Today’s guest blogger is Eric Selinger, Associate Professor of English at DePaul University, where he teaches courses on poetry, pedagogy, and popular culture. He received his B.A. from Harvard University and his Ph.D. from UCLA, and is the author of What Is It Then Between Us? Traditions of Love in American Poetry (Cornell UP, 1998) and the co-editor of several books, including Jewish American Poetry: Poems, Commentary, and Reflections (UPNE / Brandeis, 2000) and Ronald Johnson: Life and Works (National Poetry Foundation, 2008); his essays and reviews have appeared in many journals, notably Parnassus: Poetry in Review. He has written lesson plans and pedagogical materials for Poetry Out Loud, the Poetry Foundation, and WGBH-Boston, and has been awarded five grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities to lead summer seminars and school-year workshops on “teaching the pleasures of poetry.”
“A change of style,” says Wallace Stevens, “is a change of subject.”
I quote that line to students all the time because it sums up one of the keys to saying interesting things about almost any poem. Teach this concept—really teach it, so that it becomes “truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole, / reflex action,” as Robert Hayden says—and you’ve given your students a powerful way to attend to any piece of writing.
As Stevens reminds us, whenever a poem’s mood or idea changes, so will its style, with some kind of shift, no matter how slight, in its rhythm, diction, phrasing, sound, or ratio of sentence to line. By extension, anywhere you spot a change of style, you’ve spotted a shift in substance, even if the ideas seem, at first glance, the same.
To introduce this reading strategy, I like to use Langston Hughes’s “Theme for English B.” The poem’s scenario is familiar, and spelled out clearly enough to be accessible even to wary readers:
The instructor said,
Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you—
Then, it will be true.
There’s something ham-fisted, even condescending, about the assignment, and Hughes lets you hear that in the instructor’s short-lined, simplistically rhyming, clumsily metrical style.
“I wonder if it’s that simple?” the poem’s speaker responds, and each of the three responses he then gives has its own distinctive style. First comes a pre-writing thought experiment marked by unmistakably “simple” grammar and ideas. (That’s the “I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem” stanza.) Then there’s the first piece of actual writing, which is jazzier and more complex in idea and sentence structure. (“It’s not easy to know what is true for you or me / at twenty-two, my age,” that stanza begins.) Another question (“Me—who?”) prompts an answer that returns to simple sentence structure, but with a new key verb:
Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records—Bessie, bop, or Bach.
In other words, what’s “true” isn’t what I am by race or age or geography, but what I like, and like to do—a different subject, captured in a slightly different style.
To answer the poem’s final question, “So will my page be colored that I write?” Hughes’s speaker picks up and echoes the instructor’s rhyme-words (“write” and “you” and “true”), even as his conclusion refuses the pat, complacent quality of the initial assignment. It’s as though he needs to pitch things simply, using the instructor’s words, to reach his none-too-savvy audience. That’s a handy lesson in rhetorical analysis and performance—and it gives you a way to connect your own lesson in style and substance to things that your students have already heard in composition classes, their own sections (in effect) of English B.