Thursday
Carl Rosin, an occasional contributor to this blog, uses its philosophy in his English classrooms at Radnor High School in Radnor, PA. We enjoyed serving on a panel together at the 2019 National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) national convention in Baltimore, along with Jennifer Fletcher, Glenda Funk, and Carol Jago. Carl left a software engineering job to become a teacher and has won various local and regional awards along with PLATO’s (Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization) national high school Philosophy Teacher of the Year award for 2014-15; he also served on the National Humanities Center’s Teacher Advisory Council for 2018-2019. Since the pandemic began, he has bolstered his reading as a member of the #CanonChat group on Twitter.
By Carl Rosin, English Dept., Radnor High School, Radnor PA
“Dickinson at the top of the stanza, pivots to a new image…em-dash, slant-rhyme, and BANG she takes the lead! Oh, her pacing is exquisite!”
Nope. Poetry does not “score” that way.
Evaluation is easy in basketball, as in most sports: certain actions yield points, and if you score more points, you win. The single-elimination NCAA basketball tournaments bring the thrills because of the high level of play in both the men’s and women’s draws, with the season’s accumulations of wins and quality of those wins approximating the quality of each team, so that the best are competing. Still, upsets abound, which brings even further excitement. On a given day, a given team may outplay a “better” team, as quantified by score.
Evaluation in art is dicier. Art lacks the objective quantifiability of points scored; even the less-objective scoring systems of ice skating and gymnastics do not apply well. Great art exists, however…and if it does, some poems can be assessed as greater than others. Or can they?
My three 11th grade AP English Language & Composition sections have been skirmishing with this question. We have read over 40 great American poems so far this school year; I organized them (by unit) into a tournament draw, and the kids have been voting on them, in parallel with the NCAA’s basketball tournament action. Like many teachers of English across the country, I have been doing this for a few years, using the mode to reacquaint us with poems we read earlier and to introduce the complex, higher-order thinking skill of evaluation. And to have a little fun. Perhaps the tournament can – as competition so often does – give us some valuable information about the literature we read.
Each student votes for the one poem that they consider superior in each matchup, starting with the 32-poem draw. As if that’s easy, or even possible. Well, yes, it is, at least in theory.
Before we began, I talked about aesthetic judgment. Imagine a line, with subjective at the left edge and objective at the right. Subjectivity means taste, opinion; subjectivity is relative. Objectivity suggests measurableness, an absolute that will be perceived the same way by all viewers. I love olives and dislike prunes, and no amount of argument can convince me to alter my opinions about them, nor will my contrary argument convince you if your tastes are opposite to mine, because the subjective field is not where argument is fought. On the objective end of the line: regardless of what you think about rhyme and meter, they are either present or not.
The large grayish area between those two edges is the region about which one can make a normative claim, where evidence- and logic-based argument does hold sway. The evaluator attempts to approach the poem in a disinterested way, to assess normative claims about its values: beauty, mellifluousness, harshness, irony, drama, innovation, terror, emotional power. Disinterestedness does not exclude heart from its ultimate consideration.
Next, we practiced with Laura Gilpin’s “The Two-Headed Calf”:
Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.
But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass. And
as he stares into the sky, there are
twice as many stars as usual.
We tossed around some subjective descriptors, some objective ones, then moved on to normative claims. Gilpin’s poem, which I love (a subjective claim), is free verse in plain diction (objective), peaceful yet heartbreakingly sad (normative).
Now to the tournament. “Try to judge each contest on which is the superior poem,” I asked.
Two weeks later, our tournament, now whirling toward its conclusion, has illuminated a pattern that interests me: some students’ preference for what I might call straightforward poems over more ambiguous ones. I hadn’t thought deeply about this straightforwardness-ambiguity axis in the past. The values measured on that axis now struck me as appearing to correlate with popularity for a certain set of readers. Professor Bates recently took a swing at what might be a related topic in the arena of prose fiction. He pondered how more “lightweight” popular fiction compares to literary fiction.
The simplest aesthetic judgment we can draw is the mere assertion that some artistic products are more straightforward and some are more ambiguous. Seeking the proper terms for talking about this was an early conversation for my classes. It arose in January when we considered the work of National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman, whose inaugural poem “The Hill We Climb” is likely to remain the most memorable element of President Biden’s inauguration. Gorman, at the tender age of 22, is already an experienced occasional poet, having performed not only at the Capitol on January 20 but a few weeks later at the Super Bowl. She has mastered the venue: when one reads aloud to an audience who do not have access to the text, one’s approach must be commensurate with that context. Gorman’s approach is rooted in repetition, sound devices, wordplay, an affirmative tone, and her engaging delivery. The audience is always oriented. Her poetry epitomizes what I term straightforwardness.
Those whose definition of art assumes the predominance of complication, subtext, and openness to interpretation might think that this is a damning term. I’m not one of them. The 32 poems in our March Madness Poetry Tournament include many poems that are exquisite and relatively straightforward: “Still I Rise,” by Maya Angelou, “Gate A-4,” by Naomi Shihab Nye, and “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” by Walt Whitman spring to mind – all have been popular with the students, with “Still I Rise” one of the only two poems to make the Final Four in all three of my sections’ tournaments.
“Gate A-4” starts with a Post-9/11 shiver: the Arab-American narrator, at an airport, hears an announcement requesting help from someone who speaks Arabic. Afraid of what this might mean, she arrives at the gate to find a distraught older woman whose lack of fluency in English has led to a misunderstanding. Kindness alleviates the conflict, treats are shared, and by the end of the lovely, understated poem, a community has formed:
And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and I thought, This
is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that
gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—seemed apprehensive about
any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other
women, too.
This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.
Like the better-known “Still I Rise,” which I would argue is even more earnest and unequivocal, “Gate A-4” leads the reader easily to a stable understanding. The trajectory at the end is unmistakeably upward, with a hopeful and even didactic tone.
The tournament success of these poems, along with “The Hill We Climb,” led me to this hypothesis: for most readers, straightforwardness is a positive value, making a poem that is more readily assimilated into the reader’s mind and thus more readily remembered. For many readers, clarity is a virtue.
The psychologist and writer Maria Konnikova, author of the recent best-seller The Biggest Bluff, might agree. “Human minds don’t like uncertainty and they especially don’t like ambiguity,” she says. “Our cognitive-processing capacity is taxed beyond belief.” This poses a challenge for consumers of art, even more so for producers of art. If readers desire a psychologically satisfying experience, and that assumes a sense of closure, does that necessarily condemn ambiguous art to a niche audience? Is that akin to something that sports doesn’t do: have the players and fans leave the game with the result unclear? Or is analogizing art to sports simply unhelpful?
Straightforwardness/ambiguity indeed seems to be an axis that tells us something useful about poetry. I look back over my Norton Anthologies to dig up examples. In addition to Angelou and now Gorman, some notably straightforward poets include Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Walt Whitman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Rudyard Kipling. This does not mean that their work is devoid of complexity in theme or language or structure – a quick look at Hopkins makes that clear.
On the ambiguity side, my mind leaps to names like Emily Dickinson, Philip Larkin, Philip Levine, and Robert Hayden. Hayden’s beloved sonnet “Those Winter Sundays” comes through in the voice of a man remembering the sacrifices his fierce father made when the narrator was a child. The narrator reveals his youthful ingratitude, his memory of
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
The penultimate line echoes with regret, nearly keening in its suggestion that he recognized that ingratitude too late, missing the opportunity to make up for it. The conflict remains unresolved here, in a way that doesn’t characterize the earlier poems. That open-endedness offers a place where the moral and emotional imagination can play. It also can frustrate.
Poems that fall on the ambiguity side of the chart have also found success in this year’s tournament. Rita Dove’s “Rosa” (and her even more ambiguous poem “Demeter’s Prayer to Hades”) left its mark on the students, as has Lucille Clifton’s “i am accused of tending to the past” and (the only poem that has been as successful so far as “Still I Rise”) the recently-deceased Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “The World Is a Beautiful Place.” Wandering away from the left margin, as Ferlinghetti’s poems tend to do, it quickly dives from the optimistic title toward an unsettling undercurrent:
The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don’t mind happiness
not always being
so very much fun
if you don’t mind a touch of hell
now and then
just when everything is fine
because even in heaven
they don’t sing
all the time.
Three stanzas that take these darkly humorous turns prime the reader for them, at which point the fourth rejects this trend in a pleasant way, following through with Beatnik effervescence about “living it up.” Just as suddenly, the short fifth stanza takes a blunt shift back to how “right in the middle of it / comes the smiling / mortician.”
It would be disingenuous to suggest that the literary establishment – whatever that is – respects straightforwardness and ambiguity equally. Straightforwardness has tended to be associated with relatively neutral descriptors like “explicit” and “earnest” and decidedly negative ones like “simplistic” or “inelegant” or “clichéd.” This is the world of pop music lyrics and extremely popular poems like Kipling’s “If” and William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus.” It is often assumed to lack depth, and, indeed, many terrible poems do share some of the worst of these characteristics, especially cliché. Many would say that a robust intellectual experience requires less black-and-white, more gray.
Ambiguity may be thought to correspond to psychological vitality, intellectual complexity, and the ability to engage us, but it comes with its own perceived burdens: “inaccessible” (check out some Wallace Stevens…), “abstruse,” even “pompous.”
Many poets, perhaps even most, defy the easy dichotomy. Langston Hughes wrote nuanced classics like “The Weary Blues” and “Harlem” along with many much simpler ones. William Wordsworth, whose Preface to Literary Ballads promoted use of “a selection of language really used by man,” notable for being “plainer and more emphatic,” was famed for both the relatively straightforward “I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud” and more ambiguous pieces like “The World Is Too Much With Us.” The theme of the latter may not be hard to discern, but it ends, like Hayden’s poem does, in a minor key.
Does one or the other kind of poetry tend to win in your tournament?
What does our answer to such a question like this say about us as readers? Nothing determinative, although there are hints. Last year, my two tournaments were both won by Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays.” “Invictus” was a strong contender, but more ambiguous poems like Stevie Smith’s “Not Waving But Drowning” were equally popular. At that time, the pandemic was fresh and especially frightening; perhaps we are looking for something different as this spring rolls around. This year, Gorman and Dickinson – poets on the opposite ends of the straightforwardness graph – booted “Those Winter Sundays” in early rounds. My back-of-the-envelope tally suggests that 76% of the victories went to the more straightforward poem across our two tournament “Regions” that were comprised of a general collection of great American poems. The other two “Regions” are dedicated specifically to themes about justice and nonconformity, and in those contests only 12% of the wins went to the more straightforward poem. Does this suggest that ambiguity compels us more when certain topics are under examination? In our “Nonconformity” region, with its collection of Transcendentalists and Beats, only 1 of the 21 decisions so far have gone to the poem that seemed more straightforward.
I also consider this through my teacher-lens. Like a good coach, I should find ways to attune my students to appreciate ambiguity, which seems less common than appreciating straightforwardness is. Konnikova writes in The Biggest Bluff, “[I]f ‘less certainty, more inquiry’ is your guiding light, not only will you listen; you will adjust. You will grow” into self-awareness and self-discipline. Letting ourselves bathe comfortably in uncertainty prepares us for adapting to a world full of it. It also opens us up to the pleasures of many new artistic insights.
John Wooden, who coached the most Men’s NCAA championship teams in history, believed in poetry and found it useful in his coaching of young athletes. He loved Shakespeare, but the texts he applied ran to Rudyard Kipling and Grantland Rice, not William Carlos Williams and Gwendolyn Brooks. No coach’s pep talk springs from Natasha Trethewey’s “Southern History” or Sarah Freligh’s “Wondrous,” although those are two of the essential poems published in our current century. Meanwhile, Amanda Gorman and Maya Angelou hold fast to the public pedestal they have earned. A poetry tournament does not certify what makes a poem exceptional, but it can shine a light on what we admire and love in art.