The Death of a Poetic Era

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As an English major, I am struggling to find the perfect link to sustain the nourishing feeling English provides in the teaching of it to students with an abbreviated speech lifestyle. I feel that everything is too fast nowadays due to this verbal and textual abbreviation - life, our emotions and our very experiences are too abbreviated. And it is becoming all too common, all too fast.

As part of my placement experience at a high school, I have been assigned by my university to bring forth a project which I see as beneficial to the school and its students, particularly one that harnesses my majors. So I decided to focus on English and its very art, in particular, poetry. I decided this because I wanted to give a voice to the outsiders, to those who feel that they cannot express themselves - you will be surprised at how many students have no personal opinion about things!

So I ran a poetry workshop. I made it appealing for all sorts of learners - the visual, the kinaesthetic, the musical, the linguistic, the logical, the intrapersonal, the interpersonal, the musical, all of Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligence theories. And I thought it extraordinary the lengths I went through. I made attractive posters, and made a plan to collate all of the varied poetic techniques I would have taught students into a final slam poem that they would perform at the end of my two-week block, boosting their oral and performance skills as well, all vital in order to thrive academically. 

The number of students that attended went from six to two in four sessions. Then one. I could not believe it - what was I missing? I made it engaging. I placed bulletin notices that rhymed. I incorporated varied interests, even catering for those interesting in writing rap music. I touched on all elements. I asked several students to attend - their responses varied from "I can't write poetry" to "no thanks" to "maybe". 

Poetry is so beautiful. It is everything a soul could ask for. It is everything students could ask for in the middle of a bust day. But it was something rejected. Even those two who attended towards the end were bored halfway and began to doodle all over things instead of sticking to the poetic task. So I did the thing I feared the most about this project: I gave up.

I revised it entirely. I now run origami workshops. Students come in, fold pieces of paper to their amusement, trash the area in which they are folding paper, and leave. I cannot believe that language, the most beautiful communicative tool since the uttering of cavemen and cavewomen, is being trashed like this.

Workshopping

Today was the day that my first poetry workshop ran. I have been planning for this moment for months, and as per usual, had grown excessively high expectations of what would happen.

I was not ready for what actually did. The slam poetry videos I chose to play contained profanity that I somehow missed when listening to them at home, so I had to drop them. My attendance rate in my imagination was the size of an average classroom, but come reality I only had six people turn up. In the heart of the library, we sat, speaking about haiku and cinquain poetry. 

The girls were very attentive. They listened to all that I said, and partook in the same level of interest as I had anticipated. They all cooperated and produced lovely pieces of poetry that I was appreciative of. I was more timid than they were but tried not to show it, as I was the role model in that situation - who knew what I would uncover?

What I uncovered made me feel much better than a panda feels at the crack of a fresh bamboo stick. I uncovered a student who befits the label 'outcast'. She reminded me of myself when I was back in high school, the lone ranger of the private school world, sketching and writing to myself in the corner of classrooms.

Her poems were based on her loneliness and the fact that she too is a lone ranger. I did not know how to handle that situation. This is the type of situation that nobody can teach you about, that no textbook nor no theorist can prepare you for. And I do not think that I handled it adequately enough. If anything, I steered most of the attention away from her, but I think she revelled in that because of the look of content on her face.

I made them all read their poems, as little as they were. When that girl read her poem, and projected her voice like I told her to, I felt her crawl slowly out of her shell. I felt like I connected with her in the way that I had initially wanted to, and that is my aim in this project, to target those without a chance and to grant it to them, to grant them a time for their voices to be heard, to grant them a place where they do not feel alienated, rather welcome.

This project will prove interesting over the course of these two weeks. I just hope to target more soul, more spirituality, more convergence. That is, what I believe, what matters most in a school environment. To pick up the fallen.

Lisa Jacobson's The Sunlit Zone

It was a mildly warm morning. I made my way hurriedly through the campus – today we had a guest speaker, and I had devoured her brilliant book of prose with my mind days before this day. I needed to meet her, I needed to have her acknowledge that I was utterly immersed in her brilliant work.

I made it – five minutes earlier. She was around ten minutes late when class had begun. And so I sat there, taking notes on the last page of her book with my pacer. I wrote about her interpretations of the themes in the prose, and I related them to my own just to study her psyche. I noted that she had rewritten the novel twenty to thirty times. I noted things that inspired it, who took the cover photograph, everything she had said I had documented as a way of showing interest and respect to her.

Then, question time. A couple of other people had asked her mindless questions, some about symbolism. And then it was my turn. I cannot recall my first question, however I can recall my second quite well, seeing as I asked it in urgency due to our lecturer beckoning us to show some more interest in her work.

The question I asked had thrown her off track – she has had none other like it, for people only focus on the contaminants of the book itself, rather than its actual build. Today, I was to challenge her with a question lacking complexity – “the two navy pages at the beginning and the end of the book, does the placement of them symbolise that the story itself it in a sunlit zone, a pun of the title and story of the book?” And she froze, her look of confusion frozen with her.

She basically had answered that she had no idea what the publishers had to do, that publishing her book in this sense was out of her control, and that the possible symbolism of this was most likely untrue, but possibly could have been possible. Disheartened, I sunk into my seat and wished I had never asked.

If I were a published author or poet, I would want utter control of what I publish. The cover, the cover photo, the way the book is arranged, everything. I believe symbolism is not contained only in the story, but also in the make of the book itself.

I recommend The Sunlit Zone to all lovers of literature and poetry, because this very book has both of those elements perfectly intertwined.