ABSTRACT
Students in later secondary education need to know exactly how and why poems work; and to discover how challenging poetry has the potential to expand their own individual ‘map of experience’. The two aims are not mutually exclusive. One informs the other and together they create what Seamus Heaney calls a fluid movement between the reader’s innermost mind and what they think about on the surface. The surface shows us craft and technique. Identifying and naming techniques adds to the student’s linguistic universe. It expands their terms of reference and furnishes them with the means to engage in meaningful conversations about a poem’s impact. At the same time, of course, those encounters feed their emotional universe. All of this can and should be shared with the students so that they can see the intent and the direction behind teaching approaches. Poetry can very often affirm a young person’s experiences but it can do more. Poetry opens all sorts of possibilities for discussion, it’s about teaching and learning as a dialogue, not a monologue, with the direct invitation to the most able to reflect on and challenge established ideas and concepts. Poetry is a powerful way to encourage all students to develop the craft of perfected attention. Much of what we write about here is about how we perfect that attention through finding ways to put what we see and hear in a poem into words. We discuss the marginal centrality of technique and how, through an understanding of what we mean by that phrase, we go beyond viewing a poem as a solvable puzzle and reach towards accepting the poem as having the emotional staying power of a mystery. It can change how able students see themselves as well as who they are. The sample lesson at the end of the chapter considers deliberately difficult poems by Philip Larkin and Sylvia Plath, and makes much of the importance of how meaning, sound and sense are inextricably linked.
