Somehow, poetry has always served as a source of both comfort and apprehension for me – and this week’s readings helped me sort out why. When I’ve read poetry on my own, when I’ve called the tune (and the piper), it’s been great. I can kind of wander and meander through the words of a poem like W.B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming” and contemplate whatever images and meanings occur to me. In any official capacity, however (e.g., in the classroom, whether as a student or during my 10^th grade teaching practicum), I tense up a bit. I’m thinking, “What am I supposed to be seeing in this poem? What did the poet mean to say? How do I guide the students so they get out of it what they are supposed to get out of it?” Where does poetry get its power to at times intimidate readers and writers?

In the Fish piece about poem recognition, we are faced with a seemingly simple question: What the hell is a poem, anyway? In reality, it is not a simple matter but, at least for me, it has an instinctive answer. To paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart’s famous comment on pornography, poetry is hard to define, but I know it when I see it. In taking this position, I use Fish’s very interesting term, my “poetry-seeing eyes” to identify a written piece as such. I am looking for positioning of text, patterns of words and thematic elements, perhaps brevity and succinctness, etc., etc. So when I have identified and read a poem as a poem, the aforementioned challenge begins: What does it mean?

In Fish’s estimation: “Interpretation is not the art of construing but the art of constructing. Interpreters do not decode poems; they make them” (p. 271). This is a view that is at once liberating and intimidating. It is liberating because it allows us to construct meanings from poems based on our own personalities, backgrounds, experiences and knowledge; it is intimidating because that may not always be an easy proposition. Some people – students and adults alike – just want to know what a poem is about (Just tell me what it means, and then I’ll know and have that piece in my arsenal of poems I have read and “get”). When we open up the poem to subjective interpretation, we ask students to take a risk. We ask them to make connections in their own minds, and construct meaning that resonates with their own sensibilities and knowledge base. We will generally ask them to share their thoughts in a classroom environment. As Diane Middlebrook comments in the Showalter chapter, “It’s not just something you can learn on your own; poetry is best consumed in public” (p. 69). At the same time, it takes more effort on the part of the teacher, I think, because he/she is not simply imparting the meaning of the poem, but drawing that meaning from his/her students in order to construct an interpretation (perhaps many separate interpretations).