I couldn’t help feeling slightly annoyed by the time I got to the end of Fish’s “How to Recognize a Poem”; the article really has very little to do with poetry, and a lot more to do with metacognition and thinking about how we think; not a topic without merit, just not what I was expecting given the title. I was all ready to challenge any conclusion he made and draw on my personal experience in both the reading and crafting of poetry. I admit to a tinge of disappointment that I never really got that chance.

Ultimately, his conclusion is that you know a poem when you see one, even when it’s actually a list of author assigned to the class that met before yours. The entire point of his long-winded, albeit enlightening anecdote was that context maters far more than we assume. Our cultural norms and assumptions, our previous knowledge or “cultural literacy”, to use Bean’s terminology from last week’s reading, influence how we view a given text.

I recall trying to explain to one of my friends in high school that poetry doesn’t have to rhyme; it was a concept he struggle to grasp. For him, rhyme was one of the defining qualities of a poem. He thought he knew how to recognize a poem. The truth of the matter is, a poem is a poem because we agree it’s a poem. I accept that W.S. Merwin’s book of prose poems, “Fables” are poems because I know his other works and accept that those are poems based on the conventions of what-a-poem-is that I’ve learned from years of reading, writing, and studying poetry.

While it’s an interesting exercise to think about what the conventions are that lead a given group to “create” a text and its meaning from their previous knowledge, I’m less clear on how helpful such an exercise is as a teaching tool. It forces students to consider what those pre-conceived “obvious facts” are, but I can’t help feeling like Fish manages to slyly avoid the premise he puts forth with his title: he has not actually shown us how to recognize a poem, only the complex cognitive process that students in-the-know use to identify one when they see it. This information isn’t very helpful to students who are struggling to grasp poetry, or to anybody trying to teach them. The “I know it when I see it” argument may be completely true, but isn’t an adequate answer to someone who doesn’t necessarily know it when they see it.