The Poet and the Teacher
A convergence of roles
I am a teacher. I am charged with guiding my students to their fullest potentials. I am not a sage or an expert or even a guru. Although I have been teaching for two decades, and accumulated some expertise, I still have much to learn about teaching students.
I am a writer. Throughout my career, I have experimented with various types of writing. At one point, I even considered myself an amateur poet.1 Though I do love reading and writing poetry, and have a few poems published in literary journals, I never felt completely comfortable naming myself as such. It took a global pandemic to force me to my chair to write 55,000 words and a book proposal. Only then did I start to see myself as a writer. Substack has helped me create a dedicated writing routine, and all of you wonderful readers have helped validate this experiment with your loyal readership. Whether I name myself a poet or a writer or a storyteller, I believe there is a connection between the craft of putting words on paper and teaching students.
Many intellectuals, philosophers, and writers have discussed the role of the poet. In Poetics Aristotle believed that the role of the poet was as an author and a maker, creating art that imitates our lived human experiences.
Imitation… is one instinct of our nature [and] the objects of imitation are men in action.
Aristotle, from Poetics
In a generic sense, the role of the poet is one of communicating ideas to an audience, either by expressing them literally or metaphorically. If we accept the basic idea of a poet as a communicator, then to what purpose? Wallace Stevens, in The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words, clarifies that poets do not set out to necessarily enlighten their readers, nor to comfort them, but “in short, [poets] help people live their lives by seeing their imagination become the light in the minds of others.” By helping a reader’s imagination drift throughout a poem, poet and editor, Matthew Zapruder, perceives this as a deepening of the entire poetic experience. In his book Why Poetry, he explains that the role of the poet as he perceives it is to
deepen the experience, to write poems that we can use to protect ourselves in some small way against the constant encroachment of ‘the pressure of the real,’ the mundane, terrifying, distracting, and often monetary, pressures that can make us feel like automatons.
Perhaps a deeper, or more enriching poetic experience can be seen as a form of reverie that comes from spending time with a particular poem while in poetic contemplation and imagination. In Poetry and Abstract Thought Paul Valéry writes “A poem is really a kind of machine for producing the poetic state of mind by means of words.” During the summer months, I tend to read and write poetry because as a classroom teacher, the summer gives me time to surrender to Valéry’s poetic state of mind. I’m able to sit with poems and the feelings I get when experiencing associative moments in verse.
Roger Shattuck, in the introduction of The Selected Writings of Guillaume Apollinaire, writes that art, especially poetry, should present both clarity and mystery.
The clarity of a literary work of art lies in its reference to experiences already familiar and available to the reader, which allow him to orient himself within this territory called art. The mystery points toward experience not yet known, to an extension of the consciousness.
When I move through a poem (i.e. distinctive line breaks, word associations, beautiful phrases, etc.) I experience these moments of mystery and clarity, sometimes simultaneously, juxtaposed against one another both on the page and in the room.
The role of the poet here is to provide the reader with a generous helping of free space for contemplative imagination. Whether it is in the blank space on the page, or how a poem’s line breaks buttresses various words together, creating beautiful word associations, the poet helps the reader strive for understanding while in a poetic state of mind. In the poem, In Memory of W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden eulogizes Yeats saying,
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
The phrase, For poetry makes nothing happen, often stands out as Auden’s opinion of the role of the poet. In fact, the origin of the phrase is from Auden's Partisan Review 1939 essay The Public v. the Late Mr. William Butler Yeats. In this essay, Auden pretends to put Yeats on trial for his belief in fairies. The imaginary prosecutor’s argument
rests on the fallacious belief that art ever makes anything happen, whereas the honest truth, gentlemen, is that, if not a poem had been written, not a picture painted nor a bar of music composed, the history of man would be materially unchanged.
Matthew Zapruder prefers to reassemble the syllabic stresses to make the line read, poetry makes nothing HAPPEN. So, according to Zapruder, he believes that Auden thinks the role of the poet is that of an alchemist, taking nothing and making something happen. The inconsequential event of the poem (or Richard Hugo’s triggering subject) then becomes a feeling of great importance in the reader’s imagination. The poet helps the reader think through complex issues and turn contemplative silence (both on the page and in the reader’s mind) into something real. When the poet focuses their attention to the musicality of language, the reader can develop a more personal connection to the poem (and often the poet), driving forward both the poem and the poetic state of mind the reader feels while reading the poem.
I believe that the role of the poet is all of these things. Writers and poets enrich our lives with their dedication to language. Poets create drifting poetic experiences that engage our contemplative imaginations. Prose writers (whether novelists or nonfiction) create immersive experiences that push us to reflect on our own lives.
I believe that this, too, is the role of the teacher, and one I embrace fully.
Few would argue that teachers do not enrich the lives of their students. Even if one believes that teachers only dispense content knowledge to their students, it is difficult to argue that there is not an element of immersive experiences involved in teachers teaching students. Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that teachers must respect their students and that learning is discovery. It is not for the teacher to choose what their students should know or do, but for students to discover “[their] own secret.” In order for discovery to occur, teachers must create a cooperative learning experience that includes nature, books, and action. Likewise, John Dewey believed that teaching and learning are social constructs where students are at the center. Teachers have a moral responsibility, then, to create learning experiences that are designed to help students be reflective, autonomous, and self-efficacious.
How do teachers do this? In Paulo Freire’s most notable work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed2, he argues for a new relationship between teacher, student, and society. The role of the teacher is to ask questions, promote critical thinking, and have dialogue with their students. Teachers blur the line between student and teacher.
Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers.
This type of reciprocal relationship can only work when teachers believe that caring relations are the foundation for pedagogical activity. As Nel Noddings states,
Teachers show students how to care, engage them in dialogue about moral life, supervise their practice in caring, and confirm them in developing their best selves.
Do not poets and teachers share in this goal?
Poets work to enrich the lives of their readers in a way similar to teachers: both rely on reciprocal relationships between the poet/teacher and the reader/student; both are reader/student-centered; both provide the reader/student a space to be contemplative; both use a medium (poetry versus the classroom) to engage in a dialogue that allow the reader/student to discover more about themselves and their world.
Teachers are in the most unique role of forming these reciprocal and interpersonal relationships with their students in a live setting. Whereas the teacher creates a dynamic space where students and teacher are existing together in the same space at the same time, the most generous poet offers us a space where reader and poet can sit together in silence. Nonetheless, I do not believe that the poetic space (on the page, in the poem) is any less dynamic than that of the classroom learning space. It is different. There may be the absence of the breathing poet in the poem. Even in the most alive poems, the reader is left to read it alone, in the absence of the poet. However, as Zapruder states, “Poets are alchemists of nothingness. They aspire to turn silence, nothingness, absence, into something palpable.” The poet writes the poem in silence. The reader reads the poem in silence. And yet it can be dynamic and magical.
The teacher may plan a learning experience in silence, but the teaching and learning happen in dynamic and human community. Poets may be alchemists, but teachers reify knowledge, giving form to abstract ideas. Teachers are artists.
This, for me, is the convergence of the role of the poet and teacher. What would a classroom look like if imaginative thinking were as commonplace as critical thinking?What would a learning experience look and feel like if the teacher saw themselves in the same light as poets? What would a classroom look like if it was created as a poetic space instead of a standardized learning space? Although I have ideas about creating a more poetic classroom3, I do not set out to answer questions these here. My musings serve to reinforce that I believe the role of the teacher is aligned with that of the poet. Teachers must maintain their own imagination and possibility by creating classroom spaces for their students to do the same. Teachers need to facilitate more poetic discussions instead of rigid tell-me-what-I-want-to-hear discussions. Teachers should promote reverie instead of conformity. Readers want poems where they can see themselves in the language. Students crave learning experiences that mirror their everyday lives. Both of these ends may not have so different means after all.
Have a great week!
— Adrian
Resources
I love Tom Nicholas’ What the Theory YouTube channel. He explains philosophical topics in a way that I feel like I actually understand.
Between the Covers Podcast Matthew Zapruder: Why Poetry
This podcast episode, hosted by David Naimon of Tin House, is a wonderful conversation. It’s a bit long (90 minutes), but well worth it if you have some time. Zapruder speaks to his personal experiences with poetry and how important it is in our lives. I find this resonates more now than ever.
If possible, I always try and listen to the poet read their own poetry. Auden’s voice is so warm and matter-of-fact. I could listen to him recite his poetry all day long!
Philosophize This | Episode #210 - The Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Another great podcast explaining Freire’s philosophy of education. This episode in only 30 minutes long and the host does a good job discussing Freire’s belief in the role of dialogue in learning and the co-creation of knowledge.
Just for fun, my favorite Yeats poem, Who Goes With Fergus. I think Arthur Wood does a great job reciting these lines.
The word amateur comes from the French amateur, which in turn comes from the Latin amatorem meaning lover or one who loves.
You can read the full text from the UC Santa Cruz, Environmental Studies.
Maybe this will turn into a future Substack post.