Ars Poetica
Last Thursday night in my literature class we began our unit on poetry. I forewarned my students that poetry is my first love, and I think about ten minutes into my lecture--after I'd chained the door shut and threatened with a Taser anyone who tried to leave--they had no doubts. We started by discussing their feelings about reading poems. Most said that they saw them as difficult, irrelevant, inaccessible--and thus rarely spent much time bothering with them.
But then something kind of wonderful happened. I passed out a poem that bore neither a title nor a byline. We spent a lot of time talking about it; my students seemed to be deeply affected by the word choices and imagery. They kept asking me what it was called and who wrote it, but I insisted that they'd have to wait and see. Then we watched two video interpretations of the poem, which, as they soon discovered, was really the lyrics to a song: Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt." We watched Trent Reznor's interpretation, which showed him in his early twenties lamenting not only his own drug use but the universal capacity for "hurtfulness" inherent in human nature. The video ends on a positive note; however. It shows the decay process of a fox--in reverse. So the corpse transforms from a pile of dust, bone and fur into a fully intact, bushy-tailed fox. The redemption/resurrection symbolism is undeniably Christlike--a detail of which I'm sure Reznor was acutely aware.
After the Nine Inch Nails video, we watched Johnny Cash's version of "Hurt." He filmed it not long before he died, as an aged, ailing man. His take is much more personal, filled with references to his career, family and religious faith.
See, I told the class, poetry is all around us. It touches us in our everyday lives. Most of today's songs contains lyrics, which are nothing more than poems set to music. So, sadly enough, are advertising jingles and television theme songs. Poetry informs our experience of the world much more than most of us realize.
Students began talking about how they've both hurt others in their lives and been hurt themselves. I had an agenda that included ten more poems, but the discussion became so engrossing that we only got to three. One student spoke about how he has spent most of his life hurting himself. He's a perfectionist, he explained, and he's always viewed himself as never good enough. When he was younger, for example, he exercised obsessively. He was driven not simply by a desire for physical fitness but by a need to be "the perfect athlete." I mentioned that I could relate personally to his story. Just that week, I said, I'd been perusing old journals from high school and college. I said I was amazed--and saddened--by how preoccupied I used to be with pleasing an impossibly hard-to-please God. My perfectionism was almost pathological, especially when it reared its head in the form of anorexia. Another student interrupted me and asked, "So how did you make such a dramatic turnaround? You don't seem at all like that now." I told him that it had been a long, slow, uphill process. I'd finally learned, I said, that God--if he or she exists in any comprehensible form--was big enough to handle all of my shortcomings, my doubts, my humanity. And I stopped projecting onto God all of the impossible expectations I'd internalized from my parents, siblings, church, Bible and self. "I also have a really good support system," I added. "I have the best friends in the universe." Others chimed in with their own reflections. I was surprised by our transparency, though maybe I shouldn't have been. Poetry tends to orchestrate these things. It dunks us below the surface, mines us down to our elemental layers, joins us at the spiritual hip.
We also listened to Bruce Cockburn's "Maybe the Poet." (I know, I know, my students don't stand a chance now that I've exposed them to Mr. Cockburn. Poor suckers.) The chorus of the song asserts, Male, female, slave or free / Peaceful or disorderly / Maybe you and he will not agree / But you need him to show you new ways to see / Pay attention to the poet / You need him and you know it.
Poetry is a human necessity--even if we deny its presence in our lives. If only we'd keep our ears open. As Cockburn puts it, Maybe the voice of the spirit / In which case you'd better hear it.
But then something kind of wonderful happened. I passed out a poem that bore neither a title nor a byline. We spent a lot of time talking about it; my students seemed to be deeply affected by the word choices and imagery. They kept asking me what it was called and who wrote it, but I insisted that they'd have to wait and see. Then we watched two video interpretations of the poem, which, as they soon discovered, was really the lyrics to a song: Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt." We watched Trent Reznor's interpretation, which showed him in his early twenties lamenting not only his own drug use but the universal capacity for "hurtfulness" inherent in human nature. The video ends on a positive note; however. It shows the decay process of a fox--in reverse. So the corpse transforms from a pile of dust, bone and fur into a fully intact, bushy-tailed fox. The redemption/resurrection symbolism is undeniably Christlike--a detail of which I'm sure Reznor was acutely aware.
After the Nine Inch Nails video, we watched Johnny Cash's version of "Hurt." He filmed it not long before he died, as an aged, ailing man. His take is much more personal, filled with references to his career, family and religious faith.
See, I told the class, poetry is all around us. It touches us in our everyday lives. Most of today's songs contains lyrics, which are nothing more than poems set to music. So, sadly enough, are advertising jingles and television theme songs. Poetry informs our experience of the world much more than most of us realize.
Students began talking about how they've both hurt others in their lives and been hurt themselves. I had an agenda that included ten more poems, but the discussion became so engrossing that we only got to three. One student spoke about how he has spent most of his life hurting himself. He's a perfectionist, he explained, and he's always viewed himself as never good enough. When he was younger, for example, he exercised obsessively. He was driven not simply by a desire for physical fitness but by a need to be "the perfect athlete." I mentioned that I could relate personally to his story. Just that week, I said, I'd been perusing old journals from high school and college. I said I was amazed--and saddened--by how preoccupied I used to be with pleasing an impossibly hard-to-please God. My perfectionism was almost pathological, especially when it reared its head in the form of anorexia. Another student interrupted me and asked, "So how did you make such a dramatic turnaround? You don't seem at all like that now." I told him that it had been a long, slow, uphill process. I'd finally learned, I said, that God--if he or she exists in any comprehensible form--was big enough to handle all of my shortcomings, my doubts, my humanity. And I stopped projecting onto God all of the impossible expectations I'd internalized from my parents, siblings, church, Bible and self. "I also have a really good support system," I added. "I have the best friends in the universe." Others chimed in with their own reflections. I was surprised by our transparency, though maybe I shouldn't have been. Poetry tends to orchestrate these things. It dunks us below the surface, mines us down to our elemental layers, joins us at the spiritual hip.
We also listened to Bruce Cockburn's "Maybe the Poet." (I know, I know, my students don't stand a chance now that I've exposed them to Mr. Cockburn. Poor suckers.) The chorus of the song asserts, Male, female, slave or free / Peaceful or disorderly / Maybe you and he will not agree / But you need him to show you new ways to see / Pay attention to the poet / You need him and you know it.
Poetry is a human necessity--even if we deny its presence in our lives. If only we'd keep our ears open. As Cockburn puts it, Maybe the voice of the spirit / In which case you'd better hear it.
posted by Susan Adams Kauffman at 8:47 PM
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