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.

Each of the readings this week bounced me around between theories on how to approach and teach reading.  Showalter’s chapter on “Teaching Poetry” had me convinced that the best way to approach reading (poetry) is through emphasis on student interaction—reading aloud, making connections to one’s personal life/emotions.  Then, Rabinowitz’s “Who is Reading?” article had me scrap Showalter’s theory in favor of approaching a text armed with historical and biographical information in order to understand the “actual audience” or “authorial audience.”  By this theory, a reader cannot understand a text without understanding the precise conditions under which the intended and historic audience received the text.  Otherwise, nuances of the text will be wasted on an uninformed and modern audience.

I think this dialectic – reader response v. authorial audience – is what fascinates me most about this week’s reading.  Is it best to allow students to jump in to a text and draw personal significance?  Is this a true understanding of a text?  Or must one take the historical route to understanding a text?  Should one abandon personal emotion and its influence on comprehension?  Certainly there must be a give and take.

I can speak from experience in my teaching of high school juniors and seniors that when I frame a text in a historical context and present background information on the author, the students have an easier time of getting into the story.  For example, Camus’ The Stranger is much easier to interpret when one knows what existentialism and absurdism are.

However, asking them to read something through the theoretical lens of reader response is very difficult for them.  Some can appreciate texts for their personal and emotional connections, but given such fluid and organic guidelines terrifies the majority of the class.  The way they’ve been taught each year leading up to my class has been with an emphasis on context, searching for very specific symbols, allegories, personification, metaphors, and the list of literary devices goes on.  They’ve been conditioned to search for devices before they are allowed to (God-forbid) enjoy a text for the text’s sake.

To bring back the enjoyment of reading poetry, Showalter says teaching must “select from a fuller range of [texts], and we should present them in a way that encourages readers to connect the poems to their lives” (64). In this way, the text becomes “most directly meaningful to them” (64). I like this idea, but it is a struggle to fit this into a curriculum so driven by standardized tests and checking off the boxes.  Where does reading for personal meaning fit in?

Rabinowitz also comments that there are “multitiered” models of reading and the reader will engage in different strategies based on the purpose for the reading (20).  I think this is important to remember.  As a teacher, I must emphasize that different assignments dictate a different approach to the reading.  I know the Virginia SOL tests are moving in this direction with their new emphasis on non-fiction texts.  With that genre, there are clear purposes for each text and a student must learn to adjust to each.