Reading a Poem

by Carol Brown Dodson

How should students read a poem? Should they open their minds to interpretations that might not agree with those of their teacher? Should they read the poem the way they read a paragraph in a history book? Should they check the punctuation and try to read sentence to sentence in the poem? Should the readers analyze the poem critically?

As a teacher of poetry, you might feel as if you are stepping between two distinct methodologies for teaching poetry. To think about your teaching method, consider the following questions. Do you expect your students to give a right or wrong answer when you ask them a question, or do you encourage open and unlimited discussion? What is it that adults talk about when they read and share a poem? How can you encourage students to think beyond the words of the poem and yet respond correctly to questions on the OGT? How do you instill in your students a love of poetry?

Each time a new group of tenth graders takes the Ohio Graduation Test, students anxiously open the test booklet and look at the passages, expecting to see an informational article or a narrative. Nearly every year, however, the OGT includes a poem as one of the passages. And each time they confront a poem on the test, students have difficulty answering some of the questions that stem from the poem.

Imagine yourself as a tenth grader in the scenario below.

The teacher distributes the reading tests and reads the directions aloud. When told to do so, students open their test booklets to the OGT reading section. One student exhales with relief as she answers one question and goes on to the next question. She carefully marks the correct answers and writes responses to short-answer and extended-response questions. She is confident that she understands the excerpt from a short story. She knows she understands the informational passage about technology. She's sure she answered nearly every question correctly. Then she turns the page to go to the next passage.

"Oh, no! Not poetry," the tenth grader exclaims to herself as she scans the poem quickly. She moves on to the first question about the poem and struggles to find the answer in the poem. She is sure the answer isn't there. She finally guesses at the correct response. As she peruses the other questions about the same poem, she is confused. Panic sets in, and she's afraid she might cry. She leaves the remaining questions blank, closes her test booklet, and puts her head on the desk, knowing that she missed several questions and that she might not pass her graduation test.
 

Testing Students on Poetry

The March 2005 test contained one passage that consisted of the poem titled "My Desk." A particularly troubling multiple-choice question assessed students on literary text, Benchmark C: "Identify the structural elements of the plot and explain how an author develops conflicts and plot to pace the events in literary text." The question is focused on the father's reluctance to refinish the desk for his daughter.

The multiple-choice question appears to be straightforward, but only 55 percent of the students responding to this question chose response B, the only correct response. In order to answer this question correctly, students needed to read the poem carefully so that they might understand the plot and thus infer the reasons for the father's reluctance.

Consider again the scenario of the girl who is stymied by the poem included in the OGT. Her first mistake occurred when she read through the poem quickly and then went on to the questions. Students should take as long to read a short poem as they take to read a short story. A single reading is usually inadequate. Instead, students should spend part of their time engaged in multiple readings of the verse. Ideally, one or two of the readings should consist of reading the poem aloud, but this is not possible in a test-taking situation. However, a student who has had frequent experiences with reading poetry aloud and silently and listening to an expert reader, often the teacher, read poetry to the class is frequently able to "hear" the words and rhythm of the poem while reading it silently.

Another effective strategy for the student is to reread parts of the poem while considering each potential answer in the question. In the question about "The Desk," the student, upon a more careful consideration of parts of the poem, will discover that nothing in the poem indicates that the father is stubborn and unwilling to change, nor is there any support for concluding that the father longs for a son to pass the desk on to. Although refinishing the desk implies working hard, nothing in the text suggests the father's frustration with the task. Even for students who might not be certain of the meaning of legacy, response B is the only possibility remaining.

Even though some students had difficulty, many of them nevertheless performed better on the questions about "My Desk" than students who responded to a different poem in March 2006. "We're All in the Telephone Book," a poem by Langston Hughes, provided the stimulus for five questions on that test. Students' performance was low on two of the five questions which dealt with the poem. For the question below, only 24 percent of the students responding selected the correct answer, C. Another 56 percent chose D.

One way to improve student performance on questions that stem from a poem is to help students overcome their fear of and their aversion to poetry. Poetry frequently gets pushed into a single unit that may consist of some classic poets loved by their teachers and easily accessible in the literature textbooks. Often, the language of the poetry being studied is not the language of the students. In addition, many standard lessons for teaching poetry include an analysis that is so thorough as to destroy the beauty or the meaning or the poetry. The use of Nancie Atwell's technique for the daily teaching of poetry is likely to accomplish both goals: to improve student performance and to help students overcome their fear of and aversion to poetry.

Nancie Atwell, in A Poem a Day: A Guide to Naming the World (Firsthand, Portsmouth, NH, 2006), recommends using a poem a day for students and offers powerful suggestions for using poetry in teaching reading and literature. Atwell reminds us that "for students who aren't strong readers yet, the daily poem becomes their entr�e to literary discussion." She also states that teaching poetry teaches students about "good writing, about critical reading, about the kind of adults they wish to become and the kind of world they hope to inhabit." Atwell's approach of providing poetry each day gives students access to many forms of poetry. Furthermore, learners who read poetry daily as part of their learning experiences are not likely to freeze when they see a poem in a high-stakes testing situation.
 

Teaching Poetry to Students

There are many ways to teach poetry, and each textbook offers suggestions for doing so. Nancie Atwell, however, offers a slightly different approach. She introduces a poem, distributes copies, and asks students to follow along as she reads it aloud. Atwell emphasizes that she rehearses the reading prior to class, marking up copies to guide her stresses and breaths so she can let her students "be able to ride on my voice into the world of the poem and to observe how an adult reader makes sense of verse and derives pleasure from it."

Following the initial reading of the poem to the class, Atwell asks her students to read the poem independently and mark it up by underlining what they think is important or worthy of discussion. She also marks up her own copy in a similar fashion. In addition, Atwell takes advantage of the opportunity to explore the writer's craft with her students.

Albert B. Somers, in his book Teaching Poetry in High School (NCTE, 1999, Urbana, IL), offers another approach to teaching poetry. His approach is more concrete and more traditional than that used by Atwell, but it is equally effective as a way to bring the students into the poetry without intimidating them. Within the guidelines he sets forth for teaching poetry in high school, Somers advocates that in the early discussion of a poem, teachers should ask who the speaker is when appropriate for the poem being introduced. This point is particularly important in dealing with poems on a test. Students frequently mix up the poet with the speaker, and thus may mistake questions about the speaker's point of view or attitude with that of the poet. Recognizing who is doing the speaking is often critical to understanding the poem. Just as he recommends identifying the speaker early in the discussion, Somers also recommends that teachers avoid some fairly standard questions until much later in the discussion or even avoid them altogether. These questions include "What does it mean?' and "Did you like the poem?"

Albert Somers recommends devising questions about a poem in such a way as to shape but not limit discussion. He suggests sequencing questions to follow the progression of the poem from beginning to end. In the case of "My Desk," Somers might recommend the following sequence of questions:

1. Who is the speaker? (Is the speaker male or female, child or adult? Could the speaker be the poet?)
2. Who is being addressed in the poem?
3. What is happening in the poem?
4. What is the speaker's reaction to the desk and the story being told? Is the speaker objective or emotional?
5. How does the speaker feel about the desk?
6. What causes the speaker to cry in stanza 6?
7. What was the meaning of the desk in the speaker's life (see especially stanzas 8—10)?
8. Explain the meaning of the last line of the poem: "and paint it to match your bright green and lavender dreams."

Additional questions may be added to this list, but it's always important to remind students of both the story and the language of the poem being read. The discussion questions above are not intended to be used as questions for homework or written response on a worksheet, but rather to stimulate discussion that goes beyond the questions about the meaning of the poem and about what students like about a poem.

The following advice from Dr. Andrew Higgins about reading poetry appears on the website of the Department of English and Humanities at Louisiana Tech. His handout, "How to Read Poetry When Your Teacher Assigns It for Homework," offers these eleven basic steps:

Step 1: Read through the poem to get a sense of it.
Step 2: Identify the sentences and independent clauses (circle the periods, exclamation points, question marks, and semicolons). For some reason, people always forget that poetry is made up of complete sentences.
Step 3: Read a few lines to figure out the meter (figure out how many stresses there are in a typical line).
Step 4: Note the rhyme scheme (look for a pattern).
Step 5: Read the poem out loud. Try to follow the rhythm. If you do this you'll hear where the poet plays with the rhythm. And you'll hear the rhyme scheme.
Step 6: Look up any words you don't understand.
Step 7: Re-read the poem out loud.
Step 8: Mark off any sections in the poem. These sections may be speeches given by a character, discussions of a particular topic, changes in mood, or a new stage of an argument.  
Step 9: Re-read the poem.
Step 10: Figure out the tone―the emotion―of the poem.
Step 11: Re-read the poem.

Downloaded January 15, 2007, from http://garts.latech.edu/owl/literature/poetryguide.htm#whatpoetry.

You'll notice that five of the eleven steps instruct students to read or reread the poem. After completing the eleven steps recommended by Higgins, students will most likely be aware of what the poem says and where it changes meaning, tone, sound, or rhythm.

The Department of English and American Studies, University of Maribor, offers the following advice for its students who are expected to read poetry:

Remember that poetry is a completely different medium from prose or fiction. It has a language of its own, usually highly compressed and figurative.... Don't be discouraged if you don't feel you understand a poem after a single reading; some require many readings.

Downloaded January 15, 2007, from http://www.pfmb.uni-mb.si/eng/dept/eng/poetry/text/reading.htm.

Michael Gamer of the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania recommends six features of a poem for students to consider, but the three features below are particularly important for high school students:

Tone or voice: How would you describe the poet's "voice" in the poem? Is the poet speaking in a character? In a sense, all writers speak in a character, so even if you feel that the voice in the poem is the poet's own voice, it is still worthwhile to see what the tone of the poem is. Is the poet speaking in a "public" way, or in a private and personal way? Does the poet assume that s/he is speaking for all people, or is the purpose of the poem to communicate a single, special way of seeing something?

Metaphors and images: Make a mental list of the images that the poet piles up in the poem. Sometimes, it's not what the poet says that is interesting so much as the images that they use to set up their way of looking at the world.... In your poem, how would you describe the poet's use of images?

Structure: Like essays, poems are made up of pieces―Each line is a piece: are there places where the line breaks of the poem add to your experience of it?―Each stanza or couplet is a piece: are there places where individual stanzas are interesting, wonderful, or meaningful in themselves?―If this is a longer poem, you should read it as made up of shorter poems put together. How has the poet structured the smaller parts of the poem? What do they add up to?
 
Downloaded January 3, 2007, from http://www.english.upenn.edu/~mgamer/Teaching/Handouts/readingpoetry.html. (Used with permission.)
 

Resources for Teaching Poetry

Many rich lessons and other resources for teaching poetry are available on the ORC website. Some of them follow, but by using the search engines of ORC, you'll find additional great poetry resources.

Discovering a Passion for Poetry with Langston Hughes

After analyzing examples of contemporary youth poetry as well as the poetry of Langston Hughes, students use the Internet to conduct research on how events in the world shaped Hughes's work. They cite specific examples, showing the link between their interpretations of the poem and the sociohistorical context in which the work was written. Finally, each student creates an original poem that communicates a personal view on a current world issue. Links and references for instructors are available at the website. The interactive timeline included in this lesson is especially useful as students search for the historical events that occurred during the time Hughes published his poetry. A particularly useful timeline for studying Langston Hughes, his life, and historical events may be found in Teaching Cora Unashamed, another ORC lesson about Hughes. (author/ncl/cbd)

The content resources referenced below support Nancie Atwell's recommendations for teaching a poem a day. The website gives quick, easy access to contemporary and traditional poetry.

Poetry 180: A Poem a Day for American High Schools

Created by Billy Collins, poet laureate of the United States, Poetry 180 is designed to make poetry an active part of students' daily experiences in American high schools. This resource provides a bank of contemporary poems, one for each day of the academic year, that may be downloaded, printed, and shared in school settings. The goal of the project is to acquaint students with the works of contemporary poets by reading a poem each day, separate from other academic requirements. Access to this list is easy and provided at no cost to schools. (author/ncl)

The next two ORC resources allow users to find a poem and to find a poet. Both are rich resources for accessing a wide range of poems and poets.

Find a Poem

Supported by the Academy of American Poets, Find a Poem offers free access to the full text of more than 1,200 poems. In addition to poetry, this resource also provides author biographies, essays, and links to other related websites. Poems included in the archive reflect great variety, ranging from poetry for the very young to more mature pieces written by both traditional and contemporary poets. Poems may be located by searching for key words or lines of text from specific poems or by browsing for titles or first lines. The website features many enhancements including a Listening Booth, which links users to selected poems read by the author or other poets. By registering, users may also create a personalized online notebook of poems, biographies, and audio clips selected from the website. (author/ncl)

Find a Poet

Supported by the Academy of American Poets, Find a Poet provides access to poetry written by more than 450 poets. Information for each poet includes the full text of selected poems, biographies, essays, and links to other related resources. Featured poets reflect great diversity, ranging from those who write pieces for children to those targeting more mature audiences. Works by traditional and contemporary poets, representing many cultures, are included in the archive. Specific poets may be located by browsing or searching by last name. A list of related poets is generated by the keyword search. The website has many enhancements including a Listening Booth, which links users to selected poems read by the author or other poets. By registering, users may also create a personalized online notebook of poems, biographies, and audio clips selected from the website. (Author/ncl)

Carol Brown Dodson is the outreach specialist for the Ohio Resource Center. Dodson was an English language arts consultant for the Ohio Department of Education and is past president of OCTELA (Ohio Council of Teachers of English Language Arts). Dodson, formerly a high school English teacher, department chair, and supervisor of English language arts in Columbus Public Schools, serves on the Ohio Graduation Test Reading Content Committee.

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