Ars Poetica: For Students Who Wonder What the Point Is, Anyway

by Nick Richardson

When your students are living in the real world, with oral exams and essays and GRE prep—not to mention dates, soccer practice, rush, the classes they “care about,” and their crummy part-time jobs—it’s easy for them to fall into the trap of thinking of poetry as frivolous. Or as unapproachable solipsism. Or both. Largely irrelevant, in any case.

It doesn’t help that poetry is already a traditionally marginalized artistic medium. Take the floor plan of your local Barnes & Nobel. If space assignation is accepted as indicative of general cultural importance—and I think, on some level, it has to be—the “poetry alcove” squarely places the form as sequestered curio, hidden from all except those expressly searching for it. And even then!

The general feeling, famously articulated by the poet Eamon Grennan, that more people write than read poetry doesn’t help matters. The precepts of supply and demand are latent in the American subconscious; when there’s too much of a good thing it turns bad, and we’d frankly rather not waste our time.

This depressing little idea is the seed of “The End of Verse?”, a 2009 Newsweek article based on recent findings by the National Endowment for the Arts:

Almost as an afterthought, the report also noted that the number of adults reading poetry had continued to decline, bringing poetry’s readership to its lowest point in at least 16 years.

The dismal poetry findings stand in sharp contrast not only to the rise in general fiction reading, but also to the efforts of the country’s many poetry-advocacy organizations, which for the past dozen years have been creating programs to attract larger audiences. These programs are at least in part a response to the growing sense that poetry is being forgotten in the U.S.

Given the above, it’s clear that the challenge of poetry instructors is herculean: convince students raised on The Wealth of Nations that market forces do not dictate literary or psychic worth, that poetry is timely and valuable and worth reading. And you can see how this might often be attempted—although arguably not accomplished—by placing emphasis on classics by the greats. Keats, Eliot, Wordsworth, Tennyson: public domain big guns to inspire respect if not obeisance.

Now, I love the big guns. But in many cases, depending on the student, starting with these poets can foster an unintentionally intimidation-based reader/writer relationship—a weak foundation for a life-long love of poesy. Students uncomfortable with poetic form and language are on unfamiliar territory, unsure of how to conduct themselves, and may read oppositionally—or worse, passively—as a result.

The familiarity and readerly agency students need to really appreciate poetry can, of course, be achieved through teaching the classics. But for students who find poetry completely foreign, who wonder what the point of poetry is, anyway, it may be useful to start with ars poetica. Generally defined as a piece or treatise “on the nature of poetry,” ars poetica-based poems (of which there are plenty) can be used pedagogically as a sort of meta-textual guidebook or primer for students who’d otherwise find poetry generally inscrutable.

Take, for instance, “How to Read a Poem: Beginner’s Manual,” by Pamela Spiro Wagner.

Or, really, any of the other poems compiled on Poets.org’s Ars Poetica: Poems about Poetry page.

In ars poetica, the work is largely done for the reader. This, the poet writes, is poetry; this is what it does, or this is what I wanted it to do. This is how I’d like you to feel when reading it. This is my theory of poetry, rendered poetically. Oh: and if you can read or empathize with this, you can enjoy poetry!

Sometimes the poem is about the poet’s experience reading another poem, as in Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck”, and sometimes it’s about what even constitutes a poem, as in Elaine Equi’s “National Poetry Month”. Or, sometimes, as in Billy Collins’s “Introduction to Poetry”, it’s about just appreciating the imparted feeling and not over-thinking it (excerpt):

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

These are all easy, relatable entrees for students, if only because the ars poetica poem —by definition—discusses an experience of at least passing interest to the student, who is (of course) reading the poem. There’s some smoke and mirrors involved, sure, but at least they can run their fingers across the deep patina’d poetic architrave with some familiarity before entering the cathedral.

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Nick Richardson is an associate editor at Bedford/St.Martin’s. He holds an MA in Literary and Cultural Theory from Boston College and has published three books (two poetry, one prose)…exhibiting what poet Andrei Codrescu has called “a fresh sort of daring in the overstrained broth of contemporary American poetry.” He is also the publisher of A Mutual Respect Books and Music, an underground chapbook press operating out of Brooklyn, NY.