The Demotion of Poetry

It was my understanding that I had several jobs here in China. One, to act as the ESL coordinator of the school. Check. Two, to teach a summer acting camp. Right – I’ve made a curriculum and now I’m just waiting for the enrollment list. My other job was to teach creative writing and Shakespeare. Ok. That’s simple: two things I love most in the academic world.

For the past month I’ve been getting my students to write poetry and identify more words of expression. They read Pablo Neruda and wrote one of their own Odes. They read W.H. Auden and wrote rhyming quatrains. I was getting lines like “All I have is a desperate heart,” or “All things stay still like ice.” So, I decided it was time for them to move on to bigger things. They could handle it.

In the past couple of weeks I have been teaching them scansion through Shakespeare’s sonnets. They were doing tough lessons, even for a native English speaker, and they were actually keeping up with it all. I was so proud of them. And yet, today, I was told I am no longer allowed to teach them poetry in my creative writing classes. Their parents want to see them write. So, folks, it is official: poetry is no longer considered creative writing. I have a master’s degree in something that doesn’t exist anymore – if it ever did.

My plan was to originally get my students to the point where they were really comfortable with the sonnet form, then assign them to write a sonnet of their own – maybe even rewrite one of Shakespeare’s in their own way. They would be writing sonnets! They’d have a deeper understanding of iambic pentameter. Most people their age (hell, most people in general) couldn’t tell you what iambic pentameter was, let alone write in it. I was so excited.

We were only two days of scansion practice away until I would give them the writing assignment. (You’ve got to know how to read it first before you can write it). And then, today at lunch, sitting at the table with my usual bowl of rice and watermelon, leaving the other, more-strange items on the plate, untouched, I was told to drop the poetry and focus on “writing.”

“But poetry IS writing,” I said.

“Not to Korean parents,” came the reply.

They want volume. They want quantity, not quality. I could only assume they wanted prose, and lots of it, that poetry meant nothing to them.

So, this afternoon, when my students turned in their scansion homework from yesterday, I didn’t spend much time with it. I shortly put it aside and then gave them a photograph to look at. I asked them to tell a story about the photo, to ask questions, look at what they saw, ask how it made them feel. And then I quietly sat at my desk at the front of the classroom while they wrote in silence. This isn’t teaching, I thought. Anyone can sit behind a teacher’s desk and give a kid a prompt. What new information am I giving them? I felt like a failure, like we had just taken a major step backwards. It felt insulting, not just to me, but to them. They were beyond this. I could see the disappointed look on their faces. Then again, I could have imagined it.

It is difficult to not get snarky when someone tells you your area of concentration and interest is worthless. If this were happening to me in the United States, I would immediately retaliate, put up a fight and channel my inner Robin Williams to “Bring Poetry Back!” I’ve got such a hankering to rock the boat. But, there was a reason that the Dead Poets Society was supposed to be kept a secret… Somebody needs to tell me why.