Why discussing poetry is never easy: a Russian teacher's point of view

Being sincerely keen on literature in all its diverse forms and feeling groundlessly brave, right after I first started teaching I made up my mind to discuss some remarkable modern British poems with my students from the department of sociology and political science. Previously we had successfully interpreted several short stories by prominent British and American authors like O. Wilde, J.D. Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut, etc., and I didn’t have even a shadow of a doubt that studying poetry would be beneficial for educational purposes. Nor could I foresee the challenges awaiting me.

First of all, the prospect of reading poems didn’t evoke as much enthusiasm as I hoped it would. The students were indifferent at best, and the majority of them responded with traditional “Do we really have to?”. I was stunned to say the least - not only were they obviously opposed to this idea in general, they didn’t even consider poems to be worthy of discussion during their English classes.

Now I can enlist many reasons why I didn’t succeed that time - including my own overexcitement and quite a weird choice of the reading material. I should also definitely thank Karen Hewitt for making it even clearer to me years later. For that particular lesson I chose the poem by Meena Alexander. Personally I really like her floating lines; Meena Alexander’s collection of poems Quickly Changing River is the most representative and meaningful for me, as she creates an entirely liberating atmosphere of travelling on the water surfaces together with the readers. I enjoy the peace of mind and serenity you acquire while reading.

Born in India in 1951, Meena Alexander was bound to dwell upon the topics of migration and identity in her lyrical writing, as well as love, nature, and other universal concepts. She has been living in New York for a while now, but that hasn’t changed her desire (I suppose it has even enhanced it somehow) to retain her Indian identity:

What a shame they scared you so you plucked your sari off, crushed it into a ball then spread it on the toilet floor.

(M. Alexander, ‘Kabir Sings in a City of Burning Towers’) [1]

In this very poem the author, as she later mentions in the essay ‘What use is poetry?’[3], describes herself, her own struggling with her being different from others and feeling pressured not to be singled out. Here we see the character, a female, who admits feeling ashamed of being scared to such an extent that she abandons her national clothes, sari, as she not only takes it off in the toilet, which is already a sign of disrespect and disgrace, she crushes it (not folds neatly as she probably should) and spreads it on the floor, reinforcing the feeling of the lack of deserved dignity, blasphemy even.

There is one poem by Alexander I find truly appealing which is called ‘Port Sudan’. I decided to start the lesson with this very text, as I deemed it to be quite understandable and, so to say, ‘professionally appropriate’, for it touches upon the concept of language and its interaction with thinking.

It all began really well, as the first lines bear no challenge at all: there’s a little girl, whose father calls her and wants her to come and see him. He runs toward the white ship, docking at Port Sudan through a crowd of people -

[he] came sprinting for me through a crowd of labourers forced to raise bales of cotton to their heads. [1]

Answering my question what these very lines stand for, one of my students very confidently and utterly seriously stated: “Oppression!”. I mused for a while, and then, demanding some further explanation, received a more expanded reply that, since those poor people there had to work hard to survive, the author definitely used the “bales of cotton” as a symbol of exploitation and oppression. And though I understood that this statement was too far-fetched, at that time I didn’t find any strong arguments to contradict it. I just knew that at school we all had to look for different meanings attached to stanzas, and the word ‘symbol’ was indeed very common and, well, expected.

To my mind, the author merely describes the port as she saw it when she was five (this poem is autobiographical: a five-year-old Meena Alexander left India with her mother to be reunited with her father currently working in Sudan), and these people - ‘forced’ as they were - simply took her fancy. But I let the comment about oppression go.

That’s where the easy part of the poem ended. That’s where the part I like begins.

Someone cried Kef Halek /

My skirt spun in the wind and Arabic came into my mouth and rested alongside all my other languages. Now I know the truth of my tongue starts where translations perish. [1]

Having explained that ‘Kef Halek’ stands for ‘How are you?” in Arabic, I was eagerly waiting for some feedback and interpretations of the piece from my students, but they were quite dumbfounded. At last one girl asked a valid question why translations perished. I don’t remember exactly now what other students thought about that, but I was left unsatisfied. I think that this stanza brilliantly illustrates the way a new language enters your mind - and you are helpless, for you can fight it no more than a gush of wind. A phrase in Arabic which the girl hears for the first time in her life immediately draws her attention, and Arabic mixes with other languages she has already heard and maybe spoken. This instant she realizes that she wants to master the language - at least that’s how I interpret the last two lines: for her the truth can be obtained only after she no longer needs the translations and fully understands the words herself. Thus she becomes responsible for the words she speaks.

In the next several lines we encounter the image of the Pharaoh - the one who murmured at the hour of his death, throat turned towards the restless waters:

“If I forget Upper Egypt, cut off my right hand.

Here lies memory. ” [1]

Yet again this figure was transformed into a symbol by my sophomores. They saw here no less than the embodiment of land’s vigilant Keeper and Protector who would punish anybody trespassing and breaking the Egyptian rules. They noted the possible historical references and were looking for bad omens of death.

These lines in fact serve neither as an indication of the upcoming terrible destiny of the character, nor as a reference to this country’s historical past. I guess, their main purpose is to highlight the bonds between the language and the place where it is spoken: according to Martin Heidegger, speech is the existing form of language, and it is people who give life to language by actually using it. Alexander herself always stressed the importance of linguistic environment for mastering a foreign language [2], as every speech community preserves its culture, its traditions, its unique vision and its past experiences - "here lies memory.

Finally, when I was feeling desperate, I decided to turn to the last lines, where the author pays tribute to her father, who - loved his daughter so he knew she needed knowledge of the imprints of earth, glyphs cut in granite inscriptions on rough cloth underwater moorings and the black sun of death. [1]

Being likely distracted by pharaohs and death, one student actually thought that the father wanted his daughter to suffer -in the black sun of that very death. At that time I felt truly miserable. I tried my best to assure him and the others that Alexander was clearly grateful for this terrific experience made possible thanks to her father. She was thriving on the perspective to learn a new language and to get to know that country, to tread on its ground and before that - to get over a long sea voyage. She "needed knowledge" like that. Everything around her was special, extraordinary, and brand-new: she wanted to study the imprints of earth, carved symbols on the stone - undoubtedly the traces of human civilizations, their material culture... When I looked up, the students were gazing at me intently and suspiciously. They were not convinced at all: in the end, they still thought something fishy was going on with the pharaoh, death, and oppressed labourers. That time, almost four years ago, I gave up.

Yes, I admit that didn’t go well. Even now I find it hard to interpret English poems without succumbing to the expected routine of generalization. This is the stumbling stone that often evokes the clash of opinions when it comes to analyzing poetry in predominantly Russian communities joined by the English guests. The Russians have been taught to look for symbols and major concepts like Love, Freedom, etc. Sometimes, getting obsessed with theorizing, we rip the poem’s individuality off. It is thanks to Karen Hewitt’s seminars I have learned to appreciate the text itself more than my subjective musings inspired by it. No, poetry is indeed thought-provoking, as we need it to be. It eggs us on, unravels the senses, and makes us more emotionally attached to the world around. But it is a pleasure to study the peculiar wording of each and every poem, its unique images, and the inimitable beauty of the author’s worldview. Actually, Meena Alexander herself highlights the role of poetry quite deftly: “Poetry comes into play as the crust of the self hardens and it makes its exquisite music by forcing us to strip away all that we held up in front of us as spears and buffers, the barriers of defensive rhetoric.” [3]

I think I like it this way - I mean, studying every poem as a single entity, not trying to fit it into a bigger picture, often blurred and vague. I am still not really good at ‘the English way’, but with some more practice I suppose I can become better at it.

I do not, however, intend to expose ‘the Russian way’ to any harsh criticism at all, as I am aware that it could be somewhat immanent to the very nature of Russian poetry - and Russian language, and therefore Russian mentality as well. Russian poems may indeed require a significantly broader context to unravel the covert meanings attached to them, for they seem to possess a lot of various interpretations, the exact range of which might not be immediately realized to the full even by the authors themselves.

I guess right now I am ready to try to bring some poems to my class again. I have fully recovered from my previous failure, and I have acquired the necessary experience. This time, perhaps, I should stick to something more conventional and therefore understandable in terms of the reading material, although Meena Alexander’s newest collection of poems Birthplace with Buried Stones was published in 2013, and I have many students with inquisitive brilliant minds. I am an optimist; hence, I am fairly certain that in my next article I will be sharing a positive experience of discussing English poetry in class.