They Say Breakfast Is The Most Important Meal Of The Day, And They’re Right

After many years of arduous study and thought, I’ve decided I know very little about poetry. I write poetry, but that hasn’t been much help. When I write, it seems that the words just come out and either make a poem or make something that is clearly not a poem. Worse still, I can never tell which is which. Sometimes, I’ll send a poem to my editor, and she’ll write back, “This is not a poem.” I’m never sure why, but so far, I trust her opinions.

My only fear is that she may be one of those people who see poetry as requiring some strange conglomeration of symbols or imagery, in which an apple is not really an apple.

I confess that I don’t know anything about symbols or images. Well, I know that if you’re driving and there’s a red light up in the upper area of your windshield, then it’s a good bet you should stop your car at the intersection. The symbols of our every day life are pretty simplistic, but when I read a poem, and a line states something like, “My heart is a red stoplight,” then I have no idea. Maybe the poet’s heart has stopped.

Actually, it doesn’t matter that much to me what the poet means. I might have written: “My heart is an artichoke,” but that would have confused everyone since I don’t think anyone has ever defined the symbology of the artichoke. And maybe that's the point. Too often we rely on how others have defined the meaning of things. We are taught to respect that a “rose” is a symbol of love. We are taught to imagine that “night” is dark and that “dark” is foreboding. We are taught to approach poetry in a standardized way, to look for the hidden and yet somehow obvious meaning. The way I see it, such an approach is pretty redundant these days. When stodgy old Northrop Frye convinced the world that literature was based on the use of archetypes, those sort of primeval, super-symbols, I went into hiding for years. I shudder when I think that some teachers of fine literature actually believe that there’s a definitive “meaning” to a poem. It’s not a quiz, a puzzle, an enigma, or anything of the sort. If you say to a class, “Today, we’re going to figure out the meaning of E J Pratt’s “Erosion,” then my question would be, “Will our ‘figuring out’ be the same tomorrow?”

From day to day, a person’s experiences change. So, from day to day, we come at life from a somewhat different angle. I used to tell my students that you’re only as good as your choice of breakfast. What I meant by that was that your entire day is, in a strange way, programmed for you from the moment you wake up. If, for example, it’s a rainy day, then some people automatically switch into gloomy mode. Others may have a different perspective and find great joy in the rain. For teachers, the best weather is in the dead of January when a deluge of snow has piled up across the roads, and Kevin Frankish is assuring them that, “All schools are closed.” Such news is met with a sudden euphoria. Couples smile at one another in an odd kind of way, and slip back into bed. Others fire up the car anyway, and head for Wal-Mart. Conversely, when that master of suspenders says, “Buses are cancelled, but the schools remain open,” then teachers have been known to gnash their teeth and curse the board administrative assistants who decide that it’s unsafe for a giant school bus to travel icy roads, but you’ll be okay in your tiny 1999 Kia, so you’d better get to work. Of course, it’s not always a factor of the weather. If you wake up to the sight of your goldfish swimming upside down in its bowl, then that sad event will have an effect on the rest of your day. If you wake up and your mother, brother, husband, wife, or partner is in the backyard screaming at the squirrels to “Shut the heck up,” then that might have an effect on your day as well. Hey, some days are better than others. Some days, everything we experience seems fabulous; other days, it’s not so good.

The point is that we all bring to a poem a certain amount of baggage. Our travel kit might be immediate or long-term, light or heavy in weight. When I was a student, I remember a teacher going laboriously through Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle.” He did a fairly good job, I guess, but my mother had died the summer before, and the teacher’s insistence that death must be fought against, as if it were some insane heavyweight wrestler grappling with every near-dead body in the arena of mortality, brought on waves of sadness. My mother had not fought the great fight, and for some reason, I felt ashamed for her, for me, and for my entire family. For that particular poem, I brought a pretty hefty load of baggage. In the next few days, the same teacher hauled out Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop For Death.” In that poem, I saw something completely different, and I imagined that the Dickinson poem probably reflected just how my mother might have truly felt before she passed.

The truth of the matter is that the poems never change, but the audience is this fluid, unpredictable assortment of different experiences. I never quite understood how anyone could expect thirty or more students to sit in a classroom and “appreciate” or “understand” or “interpret” poetry. It seems absurd. You’re standing in front of thirty or more different breakfasts, thirty of more different baggage cars. How can even the profoundest manipulation bring all those minds to one conclusion? You can’t, and really, you don’t, despite the illusion of sometimes having done so – something that I contend is a result of the Chameleon Factor.

Through my career, I began to notice a strange phenomenon evolving as we approached the 21^st century. Students would march into my English classroom, and “shift” into English student mode. It was as if they were suddenly predisposed to act and talk a certain way, just because this was an English class. I suspected, at first, that this behaviour was some weird adaptation of the species. I wondered if some Darwinian pattern of survival was emerging, some process by which students were like chameleons that have an amazing ability to blend into their surroundings. Were these young men and women in my classroom capable of a similar behaviour? Were they, while in my classroom, in some kind of English Student Mode (ESM), and then in an hour from now, in Mathematics Student Mode (MSM), and then in another hour in Science Student Mode (SSM)? The thought of such an ability to undergo four or five of these transformations in a day is scary. And yet, there it was, happening before my very eyes.

The experience brought me to the conclusion that what we are really teaching students — despite all our impressive course outlines and our belief in learning outcomes or “big meanings” — is to accommodate a teacher. Perhaps our motto should be: “Aim to please.”

What if these same young men and women approach poetry in a like manner? What if they believe that it doesn’t matter so much what they think, as it does matter that they get the right interpretation? What is a “right interpretation”? After we parse out all the similes, metaphors and personifications, after we examine the diction, the denotation, and the connotation, after we examine the syntax, the rhythm, and the rhyme, are we assured that we will get a “right interpretation”? I suspect not. If there is meaning to poetry, it must be in the reflection it provides its reader. If poetry says anything at all, it says, “Here is something about life.” The rest of what the reader feels is as unique as his or her life experiences. Some will see in the poem something about their lives; some will see nothing but a jumble of strange word combinations. It doesn’t matter one way or the other. What is important is that we, as teachers, don’t bring our preconceived, and dare I say, ill-conceived notions about poetry into a classroom and expect sixteen-year-old students to be able to see what we expect them to see. Yes, your students will accommodate you because they want a good grade, but you will be doing them a lifelong disservice. Instead of helping them see what you see, help them to see what they see.

In my final few years of teaching, I would actually have many students say to me, “Tell me what you want,” and my answer was always the same: “Tell me what you had for breakfast.”