As I’ve covered in the first two posts in this series, enthusiasm and engagement should always be your starting point if it’s likely that students will lack intrinsic motivation for what you’re teaching (i.e. almost always). We do need to also teach them technical analysis skills, though, not only because these are worth shiny exam points but also because the ability to understand how writers create effects is a vital life skill, especially in this era of perpetual digital outrage-generation. This shouldn’t just start with simile-spotting, though. Technical analysis of poetry must stem from students’ emotional responses and personal engagement.
Let’s use a pithy example to illustrate this point: Duffy’s Mrs Icarus. In order to approach this poem, students first need to understand the story of Icarus – check for prior knowledge first and show/tell them the story if their understanding isn’t secure. It’s definitely worth getting them to vocalise or write down some personal responses to the story at this point, too, and encouraging sentimentality rather than cynicism or judgement.
When I teach this poem, I enjoy revealing it on the whiteboard line-by-line to see their expressions and get their thoughts about each little chunk of meaning. If you really want to take your time over this part, you could get them to guess the final line before you read it – an excellent exercise in empathy. Revealing the last line normally results in snorts or laughter from students who know the word “pillock” (less common among Gen Z/Alpha!), and then the laughter spreads across the room as they or you explain the word. Laughter is a good starting point, but even raised eyebrows will do. Either way, you want a good starting point for some entry-level What How Why questioning:
What was your reaction to the last line of the poem?
How did Duffy create that reaction?
Why has she presented a tragic Greek myth in this irreverent way?
If they can’t express a reaction, there is absolutely no point in students being able to tell you that “pillock” is a pejorative, colloquial noun or that Duffy uses a list of quantifying adjectives to build up to it. Without a sense of the effect, technical analysis is meaningless and fangless – “dry, yeastless factuality”, to quote Martel.
Students don’t need to understand everything in a poem in order to react to it. I used to love teaching Imtiaz Dharker’s Tissue for many, many reasons, not least because it’s an excellent text to get students thinking about their personal responses to powerful lines and phrases without immediately reaching for the low-hanging, C-grade fruit of just summarising the poem. It’s much easier to respond sensitively to some of the phrases and images in Tissue than it is to summarise the poem – but those emotional responses can then build into an understanding of the central messages.
Over eleven years of teaching poetry, I’ve honed my analysis framework for students into a series of transferable steps that allow them to organically build an understanding in a bottom-up (e.g. starting from a foundational personal response) rather than a top-down (e.g. feature-spotting and then trying to insert an effect) way. It isn’t rocket science, but giving students a few minutes to read the poem to themselves in silence and note down their reactions and responses is always a better starting point than asking them how much repetition they can spot. If they haven’t engaged with the text, their analysis will ultimately be hollow.
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