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TEACHING POETRY IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS

Kontein Trinya, Ph.D

Department of English, College of Education
Port Harcourt.

kontein@hotmail.com 0803 3388 489

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses the common diffidence with which students respond
to poetry; a diffidence that, in the opinion of the writer, is the result of the
inappropriate teaching methods of the subject at the secondary school
level. The paper proceeds to offer innovative, interactive approaches that
should make poetry lessons as interesting as they should be, consequently
improving the attitude to Poetry at the tertiary level also.
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Introduction
It is commonly agreed that old age is not usually the best time to
learn a new dance. In my few years (of about a decade and a half) of
teaching literature, I have had the precautious habit of seeking to
discover, early in my introductory lectures, the preparations, conceptions
and misconceptions, with which students have come into a literature
class. Whenever I have asked what they thought of poetry particularly,
the almost uniform despondent response has been, “Poetry is very
difficult.” Then I am reminded to brace up to make poetry as enjoyable
as it really should be.
The same despair about poetry translates into the disproportionate
choice of long essay topics by final year undergraduate students of
literature, as I have observed (until recent improvements) even in teacher-
training institutions such as the College of Education where I teach.
Usually, about 85% of topics would be on the novel or prose narratives,
about 13% on drama, and about 2% (or sometimes even less) on poetry.
It is my opinion that this situation is merely the tertiary harvest of the
terrifying tutorial mystifications of poetry at the post-primary, and
sometimes at the tertiary levels themselves. This diffidence about poetry
may also be described as the teachers’ own confusions transferred to the
secondary school students; confusions deriving from the doubts with
which they themselves had also apprehended poetry while they trained to
teach.
Several workshops and seminars addressing the teaching of poetry
at the secondary school level appear to be a recognition of the origin of
much of the tertiary dread of the genre, as well as an interest to address
that problem from source.
It is hoped that this paper, anticipating a workshop, shall offer
perspectives to the teaching of poetry at the secondary school level that
would minimize the tendency to consign poetry to the exclusive jungle of
meaninglessness, where only a few brave people dare hunt, and that for
little abstract rodents. That achieved, we shall have less old people
learning a new generic dance in an old tertiary age.

TASK I
Everyone in the workshop should attempt an anonymous definition
or two of poetry on a piece of paper; pass the papers around randomly,
until nobody knows who has written what; then select samples and read
them out loud to the group.
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Understanding Poetry
Perhaps, the fundamental confusion with the teaching of poetry at
any level, as I have had to point out elsewhere (Trinya and Trinya, 2003,
pp. 1-6), is the inaccurate conception of the genre. A number of School
Certificate textbooks on Poetry (which constitute the staple of teachers at
the secondary school level) often quote ‘definitions’ of poetry which are
foreign to the beginning African secondary school child; ‘definitions’
which that beginner does not possess sufficient prior knowledge to
comprehend. For instance, a ‘definition’ (or ‘description’) such as
William Wordsworth the eighteenth-century English Romantic poet
offers, about poetry being “the overflow of powerful feelings recollected
in tranquillity,” has little apparent relationship (in the mind of the
beginner) to those words arranged in lines, which he or she has come to
accept as “poetry.” Little more help is offered by such dictionary
definitions as one finds, for example, in Chambers Twentieth Century
Dictionary (1981), where “poetry” is defined or explained as “the art of
the poet: the essential quality of a poem: poetical compositions or
writings collectively…,” and where a “poem” is said to be
a composition in verse: a composition of high beauty of thought
or language and artistic form, typically, but not necessarily, in
verse: anything supremely harmonious and satisfying.

To the beginner, such ‘definitions’ are rather more of a puzzle than

an aid. With respect to William Wordsworth’s perspective, for example
(which is frequently found in many “Notes on Poetry”), the beginner
might wonder: “What is meant by ‘powerful feelings’? ‘Powerful’
according to what kind or standard of measurement? ‘Recollected’ in
what form, in what kind of way?”
With respect to the entries in Chambers, the beginner might worry:
“What is ‘the art of the poet,’ to start with? Who is ‘the poet’? What
‘quality’ of poetry would we say is ‘essential’? By what or whose
parameters (or ‘poet-o-meter’) do we measure the ‘height’ of the ‘beauty’
or ‘thought’ of poetic language? What is meant by ‘harmony’?
‘Harmony’ by the assessment of what cultural kind of musical ‘ear’?”
Such definitions of poetry surely have their place. They are valid
in a certain way, but they assume a certain cultural background; they also
assume that the beginner already knows what a “verse” is, what “artistic
form” is, and so on. Often, for the beginner, especially from this other
end of the world, they raise more questions than they had set out to
answer.
Such approaches to poetry tend to disregard the universality of
poetry. They appear to suggest, although very subtly, that poetry is
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foreign in origin, especially European. Ultimately, these approaches tend,

unfortunately, to intellectually alienate the beginner from the very start,
especially since that beginner is usually also a second-language learner of
the foreign languages and cultures from which the ‘definitions’ of poetry
are drawn, and from whose literatures ‘poems’ are procured.
Poetry would be better enjoyed if it were shown to be the universal
art that it is, with ‘species’ relative to times, to peoples, to places. Some
types of poems have been explored more elaborately at some times in
some places by some peoples; but that is not to say that poetry is unique
to those times and peoples and places. Poetry is no more European or
American than it is African.
In spite of the differences between poems (whether they are
rhymed or free verses, whether they are written or oral, or whether they
are even prose poems), all poetry possesses fundamental characteristics
that define them.
Poetry may simply be defined as aesthetic (or artistic) expressions
in patterned language; as patterned and figuratively condensed creative
language (which may be written or oral); as rhythmic language; as
beautiful compositions made out of the sense and sound of words.
The two basic elements of poetry, irrespective of whether it is
written or oral, foreign or African, are
1) its form (the poem as we see or hear it; the poem’s usually
musical or rhythmic feel; its sounds, shape, etc) and
2) its content (the meaning of, and literary devices in, the poem; its
linguistic means of expression, that is, its language, which is often more
flowery, more decorated with figurative expressions, than normal
conversational speech).
Through its images (created by means of language), poetry usually
appeals to thought or intellectual contemplation; and through its music
(achieved by means of rhythmic and phonic devices), it appeals to
emotional contemplation. We do not have far to go for appropriate
illustrations of poetry.

The Participatory Poetry Class

Another contribution to the fear of poetry is the alienating teaching
approaches to the subject. First, poetry is conceived of as foreign in
origin, then consequently, the choice of the ‘true’ or ‘good’ poem is
accordingly alien. That limits the students’ identification with and
interaction in the teaching process. They learn aloof, taking notes, but
enduring what should otherwise be an interesting session.
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Enthusiastic participation has been achieved where, in my poetry

classes, I have encouraged the guided class suggestion or presentation of
preliminary poems for the illustration of the essential characteristics of
the genre. Examples have come from the hymns they had sung at church
the previous Sunday, from popular English nursery rhymes such as
“Twinkle, twinkle little star,” or other popular urban pidgin nursery
rhymes, after having been shown how much good poetry lies about us all.

TASK II
a) Take a suggestion of a hymn or formal nursery rhyme
b) Let everyone perform the piece together
c) Clap or drum acoustic accompaniments to the poem, to illustrate
rhythm
d) Each participant should offer another word, appropriate in
meaning and sound (rhyme) to replace the rhymes in subsequent
lines of the poem, and see what happens to the rhyme scheme.

TASK III
Attempt to teach poetic feet, especially the trochee (the two-
syllable foot with an initial stressed syllable) and the iambic foot (the
reverse of the trochee),
a) using the names of members of the class, e.g. MA-ry, RI-ta,
DA-vid (trochee); Bo-MA, O-JO (iamb)
b) getting the class to mention other two-syllable words that have
the same stress pattern
c) letting the class hum each word as it is suggested, to
demonstrate their stress patterns.

The Patterns of Poetry

A poem’s sound-appeal (that is, its musical or phonic qualities) is
the product of the poem’s general rhythm; the overall ‘sound form’ that
the poem assumes in our ears. Even when a poem’s wordings may be
hard to recall, often, its ‘sound form’ is retained, a ready example being
‘hymn-poems.’ Take, for instance, the first stanza of Isaac Watts’ “O
God, Our Help in Ages Past” (19979, p.32):

O God, our help in ages past

Our hope for years to come
Our shelter from the stormy blast
And our eternal home.

If one should read that hymn aloud, even a listener not familiar
with its assigned tune can appreciate the pattern of its sounds; its definite
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rhythm; its ‘sound form’; its measured beats (meter); in short, the ‘shape’
of its sounds.
A number of features account for this ‘sound shape’ of the poem.
We could identify some of them as: the regularity in the intervals between
points at which the reading voice goes up, and points at which it falls
(meter); the similarity in some of the terminal sounds in the poem, e.g.
“past” (line 1) and “blast” (line 3); “come” (line 2) and “home” (line 4),
which is described in poetry as “rhymes.”
The condensation of, and ‘patterns’ in, the language of poetry may
be further illustrated as we consider the first stanza of the following very
familiar nursery rhyme:

Twinkle, twinkle, little star

How I wonder what you are
Up above the world so high
Like a diamond in the sky.
(Taylor, 1976, 75)

TASK IV
a) Carefully observe the poem above
b) Note what you observe in the sounds and shapes or visual
appearance of the poem
c) Try to replace some of the words in lines 2 and 3 with longer
synonyms or phrases
d) Note again the awkward ‘feel’ of the poem.

First, we observe that the words of this poem are arranged in lines,
or set in a ‘pattern’ of four lines. We observe, further, that the four lines
also have measurable equal beats; an equal succession of stressed and
unstressed syllables (meter) spaced out at predictable intervals (rhythm);
in other words, a ‘pattern’ of beats. The words have evidently been
carefully chosen and positioned to sustain the poem’s definite sound
effect. They have been placed at their specific locations to create and
maintain the poem’s uniform pattern of rise and fall in pitch, which we
feel in the reading voice. The result is a certain kind of ‘music.’
The words that end the lines have also been carefully chosen so as
to achieve a ‘pattern’ of similarity in the terminal sounds in the lines
(rhyme). “Star,” which ends the first line, rhymes with “are” in the
subsequent line; and “high” in the third line rhymes with “sky” in the last
line. This deliberate arrangement of the words as well as the sound of
words in the poem, in a manner which the novelist or playwright does not
usually bother about, constitutes some of what is referred to as the
“patterned expression of poetry.”
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All poems, however, do not possess the same kind of ‘patterns’

noticed above. So, let us consider other examples.
Most traditional African tales have songs that accompany them.
Often, the songs are poetic. Other occasional songs such as birth songs,
funeral songs, tongue twisters, have high poetic qualities even where they
are not actually poems.
To demonstrate the rhythmic patterns of our familiar types of
poetry without the problems of losing tonal and semantic value through
translation, therefore, we shall consider a popular nursery rhyme in pidgin
English: “New money e don come”:
New money, e don come
I bu-y garri ten kobo
I gi-ve Mary to cook’am
Mary cook’am, e no sweet
I be-at Mary, she no cry
I ki-ll Mary, she no die.
Which kin’ Mary be dis-o!
Amina!
Amina toro!
A lazy girl!
A bushy girl!

A begi yaga yogo, yaga yogo

Supepe
Ogonipio!

TASK V
a) Sing “New money e don come”
b) Clap rhythmic accompaniments to it
c) Identify the female character in the poem, as well as her domestic
roles
d) Could we describe the “I” speaker in the poem, who gives “new
money” as a superior, or even a husband? Why?
e) Can we discuss the content of this popular urban nursery pidgin
rhyme as addressing domestic conflicts? Can the conflicts be
explained as transferred frustrated aggressions resulting from
cosmetic economic reforms (“new money”) that do little to
enhance the social/survival status (“garri” – daily bread) of the
ordinary Nigerian?
f) Could we speak of the poetic condensation of language in this
poem?
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This poem certainly does not possess the same hymnal ‘sound
shape’ or rhythmic pattern as we found in Isaac Watts’ “O God, our Help
in Ages Past,” but it does possess a discernable ‘wavy,’ ‘locomotive’
rhythmic pattern deriving from the approximate number of syllables per
line in each stanza. As in the syllabic poetry of some cultures, syllables
perform in this oral poem what meter does in the ‘hymnal’ poems we
have cited above.
The definite ‘sound shape’ of the nursery rhyme above is better
appreciated when the composition is performed during the rhythmic
hand-clapping, leg-stumping girls’ to which it is an accompaniment. The
degree of condensation of language in the poem can be appreciated when
the poem is explained as addressing the domestic conflicts resulting from
a frustrated husband’s transferred aggressions whose target is usually the
woman of the house (Mary). The conflicts in the poem are apparent.

Poetry as a Means to an End

Poetry, like any other genre, does teach lessons about life, but
information is not the primary aim of poetry, or of literature in general.
Its primary aim is entertainment. Poetry could become boring when
poetry lessons turn out to be merely a means of learning new words and
enlarging the vocabulary.
The poetry class is not necessarily a language lesson, even though
language is learnt in the process. A continuous emphasis on vocabulary,
spelling, and grammar often deviates from and impedes the enjoyment of
poetry.

Poetry by Rote
Another inhibition to the enjoyment of poetry is the emphasis on
memorization, as some books on the teaching of poetry tend to stress.
For example, Jeanne M. Machado, in Early Childhood Experiences in the
Language Arts (1980, p.118) advises: “The teacher [of poetry] should
have read, practiced and possibly memorized the poem beforehand”
(118). D.W. Grieve (1976, p.1) however, thinks otherwise, and states,
In many schools the poetry lesson is not enjoyed by either
the teacher or the pupils…. The poetry lesson was not a
lesson to which they looked forward with any enthusiasm.
This was not surprising, for ‘poetry lessons’ consisted of
learning verses off by heart – verses which were rarely
understood, and which did not appeal in the least to the
children.… If poetry is not enjoyed, there is no point in
reading it.
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One should add that vocabulary and memorization would be

automatic when a poem is really enjoyed.

Conclusion
For time and space, I wish to conclude by restating some of the
debilitating common approaches to the teaching of poetry, as well as
highlight other approaches to poetry teaching, which inhibit the
enjoyment of that art form. Call them “The Ten Commandments for the
Poetry Teacher”:

1. Poetry is not foreign. A conception of the genre that assigns it

entirely to the West alienates the African child that is being
introduced to poetry in its written form.

2. Poetry classes should be as interactive and participatory as

possible, utilizing resources from the cultural and social
background of the members of the class; which means soliciting
and encouraging their input.

3. A poetry class is not necessarily a language class, although the

process of the study and enjoyment of poetry does achieve the
learning of language. Poetry should be entertaining lyrically,
emotionally, intellectually, even visually.

4. The reciting of a memorized poem does offer a certain pleasure,

but it shuts out other possibilities. The best way to learn a poem is
not merely by memorizing it. A poem would usually be hard to
remember if it is hard to enjoy.

5. The content of any work of art is rich in literary devices (such as

metaphors, similes, alliterations, personifications, rhymes, etc.), but
when poetry classes end up as deliberate hunts for such devices
rather than the enjoyment of the use to which those devices have
been put, poetry could become a dreadful boredom.

6. Encourage children to write their own guided poems, some of

which could be put up on the school or class board, and even read
in the class. Every writer is encouraged to be read, much more the
child.
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7. Teachers should not begin an introductory poetry class with very

difficult poems. The language and thought of poems selected for
introductory poetry classes should be accessible.

8. Some poems are written for an adult and much educated audience.
They do not represent the best starting block for the beginner.

9. Children should not be threatened with punishment, to make them

to learn. Poetry should not be a drill class.

10. You can never teach what you yourself have never learnt. Nobody
will enjoy a poem you do not enjoy yourself. So, prepare well
before your poetry class. Some poems there are that demand
proper prior preparations.

It is hoped that these sketchy tips would assist the coaches of our
young dancers in the post primary institutions, and we would have saved
ourselves the terrible tedium of tertiary therapies to bones already
stiffened by years of old dance steps.
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References

Chambers twentieth century dictionary. (1981). Edinburgh: Chambers.

Grieve, D.W. (1976). Adventures into poetry for African schools.
London: Macmillan.
Machado, Jeanne M. (1980). Early childhood experiences in language
arts. 2nd ed. New York: Delmar.
Taylor, Jane. “The Star.” In Grieve, D.W. Adventures into Poetry for
African Schools: 76.
Trinya, Kontein & Trinya, Shirley. (2003). Poetry for beginners. Port
Harcourt: Excellence Press.
Watt, Isaac. (1979). “O God our help.” In Praise: Our songs and hymns.
John W. Peterson and Norman Johnson. Compl. Norman Johnson.
Ed. Grand Rapids: Singspiration.

Poetry online
Below is a selection of some poetry websites that the poetry
teacher might find useful, although the list is almost endless.
With Google online search engine, find “teaching poetry,” and you
would find thousands of sites. Add the following:
www.proteacher.com, www.abcteach.com, www.poetryteachers.com,
www.poetry-portal.com, www.amalnet.k12.il, www.poetry.about.com,
www.findpoetry.com, www.starklibrary.org/teenevents.html,
www.questia.com/index,