Back in the days when I had a real job, part of it involved the attempt to teach trainee nurses how to analyse poetry. Reflecting on it now, I’m not sure how real this job was, actually. As T.S. Eliot (a poet) pointed out, “humankind cannot bear very much reality.” And English teachers, even less.
Trainee nurses, on the other hand, can withstand rather a lot of reality, it turns out. What they struggle with is the question of why I was wasting their time with stupid bloody poems. As it was politely put to me on a regular basis: “What’s the point of this, Georgina?”
It’s hard to disagree with the view that individuals who are going to spend their entire working lives caring for sick and vulnerable people probably don’t need to know the difference between a metaphor and a simile, or how to analyse a literary text about someone seeing a bull in a farmyard. And the same goes for trainee beauticians, trainee car mechanics, and even trainee agricultural engineers, although in the latter case, at least they can visualise the farmyard, which probably helps.
Indeed, so pointlessly dull were the texts on our syllabus, I often resorted to analysing other things instead. For example, we’d spend several joyous weeks studying pop music videos, because I was convinced that watching Taylor Swift standing on the back of a horse would enable students to recognise irony and synecdoche in some horrifically dense Seamus Heaney poem about his father’s shoulder blades or whatever. This worked quite well most of the time, but it did raise the awkward question of why we should even bother with poetry when we can have pop music instead. And the other awkward question persisted: how exactly is Taylor Swift supposed to help you hook an IV line up to an elderly diabetic patient? Then again, how is Seamus Heaney going to help you fix a fan belt on a Toyota Corolla? What’s the point of this, Georgina?
I tried, really I did. I regularly paced up and down the classroom, extolling the power of literature to extend our empathy, train our intuition, and bolster our spiritual well-being. The students would politely listen to my impassioned oratory and then, when at last I fell silent, someone would gently point out that this was all very well, but there’s still no need to understand three different types of irony in order to wax someone’s hoo ha.
My enthusiasm for these futile educational endeavours was sustained by rare moments such as the one provided by an adolescent drug dealer in an adult literacy class, to whom I taught the basics of haiku writing. I explained about the syllable pattern, and how the idea was to capture emotion through the observation of nature. I demonstrated how haiku contain a moment of contrast or revelation in the last line. In response, my student produced this perfect example of the form:
Rain in the carpark
I feel like I want to die
Oh look, a seagull!
But perhaps my greatest achievement in literature education was teaching several cohorts of students the word ‘defenestrate’ - a word which came up repeatedly whenever they asked what would happen if they just didn’t bother to learn about poetry at all.
The truth is, I don’t much care for poetry either. Most poems are pure cringe that should have been burned immediately before having been written, to borrow a grammatical construction from Douglas Adams, who also had quite a lot to say about poetry. I can’t help thinking of my former classroom as a sort of metaphorical Poetry Appreciation Chair, where students were strapped in and made to endure the Earth equivalent of Vogon verse:
O freddled gruntbuggly
Thy micturations are to me
As plurdled gabbleblotchits
On a lurgid bee.
“But what’s the point of it, Georgina?” They cry out, as blood streams from their ears.
At least Vogon poetry rhymes a bit, which is more than you can say for much of the Earth stuff. Of course poems don’t have to rhyme – even my most bored and disengaged students could have told you that. But if it doesn’t rhyme, how are you supposed to know it’s a poem, and not just a really long run-on sentence about fruit?
It’s funny, because when I was at sixth form college, I liked poetry enough that I wrote an entire essay for my English mock A-level in rhyming couplets, a la Alexander Pope. I can’t remember what the subject of the essay was – quite possibly simply an attempt to blind the teacher with some stylistic fireworks so he wouldn’t notice that I hadn’t actually read the text I was supposed to be wanging on about. This probably didn’t work, but I imagine it was mildly entertaining. Which, come to think of it, pretty much sums up my whole approach to poetry. And teaching. And life. Probably won’t work, but might be fun.
I did think about writing this post in rhyming couplets, too, just to be an obnoxious twat. But in the end I decided it would be just as twattish and obnoxious to share with you a poem I wrote some twenty years ago, and claim it’s better than anything Carol Ann Duffy ever managed to come up with. Strap yourself in.
MY TWEEDLEDEEDLE
My Tweedledeedle is little and feeble
I got it by chance from a chuffer named Beedle
He had shiny Wokboks and glimmering Krikes,
But I could not persuade them to travel by bike
He also had twocking and plenty of Klangs,
The kind that are frightened by clatters and bangs.
Nothing quite suitable sprang to my eye
But then from inside a mellifluous pie,
A Tweedledeedle sang.
I heard it at once and at Beedle did stare.
I said, “What is that you have hidden in there?”
Beedle looked sideways and shivered his nose
(It was then that I saw he was wearing no clothes.)
As I hurried to cover the poor naked Beedle,
From out of the pie crept a small Tweedledeedle.
It shyly crept closer and nuzzled my hand,
I noticed its beautiful Flurrupy Gland
and then
The Tweedledeedle sang.
I could not resist it, I bought it at once,
It cost me a million dollars an ounce.
In truth, this came out at about fifty pee
(My Tweedledeedle weighs less than a bee.)
I carried it home where it caused a sensation
By performing wild feats of m-multiplication.
It can count to infinity and times it by ten
And convert the equation to drachma and yen.
But what really got me, what made me a fan,
What made my poor ticker explode with a bang
Was when
My Tweedledeedle sang.
“My father’s shoulder blades / Were two dinner plates in a leather bag. / Crunchy.”
I love this! Not too long ago I burned an entire folder of my angsty teen poetry I found in a banker's box of old papers. I told my kids I did it for them. Frankly, I did it for me, because no one should be the butt of poetry jokes when they are dead and unable to defend themselves.
Great post, and your student's haiku is genius and made me laugh! You got through to someone!
What's the 'point' of any of this lark? None.
And everything.