Date: Fri, 7 Nov 1997 15:01:28 -0600
From: Kristine Batey <kbatey-AT-nwu.edu>
Subject: PLC: Re: phillitcrit-digest V1 #113


George Trail wrote:
>
>Bear in mind, however, that I can still think that "Stopping by Woods"
>sucks, and regret hugely that its largest use is to introduce the youth of
>these states to that most challenging of art forms, poetry.

I have mixed feelings about this statement. I grew up in era when all
elementary children learned to recite "If" (and didn't I love Henry
Gibson's "Keep A-goin'" when it first showed up on the Dick Van Dyke
show!), not to mention "Trees." "Stopping by   Woods" was the best of what
we learned, and I'm still fond of it, although not, I think, for its
intrinsic merits so much as for the nostalgia clinging to it, rather the
way I like the movie version of The Wizard of Oz, or the Mary Martin Peter
Pan. (I also like "Paul Revere's Ride" precisely because of my fond
memories of my brother learning it by heart for the annual speech contest;
he memorized it aloud at the dinner table every night--I can't tell you
what our family dinners were like, there were six of us children, we used
our hands to eat spinach, a la Popeye, and broccoli "trees," a la Godzilla;
we weren't allowed to eat before grace was said, or to leave the table
without asking to be excused, or to punch each other without making a
proper fist, lest we break a thumb and have to go to the emergency room.
Anyway, we all learned "Paul Revere's Ride" and began to have contests to
see who could finish first. I don't believe my brother ever realized that
the point of the contest was not to see who could recite the fastest, but I
remember those contests, and the teachers may not have realized it, either.)

But that's not what I came here to talk to you about today. (Except
obliquely. Sorry, I seem to be having an oblique morning.)

My children at one point attended Robert Frost Elementary School, where
second graders had to learn to recite "Stopping by Woods," in class, en
masse. They held a performance, 75 of the little buggers lined up across
the stage, shouting, "Whose WOODS these ARE i THINK i KNOW his HOUSE is IN
the VILL age THOUGH." Some time afterward, I sat down with my daughters to
look at and talk about the poem: what it was saying (in the most concrete,
literal way: the poet is riding or driving a horse through the woods,
etc.); how the sounds of the words contribute to the way the poem "feels,"
the multiple meanings words have in poetry (the different things that can
be meant by "the darkest evening of the year").  I think this particular
poem is a good one for older elementary and middle/jr. high school
students: they're touched by the melancholy and identify strongly with the
sense of aloneness. At this point in their education, most kids have been
exposed only to happy or cute verse, G-rated in the worst sense of the
term, expunged of any darker elements, along with Shel Silverstein's
humorous verse, maybe a little bit of Ogden Nash. In addition, SBW, along
with its little brother "The Road Not Taken," is a poem most elementary or
middle school teachers seem to be able to work with--a real bonus, because
very few teachers at that level are able to deal with poetry at all.  My
experience proofreading K-12 language arts series, and being the homework
supervisor for language-type subjects at our house, tells me that the
poetry kids are getting in school is somewhat better than what people my
age were fed, but the lesson plans I read in those books and my childrens'
reported experience indicates that they're not probably not getting a sense
of how the elements of a poem work together, or what makes a poem good.

On the other hand, high school students are ready for more meat than Frost
has to offer (although they delight in Frost gossip; they love getting to
sneer at the the Pepperidge Farm Bakery Man facade), but they don't get it.
Partly, I think, there's the problem that too many poems are a clever code
for concealing talk about s-e-x, sometimes without stressing the
desirability of abstinence (gasp!). Partly, I think that curriculum
planners assume--with some accuracy, alas--that teachers aren't like to
"get" a lot of poetry themselves, and will be totally at sea having to
guide students through an analysis.  Poetry is harder to read and harder to
teach than most fiction (or perhaps fiction is just easier to fudge). My
own teachers tended to treat poetry as an afterthought; one of them even
explained that we had to look at the poems because the curriculum
guidelines said so. One day, a callow and earnest graduate student from the
local university came to our third-year English class with a packet of
poetry that included "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,"   "Buffalo
Bill's/defunct," "To His Coy Mistress," and "Musee des Beaux Arts"--not
radical stuff, even back in the mid-60's, but stunningly different from the
stuff we'd been slogging through. And he talked us through the poems as
though we were adults--actually, as I know now, as though we were
undergraduates, but it was heady at the time. As adolescents, we were
unable to express enthusiasm to a grownup, particularly a grownup wonk, but
some of us were polite and cooperative. I wish I knew who he was; I already
liked and wrote poetry in those days, but that one session changed my
attitude toward poetry forever. Suddenly, I understood what poetry is
*for*, what poetry says that nothing else can say. I sat down with my
children and SBW four years ago because one day in 1966 a young man
convinced me that poetry isn't enrichment, it's essential.

Sorry this went on so long, and that it rambles so.


Kristine Batey
Department Assistant
Office of the Associate Dean for Administration
Northwestern University School of Music
Evanston  IL  60208
kbatey-AT-nwu.edu
phone:  (847) 491-7228
fax:    (847) 467-2363

"Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different
speeds.  A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing."




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