I’m a ESL tutor in Hong Kong. When I took the ModPo course in September 2015 the professor asked me to try out some of the ModPo poems on my students.
The following is the write up of my efforts:
Most of my students are in primary school and do not have the language skills to deal with poetry at this level. Of my 8 high school students, 2 also do not have the language skills. 2 others I have not seen for various reasons for the past few weeks, so that leaves a grand total of 4 kids on which to undertake this little experiment.
Here is a summary of our progress:
Rachel - 13, Form 2 (8th Grade)
I had high hopes with Rachel. Back in February / March (the previous school year) I had given her Emily Dickinson's I Died for Beauty because it complemented the O. Henry short story The Last Leaf which her class was reading. Because this worked well her mother asked for more poems and so we also read Recuerdo by Edna St. Vincent Millay because part of the poet’s personal history was very similar to that of a character of a novel we had read together, Daddy Long Legs, and the poem’s voice is very similar to the ‘joie d’vie’ of the first person narration of this novel. (Both of these poems are feature in the Stanford Online MOOC Ten Premodern Poems by Women.)
So I was quite optimistic but it was not to be. For the first 2 weeks Rachel point blank refused to look at any poems, instead preferring to bore me rigid with talk about all her favourite K-Pop artists and her friends Instagram and Snapchat posts (as she always does) before we turned to taking a look at the novel her class is reading this year (The Giver).
On the third week she forgot her copy of the book and so I insisted we read a poem (after more K-Pop chat). I wanted to show her Langston Hughes’ “Dinner Guest: Me” because her class read his short story Thank You Ma'am last year. Sad to say she didn’t even recognise the author’s name but remember the story when I told her he was the writer. She read through the poem and declared she didn’t understand it, clearly hoping that could be an end to it. But I insisted we go through line by line and discuss it.
I asked her to imagine what it would if she was the only Chinese person at a dinner when all the other guests were white. She couldn’t connect with why this might be an issue, but when I asked her if these other guests were asking questions such as ‘Do you know how to use a knife and fork?’ or ‘Do you only eat rice?’ she seemed to understand at a basic level what Hughes is driving at in the first stanza.
By the second stanza however she had lost all interest and in the end I just started feeding her ‘answers’ as to what might be meant. I was particularly annoyed because she could not even remember something happening here in Hong Kong that relates to the idea of ‘just wait’ (the student protests about universal suffrage of September-October 2014). Rachel goes to one of the top girl’s schools here in Hong Kong and they gave her an iPad when she enrolled to help with her studies. It’s this f***ing device that produces all the K-Pop and school friend pictures and she had it running some chat app game while we were looking at the poem. Hence her disinterest and my frustration. We work in her clubhouse, away from Mum’s prying eyes, and as the only adult my ‘authority’ can be easily ignored!
I had also wanted to show her Countee Cullen's "Incident" because I think there is an interesting juxtaposition between it and “Thank You Ma’am”, but by this point we had run out of time and I had completely run out of enthusiasm. I might show her this sometime in the future but given that this week I had to sit through a whole hour of K-Pop I’m not hopeful.
Kelly - 16, Form 5 (11th Grade)
I’ve been teaching Kelly off and on for about 4 years and so know her quite well. She is a highly intelligent young lady who, like so many Hong Kong students, suffers from the stress of parental expectation. So I thought she might appreciate Lorine Niedecker's “Grandfather advised me”.
Wrong.
Kelly wasn’t particularly enthusiastic in the first place, and just couldn’t get her head around such a short poem. She had a real hang up over the use of the word condense, which she knows all too well from physics. She struggled with its different meaning here and just couldn’t connect with the poem at all, even the idea of the adult grandfather telling the poet not learn a trade, which she didn’t really understand in either its specific use or more broader use. All she really wanted to do was to get back to our usual habit of reading BBC ‘The English We Speak’ dialogues.
Which we did, but not before I questioned her as to whether she learnt any poetry at school. She told me she did. Knowing that there are many important Chinese poets from long ago, I asked her if there were many modern Chinese poets she was aware of. She told me that there were many and so I asked her to write down their names so I could show other students and see if they knew them. I don’t speak or read Chinese, but looking at her as she was writing it was very clear that this was not a list but an actual poem and sure enough it was, by a poet called Li Bai who was born in 701 CE. Not exactly modern, so again more misunderstanding, and this pretty much sums up the whole session.
Jeremy - 12, Form 1 (7th grade)
The first time I saw Jeremey after making my promise to Al I had not printed off any poems. But I mentioned the idea to him for next week and he was enthusiastic. So much so he jumped up and came back with a copy of Felicia Dorothea Hermans' Casabianca (The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck) which unbeknownst to me he had been reading for school. So we took a look at it line by line but it is pretty much a straight piece of poetry from the Romantic Era.
When I arrived at his home the next week I showed him the poem that Kelly (who is a family friend) had written out and sure enough he knew it. He then rushed to and found a book of Tang poetry which he proudly announced at take the editor 10 years to translate into English (putting Christian Bok’s mere 7 year effort to shame!). So we took a look at a few Li Bai poems and then I managed to find a few that I know by a poet named Du Fu (thank you ChinaX!).
After this I thought I would show him John Peale Bishop’s "A Recollection" because it follows in the same tradition of Casabianca’s flowery adjectives and adverbs, with the added punchline, which I was certain Jeremy would enjoy.
He didn’t recognise the sonnet form, but when I told him he remembered being taught it at school. He also found a handout on poetic tools and we went through the poem and found the use of alliteration. Conceptually he had a real problem with the idea of descending and it took a lot of prompting on my part. The word was only vaguely familiar, and living in an apartment the idea of a staircase is somewhat alien (although they have them at all the schools!). When I got him to grasp this was a staircase he still struggled to see where ‘she’ might be coming from (an upstairs bedroom is a very alien concept here) and thus why she might have to descent (to go out the front door).
Anyway he enjoyed the poem and its language somewhat, without being overly impressed. Then I asked him to take another look, which he did, but he could not spot the ‘real’ message. Finally I covered the rest of the text and I can report to you that he laughed without stopping for something close to five minutes! In one of the later videos Al, you say you would not give this poem to a 7th grader. Well I did and he thought it was the best thing he’d ever come across and now he wants to see more poems. He even showed his mum as she passed by (we work at the dining room table) and luckily she thought it was funny too (a bit of a heart in the mouth moment for me!).
At this point he suddenly remember ‘hidden messages’ in Li Bai's poems being revealed last year. These two messages ‘predicted Brazil being beaten 7-1 by Germany, and Germany going on to defeat Argentina. Quite a feat for a poet who was kicking around some 700 years ago! He had then on his phone as they had been doing the rounds and he had me believing that this coincidence of characters might have actually happened, but a quick search on the internet revealed it was a hoax and one that offended those on the mainland who revere Li Bai.
So all in all Jeremy was a very happy student after this session and wants more poems. I thought that the trilogy by the Plum Thief, his Wife and his Parodier (wasn’t this the name of a Peter Greenaway movie?) might appeal to his sense of humour. But sadly a bout of bronchitis, and the need to prepare for an exam have prevented this from happening as of yet.
But after the failures with Rachel and Kelly it is nice to have Jeremy's name in the success list.
Martin - 14, Form 3 (9th grade)
He didn’t recognise it as a sonnet at first but with a little bit of prompting he worked it out and said he had studied it when his class read Romeo and Juliet. This was surprising because I thought they had only read a ‘storified’ version of the play and it was very pleasing to learn that he had been exposed to Shakespeare’s original language. With a bit more prompting he was able to remember our encountering the idea of a sonnet in A Wrinkle in Time as well and what we had discussed, which was very gratifying.
We looked at the language of the poem, its metaphors and its direct appeals. He particularly like the idea of the use of ‘high’ language to show that this is a man whom they intend to kill and not an animal. He liked the idea of Shakespeare's style and language moving across the Atlantic to a Jamaican in New York and from this back to England to Winston Churchill when England is at its darkest hour. He couldn’t quite get the idea that what the ‘us’ of the poem might be experiencing is universal but when I suggested that this might be how the British treated the Chinese in Hong Kong his eyes lit up and he exclaimed ‘Oh course - the Opium War, I should know this. I have been studying it in history for the past 3 years!’. So this was very gratifying to make this connection and I was then able to reveal that the poem was about a specific experience by African Americans and from there we able to talk about the history of black people in America and how the poem reflects this.
We looked at it line by line and thought about the relationship between the speaker and the bank. We decided it was best described as predator and prey and found it appealing that the ‘prey’ would speak in the imperative to the ‘predator’ in lines 1, 5 and 6.
We also appreciated both the alliteration and the allusion of ‘claws of clause’ and had a think about the ambiguity of ‘scratch out’. We decided that on the basis of probability it referred to removing ‘the land’ from the previous line to leave just the imperative ‘leave me’, but like the idea that reference to ‘the land’ could be scratched out of the contract thus allowing her to be left the land.
In the end what we both appreciated was that so much could be expressed in a poem of a mere 8 lines. As a teacher I felt as I did after our session with Claude McKay that this was time well spent developing and sharpening key critical thinking skills.
At this point Martin was very enthusiastic about these poems and asked me to stay longer so we could take a look at another. So I took out “A Recollection” and we noted its sonnet form and started to look at it line by line. Like Jeremy, Martin was lost with the idea of descending, which I could get him to understand with prompting. We work at his dining table but have had in the past a few lessons in his clubhouse on some very comfortable sofas that sit at the bottom of a quite majestic staircase. In the end prompting failed and I just had to explain. And it was at this point he spotted ‘the message’.
So that ended up all further analysis of the language of the poem. He didn’t laugh as long and as hard as Jeremy but he did get very excited to see it there. The immediate connection he drew from this is that this was the type of poem the Riddler had sent to his love Miss Kringle! News to me but very gratifying to see a kid make a connection.
Then he wanted to go back and take another look at “If We Must Die”, just in case there was a hidden message there. Al, I’m sorry to say that Claude McKay gave us a warning about ISIS that we all went and ignored!
So at this point I was really happy to see a kid so fired up about a poem. And then he recalled a video he seen on YouTube about secret messages in the first version of Nintendo’s Pokemon game. And I had to sit through that for about 30 minutes as he translated this horrendously boring Taiwanese video to me. A real downer for me after having such a vibrant and intellectually stimulating conversation about these two poems. But that’s the way it goes sometimes!
Since then we have gone back to Jules Verne and maybe that is for the best!
Conclusion
So that is my teaching experience with these poems for the past 4 weeks. Some wins, some losses, but most importantly of all, the old adage that you learn more when you teach has certainly proved true!
And I’m so glad to have finally got all this down. It’s been building in my head for the past 4 weeks. I’ve read it and looked for my usual typos but please forgive any that remain as I now have to rush off to see yet another kid.
