Follow The Yellow Brick Road: "On Teaching Poetry"

Ask any Creative Writing student across the country what qualities he or she looks for in a teacher, and nine times out of ten you'll hear generosity of taste, heightened receptivity, imaginative sympathy, the capacity to step outside assumptions and predilections (if one possesses any) and enter into any kind of work and appreciate it on its own terms, aesthetically, whether or not it is the kind of work the teacher himself would do. Such a teacher would be able to divine within the most abused, disfigured poem the ideal poem the student is struggling to realize and would unfailingly make the technical suggestions that would help him realize it. He is the pedagogical equivalent of Keats' "chameleon poet," suppressing his own beliefs and values in favor of the technical problems the poems set before him pose. While I do not mean to disparage such an openness and flexibility of mind, what Keats calls "negative capability," I can't help but feel, along with W.S. DiPiero, that as teachers and poets we've grown a little too comfortable with our uncertainties, mysteries and doubts, and that we would better serve our students if we reached a little more irritably after fact and reason. We are very good at imparting an appreciation of the subtleties of language and form, but not so good at attending to the ideas and values implicit in each kind of poem or poetic style, ideas and values about language and mind, self and world, which have moral as well as artistic consequences. Every way of writing presupposes an implicit judgement about experience, about what's meaningful or most authentic. Even the formal principles within a poem, which govern the selection and arrangement of details, attitudes and tonefe, are tacitly evaluating what we should see and how we should see it, heightening some aspect of reality, some possibility of being, by disregarding others. Style in the broadest sense, encompassing everything from rhythm to word choice, is vision, and some styles enact a wider and deeper range of vision than others, enabling a poet to bring a more energetic play of mind and heart to bear upon a greater range of life. But to