A poem is not a frog

The truth is, I like teaching a course like Intro to Lit even though the seats are filled with students who could give a hang about Hamlet's soliloquies and can't tell a poem from a jingle--and really don't care to know any more than they do. The whole lit thing carries very little anxiety for them because the rewards are so negligible--"So what if I know William Faulkner? How's that going to get me a job?"

They're not in the chairs by choice but because the college says a little lit is good for the soul. It's a core course, without which, we say, you're really not "an educated person" and you wouldn't have anything to say at cocktail parties. So bring on Arthur Miller.

I just graded a whole set of tests, very simple, really. After a chunk of time on poems, I gave them a dozen more, told them to take their choice, and link any three or four of them (on assorted themes) to what we'd been reading. Take home. I had to be out of town. I may not make this year's hardcover volume of Best American Teachers, but you can't always get what you want.

They did fine, but then I'm getting soft in my old age. I consider it less absolute than I once did that a student differentiate between metonymy and metaphor. If I were 28 years old, in my first semester, I would have expended more red ink (actually I read the papers electronically--I've long ago quit with the inky hands). But I'm almost old enough to be their grandfather, and time itself is a grandpa.

All of that notwithstanding, I've still got a beef. They're tone deaf. I love 'em to death, I've got a fun class this year, and I actually enjoy going in there, even though there's a ton of them and only one of me. The truth?--I like 'em.

But to tone in poetry, they're deaf as a post. They don't get it. They can't read in. It's color they don't see. Taking apart a poem, for them, is a kissing cousin to dissecting a frog. But a poem isn't a frog.

They're color blind. They don't read emotion, feeling, sense, tone, color, humor.

Here's one:

After the Argument

Whoever spoke first would lose something,
that was the stupid
unspoken rule.

The stillness would be a clamor, a capo
on a nerve. He'd stare
out the window,

she'd put away dishes, anything
for some noise. They'd sleep
in different rooms.

I honestly don't think you have to be married to understand what's going on here, but the question is "how" to read it--in dead seriousness, as if they marriage was on the brink of disaster, or furrowed-brow concern, as if this spat was a nuclear threat, or in sheer playfulness. What's the key? In my estimation, the word "stupid." You read that word and you know this poem is mostly fun. Sure they argued, sure they complained, but giving the silent treatment is forever childish. That doesn't mean we don't all do it, of course, but nonetheless, Mr. Stephen Dunn is looking back in fun that's worth cherishing.

My students--love 'em to pieces--don't get that. They read it with cold analytics, as if it's holy scripture.

The trick was to speak as if you hadn't
spoken, a comment
so incidental

it wouldn't be counted as speech.

It's a game, y'all, I wanted to say, and it's become ritual, like coffee in the a.m., an old established way of dealing with irritation and conflict. Smile when you read it. Trust me, after reading 35 tests, I sure they think the blame poem is a dead frog.

Or to touch while passing,
an accident

of clothing, billowy sleeve against
rolled-up cuff. They couldn't
stand hating

each other for more than one day.

Good night, it's darling. These sweetheart lovers and their silly love-hate is almost boiling over because their injured pride just can't compete with the hot springs of their urges. They love each other. Do any of my students say that? No. They're wielding their scalpels somewhere around the lower thorax.

Each knew this, each knew
the other's body

would begin to lean, the voice yearn
for the familiar confluence
of breath and syllable.

When? Who first? It was Yalta, always
on some level the future,
the next time.

Of course, they don't know Yalta, but must I remind them that there's always Wikipedia?

This time
there was a cardinal on the bird feeder;
one of them was shameless enough
to say so, the other pleased

to agree. And their sex was a knot
untying itself, a prolonged

coming loose.

Now who on earth couldn't love that poem, all that sweet heavy breathing at the end? But it's a blame frog to them, and the whole exercise is as cold as the word academic. "It's about this couple that fight and then they make up. It's about love." Smell the formaldehyde?

Well, sure it's about making up, but if that's all it was then who gives a rat's petunia? It's about me and you and us and various tugging instincts in our hearts. It courts sentimentality, but any Scrooge who isn't taken in by its darling footprint is a grinch who deserves the cave he lives in.

It's a sweet, sweet poem I hoped some of them would love and remember and someday share with some sweetheart. Lord knows it's not Eliot or Pound. We're not talking about "The Wasteland" here.

Why don't they feel it? Because poetry, like most of art itself, is basically, for them a classroom exercise. That's why.

A poem is a frog, a list of constitutional amendments, and the exact date of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Once upon a time when I taught in the city, a student of mine ran into me in the grocery store, right there at the milk cooler. "Mr. Schaap," she said, "what are you doing here?" She fully expected that when the school doors were locked, I shrunk into a gnome and slept with chalk in the blackboard's trough. Classrooms, I suppose, will always be classrooms.

No, the sky is not falling. I'm really not sure if, forty years ago, their own parents were any better at hearing the heart of a poem or story than they are, bless their souls. Maybe today, at least their parents would smile.

I just wish it wasn't so. Sweet kids are missing so much I can't teach 'em. Maybe Prof. Life will be stuck with all the heavy lifting.

Hey, just now I saw a cardinal in the tree outside.