Time for Poems
Poetry draws attention to its form besides its content. Poetic appreciation, thus, is not appreciation merely of an idea, a meaning, but of the symptoms we call ‘language’. Caught unawares with language teaching on some days, I struggled with negotiating this aspect of poetry with my students. We are seldom taught to criticise poems outside of their aggregate parts—a rhyme scheme worth one mark, some figures of speech worth a few more—and the poet’s intention, so few children think of poetry as deep, beckoning, enlivening.
When teaching language, however, I returned to this negotiation occasionally, although in different ways. I remember two instances distinctly.
Memory and its Uses
In an evening school setup, students often presented poems to the entire century-strong assembly, its members spanning grades three to twelve. There, the youngest eight-year olds to their decade-older contemporaries had conspired to strip poetry down to its meanings, often to its morals. Part of this obsession was our fault: we rarely extended conversations around literature in ways that would expand the horizons around the children rather than constraining them. The world outside was represented only in measured, intended, performative terms. When Tagore wrote, “Where education is free”, they conceived freedom in the techno-supremacist ways in which we (engineers) volunteers considered it. Nature and women in poems became familiar issues of ecological and domestic categorization that we expected them to be privy to. Poetry was exhausting: one could just cut the middleman and get straight to the content, the moral, the intention.
Once, the children protested that they should be excused from memorising the poems to present them. Before such views were aired, our policy on poems was a complex beast. First, we prescribed that each student present a poem at least twice a year. Second, we prescribed that they learn the poem ‘by heart’, with a maximum of two peeks into their books. Third, we evaluated whether they could complete this carefully orchestrated task—children passed if the memory to peeks ratio was adequate.
Children, of course, are smart. They picked small, familiar poems forcing us to proscribe grade-indexed small poems and familiarity-indexed diversity in poems. The regular volunteers were soon initiated into effecting these rules; we sat with open registers and awarded letter assessments. Soon, the assembly was a zone of superficial assessment. It was sheer madness, zero sense.
Thus, when the Grade 12 children protested, we were invested in this system. I was moderating the assembly that day. The children asked, “Why do we need to memorise poems? Is it not enough that we bring across its meaning?” Some volunteers pitched the same idea; we were soon arguing whether poetry was reducible to its content. I touted an inarticulate distinction between poetry and prose, emphasising the absurd idea that memorisation was somehow linked with this difference. The debate happened on uncommon, unshared grounds.
Finally, chafed by the endlessness of the conversation, I dictated, “You have made a suggestion. We will see about it.” We didn’t. Nowhere in this process were student concerns addressed or a path negotiated. All we had done was give them a reason to be frustrated with an irrational system legitimised, and poetry further vilified. The poems that were still memorised found the children even more distant than they were before.
This was before I learnt to acknowledge student opinions.
Time for Haikus
Half a decade later, I was teaching R, who struggled with the words and confidence for conversations that he wanted to have. His vocabulary worried his parents; I was more concerned about his association with language. “Will he pick up a book by himself?”, “Will he initiate something interesting in parlours?” were questions that I was driven by. His school syllabus initiated him to poetry; I used it to cover some rhythmic pieces before arriving at haikus.
A haiku is a poem written in three lines, with a 5–7–5 syllable pattern. While there is more to its construction, we restricted ourselves to counting syllables. I thought that I could induce him to the concept of change or surprise in a haiku using some templates that I had whipped up the night before. I asked him to come up with interesting adjectives and nouns to fill in the blanks.
Here was the first template:
I see a ______ ______
______ in my living room.
There is a ______ too.
I gave him an example, an uninteresting one on purpose:
I see wooden chairs
Sitting in my living room.
There are tables too.
Then, with some support, he came up with the rest. I will leave it to you to figure out whether any of this is poetry—does it invite closer inspection? Also, one of these is mine; can you spot it?
I see tall cupboards
Frozen in my living room.
There are spiders too.
I see broken walls
Standing in my living room.
There is a door too.
I see plastic toys
Playing in my living room.
There is a bag too.
I see few paintings
Painting in my living room.
There are photos too.
I see a clubhouse
Staring at my apartment.
There are villas too.
Here was the next template:
A ______ ______
Like a ______ ______ ______
______ ______ ______
Here is my insanely complicated example:
A ferry sailing,
Like a tiger’s paw closing
Around two small rats.
And here again are his pieces, with one of mine lurking somewhere. Can you spot it?
Scary principals,
Like six giant sea monsters
Hunting small starfish.
Five naughty children,
Like monkeys stealing apples
With secret fingers.
A massive garden,
Like an apartment in France
Filled with cupcake thieves.
An old library,
Like wrinkles on grandma’s face
Deepening with age.
An auditorium,
Like the Great Wall of China
Inviting tourists.
We learn, in our programme, that children often become apprentices to their elders, turning in work much advanced for their levels. R’s homework assignment, turned in the next day, was:
Do you like cookies?
I like chocolate cookies.
Cookies are yummy.
These were lines written from what a teacher once called one’s individual space of writing. R retreats to the syllable count as the sole feature of a haiku, conserving resources to focus on getting that aspect right. What is lost is the inarticulate spontaneity, surprise and silliness of the poems that we drafted from what the teacher would have perhaps called a shared space for writing. There is something different in these two spaces, something which is lost in evaluating students for memory, or technique or the millions of other parts that we imagine poetry consists of.
These memories are distinct in the one sense that I criticise the former and appraise the latter. They are also distinct in the way the teacher positions themselves. In the first scenario, the rules are set by the teacher: “What constitutes a poem? Why, a system of lines almost committed to memory, and broadcast to others in a shared space.” The poem there is an imitation; our association with it a task of copying it perfectly. In the second case, the rules subject the teacher as much as the student: “What constitutes a poem? Well, whatever we come up with collectively, working together to synthesise meaning for ourselves given a constraint of form.” The poem here is a creation, our association with it that of shared ownership.
Children, I understand now, appreciate these differences more than we give them credit for.
