Poetry is in the air; breathe it and just enjoy

It is surprising how many people one will meet on the streets whistling a tune that they grew up with or that is the latest ‘hit’ song. That used to be called a lyric — which is still what they call a poem set to a tune, for music.

Nursery children, all over the world, are generally ‘taught’ about their surroundings, lives and the rest of the world through song. Later in life the rhymes or jingles are taught and studied as poetry. Baa, Baa, Black Sheep still reverberates through classroom windows in kindergartens in many parts of the world just as it did more than two centuries ago.

So, how do children who were weaned on rhymes, rhythms and the singsong of poetry from an earlier age end up disliking poetry in school?

Why would high school pupils say that poetry is giving them trouble? “Poetry isn’t worth studying because it is difficult to interpret,” I have often heard students at the university say. I have met teachers who moan how these days pupils can’t even identify the persona in a poem, leave alone appreciate poetic style and language. In other words, despite all the songs destroying our ear drums in the matatus or at the market or from the neighbour’s radio; despite the annoying (but surely enjoyable) renditions of some old tune by your neighbour showering in the morning; despite the claims of the ever-increasing numbers of spoken words poets or artists around; despite the poetic atmosphere around us, poetry continues to cause trouble in school and is largely ignored by the public.

Yet, those who listened to Tony Walsh render a lyrical repudiation of terrorism and proclamation of humanity in the aftermath of the recent attack at a music concert in Manchester, UK, have not stopped commenting about the power of poetry. Walsh’s poem, This is the Place, was a most powerful reminder of poetry’s capacity to say a lot in very few words about an emotional state when words would normally fail to fully express feelings. Thousands of miles away from Manchester, Harvard University awarded a degree based on a thesis delivered in hip-hop! These days, rap music moguls in the USA rival the best actors in Hollywood and established businessmen.

ENJOYABLE TASK

So, what happens with poetry in the classroom? Is it poor teaching methods, such as teachers asking learners to analyse poems that they haven’t even read? Poems that they have just encountered, or poems that are difficult to decipher? Or is it about modern teaching that tends to separate the classroom experience from life as lived by the learners? In this case is poetry seen as some abstract, academic task to be done in the classroom, with little or no relationship to life outside school? Or is it just that poetry is for poets and the rest of us lay readers would be none the wiser, however much we read it?

My first encounter with poetry in the classroom was the poem A Freedom Song by Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye. My teacher insisted that we had to read the poem aloud. We had to read the stanzas as if they stood alone, from the rest of the poem. Then we had to read the stanzas together.

The teacher insisted that we were searching for the different sounds, voices, persons, ideas in the stanzas, then linking them to see whether the so-called ‘freedom song’ was indeed a song about liberty. We had to find words in the poem that suggested freedom, liberty, independence, choice, autonomy etc.

As for whether this was really a ‘song’, we were urged to recite the poem rhythmically — of course some clever fellow in the class tapped on his desk and started a regular ‘beat.’ One needn’t have studied music or be poetically/musically-inclined to have sensed some music in the poem.

Weeks after renaming A Freedom Song ‘Atieno yo’ — which is the refrain in the poem/song, we read Building the Nation by Henry Barlow. In this case the teacher introduced the idea of the persona — the speaker in the poem.

We were urged to identify the two characters in the poem — the driver and the Permanent Secretary — although we were also told that there could be more, and ask questions about why they speak to each other in the way the poet makes them do. We didn’t know that we were being taught about ‘attitude.’

We were being led to the world of knowing ‘how’ poetry can be a commentary on social issues. But nobody insisted that that was all we needed to get out of poetry. Just like in the case of A Freedom Song, the teacher’s intention was first, to make us like or appreciate the words, the rhyme, the rhythm, the images, progression of ideas, the speaker, the audience etc, that the poem suggested before chasing after its meaning(s).

Reading poetry then became a very enjoyable task. For instance, if a classmate argued that a poem was romantic, he had to count how many words in the poem tended to show love, intimacy, liking etc. If we read a poem, such as Daughter of the Low Land by Anyang’ Nyong’o, there were those who would argue that the poet was talking about virility.

But we were shocked when one of us, who apparently had read Song of Lawino, insisted that the speaker in Daughter of Low Land was responding to Lawino, who had apparently suggested that Okot was impotent because books had crushed his manliness. Ooh, no, we couldn’t accept this clever fellow’s conclusions. But when we asked the teacher, he confirmed that our classmate was right.

The teacher noted that this was what was called intertextuality. But he suggested that we could live with the word ‘allusion’ then and wait to talk about the ‘big’ word, intertextuality, at university.

BIBLICAL ALLUSIONS

However, we were now eager to read poetry beyond what was prescribed in class. We looked for Song of Lawino. We then read Song of Ocol — looking for allusion, of course. Familiarity with the contents of Poems from East Africa by David Cook and David Rubadiri became the true measure of one’s immersion into poetry.

The next collection of poetry to be read voraciously was Introduction to East African Poetry by Jonathan Kariara and Ellen Kitonga. There is yet to be published a better study book on poetry in this region. The book immortalised the poems, Grass Will Grow and A Leopard Lives in a Muu Tree for us. These were poems to recite, analyse and revisit, the whole term. We were moving into the land of poetry as a mystery; something that only a few would fathom.

Some of us were hoping for poetry to become mystical at university. For some strange reasons, poetry became a no-go land. One studied it as an unavoidable course to finish and move on. Why? Because there was a sense in which emphasis was placed on reading meaning into the poems rather than out of it. Poetry was largely presented not as something that we had grown up with, but as something to be sampled and enjoyed by a select few.

This way of teaching and studying poetry explains why up to today, Christopher Okigbo became the bogeyman for many undergraduates. His highly allusive poetry, especially in the collection Labyrinths with Path of Thunder became a literary conundrum for many of us. There was no doubt that these poems significantly referred to Igbo and Greek mythology. The problem was that we didn’t have access to those myths. We didn’t know much about the poetry’s background.

Those who were daring enough — like my high school mate — went to look for books that would explain what the various images and gods in the poetry were. We read the history and anthropology of the people of Nigeria, Egypt, Greece etc. Poetry transported us to new lands and invited us to read other literary texts — novels, plays or biographies. In the course of these readings, we began to ‘see’ how our (Kenyan) world connected to other places in Africa and then the rest of the world. In this sense, poetry became enjoyable, memorable and companion to life.

In other words, if we need learners to appreciate poetry, we have to teach it beginning with their own experiences. Those nursery rhymes can be brought back to the classroom. The latest rap songs should be recited in the classroom. Read the biblical verses and they will make a lot of sense to the learner when later the teacher talks about ‘biblical allusions’ in one poem or another.