Poetry at Trinity

Last year one of the junior girls announced that, according to an article she’d come across, most Americans do not read or hear more than one poem a year.

“That’s obviously really sad,” she said. “I mean, we read a poem every day, and it’s amazing how much beauty and experience of life we see in each one. It’s just sad to think that people are going around deprived of that vision.”

I tried not to betray my sense of triumph. I moved the class along. But hearing her did make me happier than I can say. For her, poetry was one of the fundamentals of life, one of the goods that she assumed will be around, like windows, or the art on the walls. I would say that’s true for most students here. Most of them appreciate poetry’s depth; all of them take for granted that poetry is part of life. And that’s as it should be.

Outside of Trinity, if you say you’ve been paging through a book of poems, or you recite a favorite verse, you’re likely to receive a quizzical look or two. Poetry intimidates us. A poem often defies immediate comprehension: if we scan it expecting to grasp it the same way we grasp an office memo, we’re likely to be rebuffed. I think people say that they dislike poetry, or can’t get into poetry,
for this reason. Because it’s not immediately clear to them, they figure it’s just not their thing—they can’t enjoy it.

What students at Trinity discover is that poetry speaks to our intuitive sense—imagination, sensibility, memory—more than it speaks to our powers of deduction. If we allow it to work on us this way, if we spend time on each image and see how it moves us, we’re likely to find the meaning as well. And it can take us further than prose, to deeper meaning, because it communicates in this subtler way. If we give a poem the time necessary to break it down, we can come to a firm understanding. Anyone can—it’s not just for the mystics. But you don’t have to turn a poem into prose in order to experience and enjoy it. The beauty and imagery will work on your heart even while it remains mysterious.

Trinity students have this intuitive experience of poetry all the time. They read and memorize poems in class. They might discuss them, they might not. If a ninth grader chooses to memorize an obscure poem in the manual, he may not get a chance to sit in a seminar about it, but he does have to chew on it for hours, letting his memory work on the strangeness of the lines. He will naturally gain some form of understanding about it, but, more importantly, we hope he will come to love it.

Outside of class, students sing poetry, shout lines of poetry at each other as they run across the field, and ponder the poem of the day posted by the water fountain as they wait for their bottle to fill. I love when students turn to me, screwing on the top of their Owalla, and tell me, “That’s a good poem.” Once a student sat down cross-legged on the floor during break and said, “Let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.” Once a substitute teacher made the mistake of mentioning Cortez to a group of seventh grade boys and was immediately overwhelmed by a chorus of: “When, with eagle eyes/he star’d at the Pacific …”

Poetry is natural to them. It’s natural to all of us. 21 st century man is strange in his wariness of the poetic. But for Trinity students, this aspect of human flourishing is bread and butter.