained from Freud's instruction of "evenly suspended attention" seems to me to be at the heart of what we want to do with literature in the classroom.

If the universe is contingent upon the possibility of our reading, it becomes a livable place when we speak our translations. What we learn and share of ourselves from our reading, the very ability to do a bit of both, is the beating heart of literary education. To write, read or live poetically is to offer up that unknowing bit of ourselves to a world that, although it offers no guarantee of reception, might nonetheless be waiting to hear and become something new. At its best, the English education classroom offers an assurance in the form of a creative, risky chance: the opportunity to add ourselves to the "echo of everything that has ever been spoken" and to know that we are a part of that irreplaceable syllable of the world just as it has always, already, been part of us.

182 Conclusion

When You Are Old

When you are old and gray and full of sleep And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true; But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

And bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead, And hid his face amid a crowd of stars. —William Butler Yeats

/ believed in sorcery, and was certain that one day I'd be granted three wishes which countless stories had taught me how not to waste. I prepared myself for encounters with ghosts, with death, with talking animals, with battle; I made complicated plans for travel to adventurous islands on which Sinbad would become my bosom friend. Only when, years later, I touched for the first time my lover's body did I realize that literature could sometimes fall short of the actual event. —Alberto Manguel

183 As it turns out, Lori Sewell's notes on Wuthering Heights did little to prepare me for my experience of the novel.

"The meaning evoked by the literary imagination is not to be found in the reader or the text, " Dennis Sumara writes in a statement pivotal to my understanding of what literary education might constitute itself toward, "but in relations between the reader and a world that contains the text and the reader" (221). Sumara's dictum is a complex and multifaceted idea; it changes each time I return to think about it anew. Much of this thesis has been an attempt to work out how those relations between world, text and reader might manifest -and how we might come to think of these in terms of a humane, compassionate and inclusive methodology of teaching that most impossible, human and uncontainable subject: literature. A subject capable of meaning something unique to each student and teacher within its purview; one that lives in the space of ambiguity, that allows for feeling and personal investment and the histories we are ourselves unaware of writing; a body of knowledge in possession of something unknown even to itself.

Much of this relation can be called an aesthetic, and I have used the term throughout as a way of thinking about the association between reading and reader. But "aesthetic" has become a loaded term and, in spite of my own belief in the lightness of each of the definitions I've offered -Grumet's notion of access to the world of pre-Oedipal childhood;

Scarry's conception of a lifting out of the self; Dewey's allegory of the stone's experience as it rolls down a hill— each of these leave me wanting. How can an aesthetic of reading be something more, something that includes a text, a reader and the world containing both?

184 If my idea of the poetic as an experience of one unconscious being caught and held by another holds weight, I believe I am reaching for an aesthetic of intuitive feeling -a palpable experience within the bounds of what we read: the literary experience as a lived experience, to note once again Deanne Bogdan's idea. What is surprising about this, however, is precisely where the experience of living the literary -or experiencing the poetic—takes place. While Sumara seems to me absolutely correct to place the relationality of literary education in the location of a world containing both text and reader, the surprise comes when we realize that this world exists exactly within ourselves.

And the challenge for English Education is to acknowledge, nurture (if we're lucky, idealistic and dare to dream) and somehow exist parallel to these impossibly individual, often unknowable internal worlds even as they create a relation with the world at large - one we might call the classroom.

It was in November of my second-to-last year of high school in which I was given a copy, at last, of Wuthering Heights. I'd been waiting years for that defining text to reach my hands -and, as I've noted, I was not unaware of how important Lori Sewell's notes on the novel had become in my own mind. By twelfth grade, I was well awake to the idea that literature was my favourite class -that it held something special for me, that I was good at it, that it was a safe and comfortable platform from which to explore the world, and sometimes to hide from it. I knew, too, that those renegade notes of my unmet patron had been a great gift, providing me a way of thinking about books and poems and plays that I may not have come up with on my own. While I loved history and did very well in it, that class never reached the status of English for me. Often, I've wondered about why

185 this was so. It may well be that if Lori Sewell had misplaced her notes on the French

Revolution or the Peloponnesian War, my life could have taken a different path.

Contingency is often destiny, though, and the notes on Wuthering Heights had sustained me well through three years of study. It seemed almost mythical to me that I was about to read the actual text from which I'd learned how to think about literature and the world. I often think of Sigmund Freud's incredulity upon finally seeing the Acropolis in his 1936 essay "An Experience on the Acropolis"; "So all this really does exist," he muses upon at last beholding the ancient structure (449). Like the Acropolis for Freud,

Wuthering Heights had become derealized for me. I was amazed that I was about to approach the original source so important to much of my 17-year old life. It was as if a myth was about to become real.

Yet there was possibly another reason for my feelings of the uncanny. From the beginning of October, I'd had a terrible cough which had progressively become worse.

I'd been to see the doctor once and he gave me some fairly strong antibiotics. I'd taken a few days off school and then returned. By the beginning of November, when we'd been handed Wuthering Heights, I was starting to worry about my recovery. I'd finished the antibiotics and continued to cough violently. A few days after the start of the novel study,

I remember wandering the halls of the school and thinking that I couldn't hear anything properly -not so much because my ears were plugged, but because somehow the world seemed muffled and very far away. People were talking to me and I could not understand what they were saying or, in some cases, remember who they were. I remember one good friend of mine asking if I was alright as I struggled to place his face and wonder what he could possibly be going on about. Probably I had a high temperature. Before dinner that

186 night, after a particularly bad bout of coughing, my nose started to bleed and I knew something was really wrong. The next day I went back to the doctor.

Even before my chest X-rays came back, I more or less knew that I had pneumonia. I didn't know what the name of my illness would be, only that it was serious. The doctor prescribed a robust course of medicine and, after some almost panicked pleading from me, decided that I wouldn't have to be admitted to the hospital if I promised to stay in bed and rest for a week, until my next appointment with him. I gave him my solemn word and

I barely remember stationing myself on our sofa with a heavy blanket and a pillow. I could see out the window -there seemed to be a snowstorm happening the entire time I was ill, but that might be my memory's version of pathetic fallacy. I could also see the television. But I don't remember watching it.

Instead, as soon as I was well enough, I picked up Wuthering Heights and began to read. Part of the novel's critical appeal is how Emily Bronte tells the story within a very particular narrative framework: playing on a common trope of nineteenth century fiction, the events of the book are told to characters by people within the novel relating events that happened to them. The first layer of storytelling is given to readers by a character called Mr. Lockwood. In detail, he describes his first journey to the novel's setting in a quest to rent lodging. There he meets Heathcliff, the novel's passionate and sometimes violent anti-hero. Events ensue, and at one point Lockwood is chased out of doors by his unstable new landlord, and forced to wander underdressed through inclement weather.

Relenting, Heathcliff allows his tenant to spend an unsettled night of bad dreams and supernatural encounters in a drafty, haunted bedroom. He leaves the next day, wandering lost through the snowy woods on a journey of two miles -although, Lockwood tells us, "I

187 believe I managed to make it four, what with losing myself among the trees, and sinking up to the neck in snow, a predicament which only those who have experienced it can appreciate" (36). Finally, he arrives home and, "benumbed to my very heart, I dragged upstairs; whence, after putting on dry clothes, and pacing to and fro thirty or forty minutes to restore the animal heat, I am adjourned to my study, feeble as a kitten" (37).

Not surprisingly, Lockwood becomes terribly ill after his adventure. Bedridden and alone, he laments his misfortunes and finally beseeches his housekeeper, Nelly Dean, to either "rouse me to animation or lull me to sleep by her talk" (37). It is this supplication that begins the second layer of storytelling: Mrs. Dean begins to tell Lockwood the early history of Wuthering Heights as she experienced it. Bored and in poor health, Mr.

Lockwood listens enraptured to her tale; she nurses him through the hours with the story.

Fighting fever and the terrible winter of the English moorland, Lockwood loses himself in the narrative. As I did. It was not difficult to imagine, couch-ridden as I also was, how

Lockwood was able to give himself over to Nelly's storytelling. She nursed us both back to health simultaneously; we recovered together.

Of all the characters in the famous novel, I remember Lockwood and his illness more vividly than any other. He plays a relatively minor role, contributing nothing to the plot other than to begin the telling of the tale. Yet for me, our parallel experiences of illness function to create in Lockwood a perfect double -my pilgrim soul's intimate entryway into the world of the book. In my memory of that feverish week, Nelly told me the story just as she told Mr. Lockwood. I was there. Literary experience was lived experience, and

I think of that novel as something that actually happened to me during my snowy, dimly-

188 lit November recuperation. The sensual and physical experience of my illness is

inextricable from Bronte's narrative. I remember it emotionally, and in a personal way.

This, too, is an aesthetic experience. In one incarnation, "aesthetics" refers to a way of

gathering knowledge through the senses; throughout her essay on "Ethics and Aesthetics"

Maura Mclntyre talks about the aesthetic elements of research as "ones that do not privilege the intellectual over sensory and emotional engagement" (259). There is no other criteria by which to judge my week at Wuthering Heights; the novel engaged me emotionally due to an opening in my own life caused by a conflagration of events -Lori

Sewell's notes, being ill the way Mr. Lockwood was ill, having time to read, living in a

similar climate to that described within the pages of the novel. How this was to be judged -or even translated—when I returned back to the classroom and had a chance to talk and write about the novel is a complicated matter; the experience cannot be measured intellectually at all, but only by how my intellect was changed by a sensory, emotional experience. I remember nothing of classroom engagement with Wuthering Heights. I must have done well on the exam because a disappointing grade would have stood out in my memory. Undoubtedly, we were judged by our intellectual responses to the text; it

seems to me that the point was missed somehow in leaving out the aesthetic aspects of

lived experience. And that is at the heart of the poetics of literary education, the unconscious grasping of something offered. How can teachers and the discipline we call

education come to a vocabulary with which to talk about this?

The answer may live within the arts themselves. Each chapter of this dissertation has begun with a poem. In a very real way, these small pieces of text have been the central

element of the discussion which followed. The poems were context and springboard for

189 thinking; they began the process of identifying and fleshing out the experiences, concepts,

questions and ideas that made up the work of each chapter. "Poems are theories," writes

Rishma Dunlop (2004, 88) and I think within the body of this thesis, they have been. It

seems to me a small miracle, and a hopeful one, that embedded within the research of a

doctoral dissertation in education -a "social science" staple—lives the ambiguity and

imprecise way of knowing offered by poetry. Poems defy logic; they work against rational argument but present aspects of living and of life that are true, meaningful and thought-provoking. Poetry proffers a knowledge of ourselves and our inner worlds; in its unique way of noticing the large and diminutive aspects of life, poetry holds the possibility of hope and an ontological understanding of the world that uses words to go beyond the human truths of language. If a poem -or writing about poetry—gives us a

feeling of familiarity that seems somehow unquantifiable, it is a symptom of the poetic at work. And it is not an invitation for irrationality, but instead a moment to start thinking, to begin to ask the larger questions that might give us a lexicon with which to speak

about the poem and the poet, the research, the world, ourselves. As Deborah Britzman notes, "We write and read in order to surprise ourselves, and we think in order to love"

(2003, 147). This profound statement reads to me like an equation, no one component balances without the others. Reading and writing for surprise, thinking to love -these are parallelisms that seem to be strange pairings; in the end, it could be no other way. This too is the poetic, a logic of interiority found only in ourselves and on the page. Not

surprising when we consider a familiar suggestion of Deborah Britzman: "We take reading seriously precisely because we take psychical life seriously" (2003, 148).

190 There are rules to be followed, however. Poetry and the poetic demand discussion; while each chapter began with a poem, what followed was engagement springing from the poetic resonances. There was space for the personal but it (hopefully) led to larger thinking and a reaching toward others who had reached toward the same questions.

Interest began with the images offered by my chosen poets; what followed was the challenge of sustaining that interest, of keeping the questions alive.

In order to argue for reading, and especially reading poetically, as a form of aesthetic engagement -it is, perhaps, an original form of "arts-based research"—a certain "anxiety of influence" has to be addressed. Not only must we come to see reading as a creative act, redefining the creative as an act of process rather than one of product, but the reader/researcher must also privilege using the words of others -repetition—as an act of what George Steiner sees as generous reception. Indeed, he notes that the arts are in fact dependent

on our capacities for welcome or refusal, for response or imperception, that their own necessities of echo and of presence largely depend. To think about why there should be painting or poetry or music at all -an order of matter and of being in which there would be none is perfectly conceivable—is to think about the kinds of entrance which we allow them or which they exact into the narrows of our individual existence. (1989, 147)

Instead, Steiner argues for a methodology "which plainly articulates the intuition that an experience of communicated forms of meaning demands, fundamentally, a courtesy or tact of heart, a tact of sensibility and of intellection which are conjoined at their several roots" (1989, 149) -an aesthetic defining of generosity. How we choose to receive and use a work speaks directly to the impulses involved in our relationships moving toward,

191 and fearing, others. In this sense, an unwillingness to repeat -to use the words of others— is based in a reticence to give up the mantle of expert; as Adam Phillips notes, all authority is based upon what others fear (1997, 62). It seems both healthy and a characteristic of Steiner's "tact of heart" to give this up, to allow our readings of others' writing a meaningful place, a knowing that is at once sensate, emotional and intellectual.

There must be another kind of generosity as well, based in an understanding of multiplicity and the possibilities of differing interpretation. "All readings are misreadings," Steiner tells us (1989, 126) and for dialogue and discussion to take place following poetic research, we must make room for the misreadings of others alongside our own. Once again, rational argumentation at first seems sacrificed; instead of looking for common truths, we might instead find the truths of common resonance. It is interesting, instead, to think of questions of what a reading brings to mind for one reader that is different from what the text catches in the attention of another, or what is the same, what is intolerable or uncontainable or perverse. It seems to me that these "misreadings" lead to much better discussion and thinking than would unanimous assent.

And always, there must be a space for affect, the intuitive, the immeasurable waiting for an assay at language. "Nothing is more certain than one's emotional engagement,"

Liz de Freitas writes, and yet few things are more difficult to articulate (269). As I've noted throughout, I think this is the beating heart of literary studies: the attempt to articulate our feeling for a text, how it resonates with us, where it reaches us and the places we hope it will lead. In reading and writing, we share the unconscious associations of which we have become aware. As the poem I chose to begin this chapter notes, it is often only in the poetic realm of the literary that we can find our own

192 wandering, pilgrim souls; perhaps only in the literature classroom can one find an acceptable place to hide amidst a crowd of stars. If we are doing something else in literature studies, if the goal is other than this, I think we have missed the best and most human possibilities of our craft.

How difficult it all sounds, though, and what an impossible task to ask of a teacher.

Not even the best literature teachers I've had have been able to understand the depth of my experiences with Wuthering Heights, or A Separate Peace, or The Razor's Edge. And

I have both misread and neglected theirs -in fact, having been a literature teacher, I am guilty from both sides of the chalkboard. There is no way for any one teacher to grasp the poetic dimensions of student encounters with text, and no pedagogy can compass this fully either. The misreadings are more important anyway. Imagine, though, a world in which English teachers are aware of the potential of what I've described as poetic engagement with literature, in which Steiner's capacity for welcome and refusal are at the heart of every reading assignment, essay question, examination. I envision classrooms filled with engaged students, passionate discussions -arguments, perhaps—and unanswered questions haunting, plaguing, sustaining the minds of readers long after the safety of English class has been left behind. In my mind, I see teachers who strive to know something personal about each student even as they revisit and rewrite their own

"misreadings" of favourite and familiar texts. These are encounters that can change lives.

None of this is new, and my daydream is based upon the best of my own experiences.

It exists with the awareness that there are those among us for whom literature is a way of knowing in the same way that for others, statistics, algebra and physics are ways of knowing -as are chemistry, dance, music and the visual arts. The literary as a way of

193 reading the world in a personal, narratable language of interiority is central for these souls. For us, there is no better research method, no more advanced ontology or organization of experience in a way that sustains livability and an interest in the world and our lives. Works of prose, drama and poetry -perhaps, especially poetry—can speak to the inner world where meaning is made because they offer a kind of familiarity capable of reaching through the necessary barriers of self. The literature classroom must be a place where integrities of that inner world find privilege; it must provide opportunities for students and teachers alike to be moved and challenged, recognized and provoked and surprised in ways they hadn't imagined but had somehow been waiting for.

And always, always, to share these shocks of the poetic in language both oral and written.

Adrienne Rich sees "books as metaphors for and lines into experience, life itself as

'Primer' to the 'Book' of eternity" (2003, 93). A powerful and ancient metaphor, so present in Yeats' poem, so much a part of each of us, when we too are "old and gray and full of sleep," taking down that one book or those few poems -as we understand, perhaps without conscious knowing, how only those texts can truly remember us to ourselves: that the elusive relation between world and text and reader is only so complex and simple as the shock of recognition of once again meeting our own readings —the flawed, ambiguous, incomplete and human faces of who we have been.

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