Book Talking

Poets may not know this, but the anthology is not our friend. This may sound counter-intuitive, after all, people buy anthologies, people even read anthologies, but that is the problem. In schools all around the country, teachers recommend novels, they recommend short story collections, but they rarely recommend poetry collections. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find many young people who have bought a book of poems.

The reason is simple: in school, poetry is taught in a predictable way. Single poems by various poets are selected from a long list. The students are taught how to analyze these poems, and they are expected to be able to write about the use of poetic devices in these select poems. Where students are expected to read a complete novel by a single author, there is no expectation that they should read an entire book of poems by a given poet. The very concept of a book of poems written by a single poet, a book that is designed to be read as a whole, is one that I suspect few teachers share with their students.
And yet we keep on producing our books, publishing these collections, and somehow expecting people to buy the books and read them. The average person consumes poetry in a very specific way. They consume individual poems, and they do so as they search the shelves of a Target to find the perfect card for a special occasion. They are encouraged to commit to memory individual poems and many do. But few even know where these poems first appeared. Few know that many of these poems arrived in a book of poems that was shaped as a coherent whole. The single poem is not a sampler for a larger work. It is a thing in itself.
The problem, of course, is that the very shape of the poem—the fact that most poems tend to be complete in themselves—plays into this situation. It is possible to read a single poem by a given poet and not need to look at anything else by that poet. The poem is a self-contained entity, it rarely relies on what comes before or what comes after for it tro have meaning. Sections from a novel are excerpts. A poem from a poetry collection is not an excerpt—it is just a poem.
Many of you may not know this, but librarians or media specialist around the country promote books and promote readings through something called the Book Talk. In the Book talk, the librarian summarizes the key elements of the work, and then uses visual aids and readings to hook the students or the teachers into reading the work. The Book Talk relies on the pull of narrative—the business of suspense and letting people want to discover more by reading more. A section from a novel points the reader to the novel. If the section is good, the most reasonable thing to do would be for the reader to borrow or buy the book and finish it. A successful Book Talk gets people to order books.
Curiously, in all the literature that I have found that deals with how to book talk. None of it deals with how to Book Talk a collection of poems. There are no hints, no suggestions about how to do this. As a result, media specialists rarely give Book Talk for poetry collections. They will Book Talk an anthology. That is easy, the anthology is often clearly themed and they are able to select a few poems, talk about them, talk about how they collide with the theme and that is that. They rarely expect students to borrow the anthology so they can tuck themselves in bed and read. But they don’t do poetry collections by a single author.
There are a number of reasons why the poetry book is not pushed by librarians and teachers. Firstly, there is a deep suspicion of the poem and the poet. People feel as if they have to be smart to get the poems and when they don’t understand the poems they feel stupid. Above all, the poet is seen as someone who is hiding information from the reader. Secondly, few teachers and librarians have, themselves, the experience of reading full volumes of poetry and finding that reading process attractive. Thirdly, teachers and media specialists have no idea how to talk about poems in a way that can make it appealing and that suggests something useful to the standards in the curriculum. They are not comfortable enough talking about poetic devices and they feel quite naked and vulnerable when they do not have the crutch of narrative to bolster them. They have too little experience with the contemporary poetry collection—its coherence, its architecture and the range of allusions that shape it. Fourthly, this dilemma is a self-perpetuating one. Many teachers and librarians are not fond of the poetry unit because of their own bad experiences with poetry. They have not read enough poetry collections to be able to speak to the values of that genre.
The contract we make with anthologies is a compromise. The deal is that by being exposed to our work in anthologies, people will want to follow up and find the rest of our work. We also enjoy the benefits of association. Appear in an anthology with big names and people will think you are as great a poet as the poets you with which you associate. And perhaps there are some benefits, but at least among the school age kids, I am not so convinced that anthologies do that kind of work.
But rather than come down on anthologies, it may well make sense to think about how to get teachers and librarians to start thinking of the single-authored poetry book as a viable text for study as much as they embrace the novel. To do that we may have to start thinking of the architecture of collections, selling the fact that many contemporary books are beautifully shaped, thematically varied works of art. It would make sense for them to see that a poet is best met when the full range of his or her work is read. There are so many wonderful teaching possibilities in the poetry collection and finding ways to get people to see that can only benefit all of us.
I like to tell teachers and students that the poetry collection is like a CD by a single artist. The more we listen to the range of songs on the CD, the better we understand the imagination and the skills of the artist. But our enjoyment is as beautiful listening to a variety of songs on a CD as it is reading a collection of poems. We develop a taste for some pieces, we sometimes return to less loved pieces and find that we now love them, we discover patterns from one piece to the other and so on.
Join my crusade, friends. After all, the product is quite a good one.
Today I head out to Traveler’s Rest near Greenville, South Carolina, to read at a High School and to do a reading at 7:00 PM. at the Leopard Forest Coffee Company, (26 S. Main Street, Travelers Rest, SC 29690 (864) 834-5500) Next week I had to Nashville and then to Jamaica. My blogs may get even more interest when I go through the immigration desk on that international journey.