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Home > Features > Dancing with Poetry
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Dancing with Poetry
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by Ellen , Greenblatt
University High School
San Francisco , California
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| | Folding Sheets
Recently, when I invited several English teachers at a workshop to find a partner and stand facing each other, they were a bit mystified. "Are we going to dance?" joked an older man. "Maybe," I responded, "but first let's fold some sheets." When they stood up, willing to play, to be adventurous, to take a chance, I knew they were ready to dance their way into poetry by way of a quietly intimate sonnet by Seamus Heaney.
"Imagine that you've taken a sheet from the dryer or from off the line. Now, please fold it," I said. I then watched as the pairs negotiated whether to go horizontal or vertical, left or right. There was a lot of laughing and good-natured ribbing as they stumbled through the task. But as they proceeded, their movements became smoother, and everyone ended up standing close to the partners they might not have known before, with their virtual sheets neatly folded.
So it is with reading poetry, if all is going well. We encounter the poem, and, if we're lucky, we might have someone to read it to or who will read it to us. If we're teachers, we will have our students read the words aloud, and if we can't resist, we'll read them aloud too. At first, especially if we are unaccustomed to reading poetry, we won't know how to proceed. We'll flounder a bit and lurch over words whose meanings or connotations are unfamiliar. We'll wonder if we're missing something, whether we should stop at the end of a line or only where there is punctuation. But we'll make it to the end. And the next time we read this poem or another one, we'll have gained a bit of confidence. We'll have been there before.
Haggling with Language
Reading a poem involves haggling with language, with form and function, with metaphors, and maybe with rhyme and rhythm. But there is something mesmerizing about the choreography between a poem and a reader. Fans of hip-hop and spoken word poetry know how viscerally the power of the words involves our whole bodies and minds. After all, hip-hop and spoken word artists dance to the sound of their own words, and, when they're good, they get us moving too. We can resist, of course, but many of us choose to accept the enticement.
When we're not worried about getting the interpretation "right" (something that we only worry about when we're in school, as if there were just one "right" interpretation), we can find our feet more easily. We embrace the adventure and playfulness that the relatively few words of a poem offer us. It's not surprising that former poet laureate Robert Pinsky's invitation to participate in his "Favorite Poem Project" proved irresistible to people from all segments of society. Listening to several readers of the same poem on the Favorite Poem Project Web site allows us to witness fresh responses and throws open the doors to meaning and interpretation.
Discovering Clearances
When my sheet-folding group encountered Sonnet #5 from Clearances by Seamus Heaney (a link to the poem is in "More" below), they exclaimed, "We get what you've been up to!" But though the sonnet is about folding sheets, as with all good poetry and good writing, there's more to it. When the speaker observes, So we'd stretch and fold and end up hand to hand
For a split second as if nothing had happened he's right. Nothing has happened as they are folding the sheets that had not always happened
Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go,
Coming close again by holding back. Is the poem about lovers? Is there tension, wondered my group? Maybe it's about a mother and son, conjecture a few. Maybe it doesn't matter, said others. Maybe what's important is the feeling of familiarity it evokes with its silken rhythms and down-to-earth resonant images. Only after some discussion do I tell them that Heaney wrote the sonnet about his mother after her death. They can see that it, like other sonnets in Clearances, reads like the love poem it is.
The tension and intimacy conjured by the most banal of tasks, folding sheets together, is what the speaker remembers, even as he "pull[s] against her." And so we dance, in our groups of teachers and students, first with the sheets, and then with the words of the poem and the memories of intimacy it conjures in our own minds.
The Mystery of Poetry
In an essay entitled, "Are You Doing Any Poetry with Them?" in The American Scholar in the fall of 2001, Heaney reflects on his first years as a teacher in the early 1960s, "in front of a class of disaffected adolescent boys, many of whom would end up a decade later as active members of the Provisional IRA. There was plenty to make them shy away from poetry: peer pressure, the macho conventions of the playground, a working-class unease in face of anything that smacked of middle-class pretension -- but even so, the mystery of the thing interested them."
It still interests them, students and others, that is, and if we invite them to read and write with us, they will come to the party, and they will dance.
Please note: The first line of Sonnet 5 in the link below should read: "The cool that came off sheets just off the line".
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