What's the value of reading and responding to poetry?

After our class discussions of Rukeyser's "St. Roach" and Darwish's "Jerusalem" last week, I wondered: what's the value of what we do when we sit down and read poetry together?

For instance, I really enjoyed our conversation of "St. Roach," but being one of the teachers in the classroom, and the one who had chosen the poem, I began to wonder: where is this conversation going?  When do I know it's over?  Do I have certain objectives in mind (I didn't--except seeing what would happen when we discuss the poem).  And as much as I enjoyed the free-wheeling conversation, I became almost (not quite) uncomfortable with the nagging thought that it should go somewhere...but where, and why?

So where do, or should, our conversations of poetry go and why?
This is a question about context, purposes, and value.
It seems to me that as teachers of literature we take the value of literature, and reading it, for granted. After all, it's what we do (talk about literature, getting students to "read" it) and so the question of its inherent value and the value(s) of reading, responding to it, talking and writing about it, is not on our minds in the way it should, perhaps, be--and is for many of our students, especially those who have not chosen "literature" as a field of study and who are not convinced--or pay lip service to the idea-- that the encounter with Literature, as with all great art, is somehow inherently good for us, inherently edifying.

I'd like to know: what are your thoughts on the value of reading and responding to poetry?
All of us read "St. Roach" and "Jerusalem" together: what's the value of doing so?  What do you remember of our class discussion, for instance?  What do you remember of your thoughts and feelings while we talked about the poems and read them aloud?  Were there things you would have liked to have said and didn't?  Were they points when you "checked out" and decided that the conversation was no longer of interest to you--why?

teacher understanding of student understanding

Hamel's piece helps me envision the kind of research I might undertake on "reading."
I also love the fact that Hamel brings up Gadamer, a literary theorist whose work I have just recently rediscovered for myself and who thinks in really interesting and productive ways on what it means to understand something--anything really, but particularly a literary text. 
Gadamer introduces the concept of "Horizon."  We each understand a text from our point of view, beyond which we are unable to see.  In other words, what we can see or understand is shaped by where we "stand."  Gadamer argues that the inevitably circumscribed nature of our understanding is not a disadvantage or advantage, but simply the only way in which we can understand another text (or another person).  Understanding then means that we use our biases and pay extra attention to the moments when our biases or preconceptions are challenged.  From a "hermeneutical" point of view, it's important to be attentive to the places where we encounter phenomena or behavior that don't seem to make sense  or that cannot be immediately subsumed within our way of understanding.  At such moments, we are compelled to adjust our horizon in relation to "other possible horizons," and our consciousness changes.  Thus Hamel writes:

"Studying teacher understanding of student understanding, then, ... is less a matter of objectifying or testing teacher's partial knowledge in relation to a research base on student understanding, although attention to research can be both useful and powerful.  To understand understanding involves, instead, richer interaction with teachers' starting points in thinking about students, and attention to ways in which teachers can identify their own horizons in relation to other possible horizons" (52).

So Gadamer is interested in understanding understanding and that's what Hamel's research project takes on as well.

The ethics of "Performative Literacy"

When I read Sheridan Blau's essay "Performative Literacy: The Habits of Mind of Highly Literate Readers," I noticed that the words Blau uses to describe the critical literacy required of today's students carry explicit and implicit ethical meanings.  For instance, critical literacy "requires students to become active, responsible, and responsive readers."  Moreover, the capacities, required and cultivated for "performative literacy," which he identifies as "an enabling knowledge," include habits that are not merely cognitive but ethical as well: the willingness to suspend closure, the willingness to "respond honestly," "intellectual courage," "tolerance for failure," "tolerance for ambiguity, paradox, and uncertainty," "intellectual generosity and fallibility."  The teacher, in turn, is asked to "foster in students ... respect and capacity for tentativeness...."
I don't have a problem with this, but I think it's interesting. 
Is it true, or at least inevitable, that our "theories" of what works in the classroom are bound up with ethical values?  Gee would say, "yes," I think.
I'd like to ask Blau about the implied ethics of his views on literary literacy instruction tomorrow.

Is meditation a literacy practice?

Rereading Brian Stock's essay “Minds, Bodies, Readers," I wondered what class members would say about it: why are we reading this?  What does healing and meditation have to do with reading?  What does the history of medicine and pre-modern mind-body theories and practices have to do with reading?

And while I cannot answer these questions directly, I found myself, again, very intrigued by Stock's comments on the early, pre-modern western practices of meditative reading and visualization, which apparently were abandoned as time passed (I am still not quite certain why).

Stock's historical  survey of body-mind concerns in relation to the history of reading makes me aware that reading is an activity that does involve the mind and the body; yet we forget about the body, even though, or precisely when, reading is pervasively understood as a cognitive skill. 

We have all experienced, however, how profoundly our bodies respond to, and are engaged with, what we read--and not only in moments of narrative suspense.  When we describe reading as a refuge or an escape, we also describe a way of feeling about ourselves--relaxed, perhaps, at ease, comfortably or pleasurably engaged. 

What might meditative reading be like?  Perhaps a bit like what Newkirk describes as "slow reading?"  Reading in which we linger over a text, in ways that allows us to forget ourselves or connect with ourselves as deeply as we might in meditating, when we enter a realm that is no longer merely the personal self--when we become self-forgetful?

I don't know--but I am intrigued and agree with Stock that we should find out much more about reading as a body-mind practice.

Gendered readings

I find myself amazed, reading the excerpt from Mellor, Patterson, and O'Neil's Reading Fictions, how deeply gendered my own reading of "A Lot to Learn" was.  I guess I have a lot to learn!  I assumed that the scientist, by the name of Ned, was male (not surprisingly, but still--if "Ned" had been an elementary school teacher I might have allowed for the possibility that "Ned" is the shortened form for a female teacher).  And, given that first assumption, I found myself in a brief shock when an actual girl appears in his miracle machine: a naked eight-year old girl with freckles and a brace (what kind of brace? I cannot really imagine that).  Two readings that immediately popped into my head were: a. Ned is caught up short by his sexist assumption about women as "girls," available to him whenever he wishes for them (like money, a martini or bottle of beer); b. Ned is actually a pedophile and got exactly what he asked for.  The reading that did not occur to me, but that instantly occurred to me when Ned became Nell, is that he/she wanted a child (of course, the wish for a member of the opposite sex--that's still a bit weird, even if we think of Ned as Nell).
But then why say "hell"? 

The entire exercise or experiment made me deeply aware of how my readings of texts are shaped by gendered expectations, much more so than I thought.

What brought me up short right away, however, was the reference to "opposite sex"--a dead give away, in my mind, that the story's, or at least Ned's, expectations about gender are heterosexual (or what is sometimes called "heteronormative").  The assumption is that there are two sexes, each of them opposite to the other--some might call this a very rigid, binary model, that does not allow for the fluidity or even multiplicity of gender.
What if Ned is a transgender scientist seeking to confuse the machine he created?

Caedmon

Memorial to Cædmon, St Mary's Churchyard, Whitby, England.


I am intrigued by the story of the Anglo-Saxon poet Caedmon and the signficance Howe sees in it for our understanding of the transition from a purely oral to an increasingly textual culture.  Caedmon's ability to compose beautiful religious poetry in Anglo-Saxon after listening to monks' expositions of passages from the bible, in Latin, made Caedmon an admired member of the monastic community.  Nobody, it seems, felt the need to "teach" Caedmon how to read the written texts, not in order to keep him from that skill but because his skill of transforming what he heard into powerful, persuasive orations was so highly respected within the "early medieval textual community."  Howe does not emphasize Caedmon's skills as a translator, but this is what impresses me (and what I, at first, did not even grasp): that Caedmon apparently understood Latin (although he did not speak it?) and was able to translate it, on the spot, into Anglo-Saxon verse.  So, in this story, "reading" involves an impressive number of practices, performed by different people in a textual community: comprehending a written text; performing a "text" by reading it aloud or reciting from memory; listening and memorizing a "text" read aloud; translating the performance of a written text (latin) into a poem or hymn, something to be sung, in Anglo-Saxon.

I was struck by Howe's following remarks:
"To the question why the monks did not teach Caedmon to read, one might respond that it would have been a waste of everybody's time.  Less facetiously, one might say that the question itself reveals a misunderstanding of the nature of an early medieval textual community.  Established as he was within the monastery, Caedmon had no need to read alone and to himself. Indeed, his particular responsibility to transform Latin text into Old English verse emphasized the skills of oral performance rather than of reading comprehension.  We must also ask if the entire question of Caedmon's inability to read is not at least partially anachronistic in its assumption that this ability be defined by our own cultural practice as readers who exist in only the most tenuous of communities." (70-71, my italics)

Somehow I am saddened by our own narrow understanding of what constitutes reading!

What did it mean to "read" in Anglo-Saxon England?

Howe writes: "Quite simply, no Anglo-Saxon learned to read in order to read alone, late at night, in a quiet house and a calm world." (71)

Instead, as Howe shows by, among other things, tracing the etymology of to "read," reading in Anglo-Saxon England was a communal affair that involved not only "comprehension of a written text" (very few people were able to do that), but the oral performance of a written text to a community, an oral performance that was frequently based not on a direct deciphering of a text but on memorizing another's reading "aloud" of a written text.  As a result, "listening" and "memorizing" were important aspects of "reading."

I am intrigued by Howe's piece because it makes me realize something about my native language, German. He points to the etymological links of the English "read" to the German words "reden" and "raten."  "Reden" is the German word for speaking, or, more formally, holding forth on a topic, as in giving a speech or lecture (this perhaps more formal aspect differentiates it from "sprechen"--to speak).  "Read" is also related to "raten," the German word for puzzling something out, for deciphering.  A puzzle is "ein Raetsel" in German.  Both of these usages suggest an understanding of reading as rooted in speaking or giving councel and deciphering or figuring something out, and thus to an entirely more oral, and not exclusively textual, understanding of the cultural practice of reading.

I am intrigued by Howe's point that this earlier and more expansive or "oral" use of "read" survives in contemporary usages of to read as deciphering social or personal texts, as in "I could not read him" or "he was unable to read the social dynamics."  Also a "palm reader" does more than "comprehend" the lines on your palm.  It's neat to know the ancient roots of this word!  And see how these ancient meanings still, at times, assert themselves in contemporary contexts and practices.