Perfecting attention – The case for poetry

Where poetry goes to die

When people listen to a song they do not feel obliged to respond with an attempt to paraphrase the song’s meaning or solve it like a crossword puzzle. A few phrases undoubtedly stick in the mind but they are rarely interrogated for a coherent meaning. Undoubtedly the words do mean something, but as well as thoughts they leave us with at least as many feelings. Like music, poetry is an auditory experience. Poetry has for some students become so difficult that it has become opaque. Examination boards want proof that the student and the poet have made meaningful contact. The meaningfulness of that contact cannot be found in the answers at the back of the study guide or the collection of poems. The American poet, Billy Collins, said that: ‘High School…is all too often the place where poetry goes to die.’ Exams simply require an understanding of a poem’s concepts and techniques and have unwittingly turned poetry into ‘a field of barbed wire that students must crawl under’. Hence many encounters with poetry in the classroom have become about paraphrasing. And when the paraphrase proves elusive students give up and mumble that familiar refrain: ‘This is boring.’  

Moments caught between heartbeats

To be clear, trying to articulate ‘meaning’ is no bad thing, just that it ought to be just one of the pleasures of reading poetry – alongside experiencing its sounds, metre, and metaphors. The Robin Williams character, John Keating, in Dead Poets Society says this: ‘We don’t read poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine. And law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.’

Neither does poetry offer solutions. When an Oxford schoolgirl (in Kate Clanchy’s, England Poems from a School anthology) writes: ‘I know what it’s like to only half- understand the words people say, to half-belong in a room. I know what it is to be in between’ – or when a migrant boy says of his lost father, ‘This is the only place you are allowed to be/In this poem’ they are not expecting the process of writing poetry to offer answers – interpret their lives for them – they are engaging their thoughts and their emotions with experience and memory. What they write might have been prompted by their experiences as migrants – or it could just as easily have been wrenched from the whole business of growing up. Poems are a process, Kate Clanchy says, that allow the writers (and readers) to ‘become more than themselves’.

Louis MacNeice’s poem, ‘Snow’ describes a moment when the poet suddenly becomes aware that both he and the world he lives in is, ‘more than himself’ and ‘incorrigibly plural‘ and he relishes ‘the drunkenness of things being various.’ When asked to describe the genesis of this poem, MacNeice believed the experience was ‘a sudden and intense realisation of the obvious’. For him, the world is not just diverse and plural, it is enigmatic. ‘There are moments caught between heartbeats’ he says in his poem ‘Coda’, ‘When maybe we know each other better’. This is what poetry is exactly, moments caught between heartbeats when we suddenly know. 

The cultivation of instinct

It has become normalised to expect that engaging with a poem means ‘translating’ it. Certainly, it is what an examination paper seems to be asking of students. It appears to the student that their task is to show that they understand what a poem is saying and how it is saying it. The danger in this approach is that the student’s awareness of ‘the otherness of things’ is side-lined. Poets like Keats, and Shakespeare, were interested in the ‘burden of mystery’. They acknowledge that there is no single version of the truth. Flexibility and openness are what matter. 

That phrase ‘the otherness of things’ comes from Christopher Middleton. He believes that is what the student ought to touch and feel in a poem. Ignore that possibility and there is unlikely to be any ‘real intellectual transformation, no real structuring refinement of sensibility, no cultivation of instinct’ – merely a return to existing frames of reference. If the criteria of classroom practice and examination demands fail to ‘identify what they cannot measure, and so fail to achieve intelligent contact with the other reality, (offered by poetry) then those criteria are wrong for the educational process.’ Or, as Clive James says, poetry is often foisted on young people by those who want poems to be taught rather than remembered. The poet, he says, does not really need an examination syllabus to mediate between the poem and the student.

Sean O’Brien would almost certainly agree. He calls Middleton’s words, a ‘decisive argument’ to support his certainty that poetry has much more to offer than entertainment or easy accessibility. Poetry should offer: ‘…enlightenment, a sense of wonder, a clarification of feelings, and extension to the map of experience – of which the audience is not already in complete possession.’ It should ‘touch the soul’ in the same way as music can, or a film from earlier times. 

Exploring our linguistic universe

Poems, like songs, have what Seamus Heaney calls a ‘rhythmic and phonetic power’. They arrive ‘at the intellect/ by way of the heart’ (R.S. Thomas). The American poet, Elizabeth Bishop puts it like this: a poem’s ‘images and the music of the lines are primary. If we comprehended the sound, eventually we would understand the sense…One did not interpret poetry, one experiences it.’ Ruth Padel would say that this is about understanding how the words in a poem speak to each other forming a persuasive cohesion or as Alexander Pope put it: ‘The sound must seem an echo to the sense.’

Engaging the intellect and the heart are not two mutually exclusive aims. One informs the other and together they create what Seamus Heaney calls a fluid movement between the reader’s innermost mind and what they think about on the surface. The surface shows us craft and technique. Identifying and naming techniques adds to the student’s linguistic universe. It expands their terms of reference and furnishes them with the means to engage in meaningful conversations about a poem’s impact. At the same time, of course, those encounters feed their emotional universe.

Middleton and O’Brien probably come closest to what we feel about the importance of finding a way forward when a poem seems to leave you with nothing more to say, nor any other way of saying it. Neil Astley gives us a way to go: ‘Just as you listen to songs – or sing them – again and again, so poems need to be read, re-read, read out loud and read again.’

How poetry ‘perfects attention’

Meaningfulness comes through the perfecting and crafting of the reader’s attention, through an openness to allowing poems, ‘…  into the mind through a side entrance’ (Clive James again). This usually happens when they are said aloud, or when they roll around in the mind – often of their own accord. 

Louis MacNeice called this the way ‘gimlets of memory’ can sneak in to ease the difficulties of a vicarious and confusing life. In his 1961 poem, ‘Round the Corner’ he writes about, ‘Our childhood/Tipping the sand from its shoes …’ and how such memories reassure us that there is more ‘Seaweed to pop, and horizon to blink at’. They encourage us to believe that, even in our present life, however stressful, ‘Round the corner is – sooner or later –is the sea.’ Understanding or even redemption is waiting to happen – almost within reach. Just like a line from a song or a phrase from a poem. 

We have to believe that understanding difficult poems might be about to happen, knowledge might be about to connect with other knowledge, and the poem might inform the life of the reader. We have to believe that frustration with a difficult or elusive poem might become a ‘productive’ frustration. The poem, and the reader’s dialogue with that poem, might reveal as it did for MacNeice, ‘questions I was not fully aware I had asked’. Ambiguity, elusiveness, struggling to understand are in themselves, experiences which can show an answer: ‘on a plane just a shade above or below our own or just round the corner, so near and yet so far in fact, lies somewhere that might make sense of our past and our future and so redeem our present.^’

In short, the poem, or a line from the poem, gets into our head long before we really know what that line is saying – just as all those nursery rhymes did when we were little. We did not have a clue what they meant, we simply delighted in saying them over and over and over again. We craft perfected attention through repetition, and through a dialogue with a writer who is, ‘… a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand had come out and taken yours.’ (Alan Bennett) As John Berger puts it, ‘The relationship between what we see and what we know is never settled.’

If you are interested in the ideas in this article you can find more detail in Redefining English for the More Able by Ian Warwick and Ray Speakman. Routledge 2018