Building on the opportunities of uncertainty and indeterminacy that have been identified by post-structuralism and reader-response criticism, we now see that a lack of closure encourages democratic accessibility. Previously, by acting as though there were final readings for texts, we denied students access to contested readings. When certainty dominates, we lose the joy of being a social reader and a member of a response-ible community. By inviting the expression of many perspectives, the teacher of literature promotes equity and mutuality, replaces power with negotiation. It is not easy to develop democratic competence when existing institutions of schooling are mostly concerned with order and control--with sorting people and keeping them apart. Yet as Dewey and other progressives have shown, every area of the curriculum can be organized democratically in terms of problem-solving, active learning, agenda negotiation, and interpersonal cooperation. The reading and writing of literature, however, offers the primary opportunity for developing these social abilities.
The teacher's theory of literary response is crucial in advancing the notion of democratic reading. Unless we're committed to collaborative approaches to textual uncertainty, the poem will only be an occasion for us to "display" correct answers. When this happens, "knowledge," which is subsequently fed back on some test, functions to separate and rank students, not to collectively draw out their individual resources. Without a democratic climate in the classroom, little more than literary information is conveyed. A teacher who assumes total command of what students may say in the literature lesson drives the pleasure of the text underground, if it doesn't disappear altogether. Students are naturally curious when it comes to aesthetics and values. The challenge is to exploit this curiosity by both pushing and trusting the students, not by infantilizing them. In this sense, one appropriate response to a work of art can often be the creation of some corresponding work of art. This "responding text" will satisfy to the extent it enriches and pushes forward the human conversation initiated by the original text. Joining with student readers in transactional ways, we help establish within them confidence and security. Then their own readings and interpretations might serve to arouse contact with others.
Democratic values are not just another guise for eclecticism, where the teacher employs indiscriminately any activity that grabs the students' "interests." A democratic position is committed to particular ways humans might transact with each other. It fosters ways of knowing that blend multiple perspectives into benevolent communities.
Much of the talk about how literature ennobles our lives, while appearing to be enlightened, actually is deeply undemocratic. Such talk places the message of literature in the text itself, not in the transaction between the text and the social-reader. To gain access to this "message," readers must rely on specially anointed reader/critics who serve as cultural priests. Accordingly, much literature "appreciation" teaching is about someone else's appreciation, not the students'. It disallows direct engagement with the literary work and often imparts a sense of despair that literature is irrelevant, something only for "smart" people. Literature does of course function in every culture by both reflecting and shaping cultural values and wisdom; however, in a system where people are trying to live together democratically, the disagreements of social readers serve as a hallmark. Compliant or certain readers diminish the play of literature and so impede the course of democracy.
Keeping the Text in Mind
As a teacher I hate to admit that I find it stressful to break with traditional patterns of control in the classroom. After mouthing the words independence and self-determination, I find myself turning around and bristling when the "obvious" response is not forthcoming from students. It's so much easier to lay down the law by offering preemptive readings. Or, attempting to appear more enlightened, I can welcome response, even as I subtly shape it to the "right" view by over-powering with argument and information. Let students display the scattered iron filings of their minds; then I, the all-knowing magnet, properly align them according to my field of force. Maybe I'll never be comfortable in having many disparate readings exit the same lesson at once. But what exactly these disparate readings are I'll never know, if I only listen to protect myself.
The open discussions that occur after students read a poem often seem from a world not my own. Many statements are highly judgmental and not what I would see as defensible. As the discussion proceeds, I often find it difficult to hold onto a thread of coherence that indicates some progress in learning and understanding. Faced with this feeling of incomprehension, a number of teacherly strategies might "focus" the rush of remarks. Not only can I control turn-taking, but I can begin to map the contributions onto my own preconceived pattern of understanding. By urging students in particular directions, I can force their contributions to serve in place of my own.
Sometimes there's the direct gambit of exhorting the students back to the text--"Where is the evidence for your claim in terms of the author's particular words?" This ploy, influenced by the close readings of new criticism, privileges the words on the page. If the students do not somehow get back to the text itself--and the text could equally be a piece of student writing--what's the point in having the author's words in the room? My secret hope here is that the text itself will reinforce my readings, and so I won't be annoyed by off-the-mark comments or suddenly find myself aggressively questioning the students, sending them the message that they are not getting the "correct" meaning of the text.
Of course the text itself doesn't always bring more order or coherence to the discussion. Still, I wonder about talk that appears to distance itself from the actual ink marks on the page. I'd prefer debating interpretation at the site of the author's actual words rather than amid the ungrounded speculations of our remembered readings. But this does not remove my dilemma. It seems I can be guilty of making students toe the line at either site.
One alternative I have experimented with involves performing the literary text. Borrowing from protocol or "reading-aloud" analysis as it's been applied to composing process research, I have students start at the beginning and take turns reading aloud one stanza or paragraph at a time. This is not, however, non-stop reading. The students interrupt themselves as they read, performing their inner monologue of questioning, connecting, and meaning-making. They comment on what confuses them, how their presuppositions link with an author's statements, how a kind of sense begins to emerge for them as the text unfolds, and how their responses relate to previous readings. There is also room for other students and myself to join in and extend the reflections and complicate the conversation.
What I've found is that the commentary that hovers just over the poem immediately before us differs greatly in quality from the aimless discussions that I'd formerly considered to be free and open. First, it sticks closely to the author's words, and, second, it prevents me from preempting open exploration by obliging me also to become a reader of the text side-by-side with the students. In this role, while I may have more experience, more "answers", I once again am trying to make fresh sense of the poem just as my students may be doing for the first time. Then, when students begin to feel confident enough to select their own texts for such a class reading, I imagine that together we've taken an important step toward intellectual independence.
Initiating Written Conversations
When I read poems with students, I continually struggle with my equilibrium. I want to find ways to encourage democratic response and dialogue without usurping control of the classroom conversation. I want students talking and involved, yet I don't want to badger them. Too readily I rush in to fill the discussion space that exists to be negotiated between us. Sharing responses in an open conversation, one in which all participants add to and revise their understandings of the texts on the basis of back and forth contributions--this obviously requires a tentative stance and a commitment to staying with the process even when at times the results appear muddled.
Such "collaborative reading" practices feel strange at first. They expose our individual readings as largely indeterminate and uncertain. Students can feel uncomfortable with the unrestricted, give-and-take, exploratory talk that I'm expecting of them--indeed trying to model--and so they have a tendency to be quiet. At they await directions from me, unwittingly I end up assuming the lead in the "discussion." But of course this defeats my purpose of having them discover their own intentions, responses, connections. Even as I seek methods to remove the safety net of my teacherly props, students cleverly discover ways of skirting around my constraints. Student classroom maneuvers often seem directed at locating some haven where they might escape the risks that uncertainty and learning always entail.
On one occasion when I was reading a poem--one I'd not previously seen--with a group of four 16-year-old girls, I wondered what would happen if we tried conversing with written words rather than spoken words. At the time I was in England, and the poem, which a colleague, Jenifer Smith, had provided, was "Grandmother's Ring" by Kathleen Jamie:
When, in the dark, old-fashioned street
of bungalows, a neighbor enquired
after my Gran, I tried to sound mature
but failed. My ten-years voice splintered
as I summonsed up the words "she died last night".
She left me a hideous ring.
It was laid away in velveteen, in some
secret place, to await `the future'
and forgotten. But, as I breezed
away my teens, something strange occurred:
It transformed like a chrysalis into a butterfly.
(Or perhaps it was I who'd changed?)
We took it out the day of my engagement: It was
exquisite. In the jeweller's shop
where I was scared to cough
my clothes all scruffed, he looked at me
in some disdain, then peered down his inch-long
telescope. And grew excited. Well, as much as such
sombre grey-legs ever dare. He called his student, "Look,
such rare, perfect colour!" then turned to me, began "My dear..."
She's laughing now. I can see her bloomers
(pink, with frills) wrapped around her laughing thighs.
I can visualise the slant-ceiling
of the attic room where she and I
sat for hours making stories, poems, rhymes:
She left me, too, a love of complicated sounds, and tales
of high adventure. Of musical words,
and made up scraps of nonsense.
So years on, when she had died, and I
was old enough to choose; she made me write.
Not doctor, or teach, or engineer.
And having made sure I'd always be poor,
she left me a ring worth a fortune. Sapphires and diamonds
shoved in my pocket, I walked home,
half-laughing through the pricking tears. How did she know?
The poem provided a moving and fresh recollection of what the poet had inherited from her grandmother: what had originally been considered a worthless ring turns out to be quite valuable, but such a worldly possession is contrasted to a love of language that is really the grandmother's more lasting legacy. Surely this poem would prompt these girls into responding.
Normally, as a way in, I would have "tried on" this poem by reading it several times, before asking the students to do likewise--a common enough teacher practice, one which focuses the class, catches our attention, and suspends the rush toward interpretation and judgment. But, as I explained to the girls--Kari, Tara, Glenda, and Melinda--we were just going to read and write to ourselves for awhile before talking--"Read the poem silently to yourself and in the margins begin writing any impressions or responses that come to you." Part of this writing, I assumed, might just include free associations. They could jot down brief comments, phrases, or questions at any point in their reading and at the end might begin a longer, "open" response. But these "directions" grew out of my "trained" expectations about how one should proceed as a reader; the girls initially showed little sense of how to proceed.
As the five of us began writing responses on the copies of the poem I'd distributed, I could see that they seemed hesitant. Their eyes moved from the poem to sneaking glances at each other, as if waiting for some signal that would tell them what to write. Perhaps the first responses they wrote down were so halting because they were working with someone unfamiliar; here I was, an American teacher whom they'd met only that morning. This alone could have been enough to dampen their enthusiasm for exploring possible connections between themselves and the poem--raising questions might expose their ignorance, make them appear inept and inadequate. Intrepidly, however, I kept scribbling away, making a mess of my page by including arrows and circles and writing a series of impressions and questions. At the bottom I wrote a brief comment that connected my own experience to the relationship being explored by the poem:
I never had close relationships with my grandparents but the story my mum tells about her grandmother seems to apply here. She tells endless stories of how my great-grandmother had such a zest for life and how this carried over to her. I wonder how we do inherit these traits and how in this poem the gift of language being passed on contrasts in an important way with the seeming insignificance of the ring.
Eventually, the girls began to put down more comments, but after about 15 minutes, everyone seemed to run out of steam, and it would then have been an obvious time to share our individual responses in open discussion. The moment, however, didn't yet seem right for talk. I felt that the girls, given what I could glance from their papers, had only scratched the surface. If we immediately began talking, once again I might end up overpowering the discussion, however indirectly, and the deeper range of responses that they might be feeling would be lost forever.
So I made up something new on the spot, a variation of note passing in class. I asked them to pass what they'd written along to the next person. Then, continuing our vow of silence, we'd respond in writing to the just written responses still fresh on the page. Next, we'd keep circulating these papers until everyone had at least one chance to respond to each set of marginalia. Such a written conversation might cut back on my dominant presence as teacher. By remaining silent, I hoped they would feel safe to work with the words that others were writing and not be immediately thrust into the performance mode of discussion.
Everyone passed their paper to the right and followed my directive to continue commenting on what was already written there--extending, questioning, elaborating, contradicting. This at first went slowly because the girls felt unsure of what was going on. Soon, however, they joined in the flow of this note passing, and we kept exchanging papers until each contained extensive marginalia from five hands. By then each of us was anxious to see what conversations had been carried out on our original papers.
Having granted the girls and myself this extra freedom to explore the poem, I was pleased to observe what I took to be an important shift occurring for them. They began to move from a conventional mode of literary explication, one that offered generalized "meanings" and focused on the formal aspects of how the poem was working, to a consideration of the poem's significance for their own lives. This didn't mean that these lines of verse were merely an occasion for discussing relationships with grandparents, but, once the girls felt more comfortable exploring these emotions, their stories of opportunity and regret began to surface.
This shift to a deeper level of understanding--many teachers, of course, regard "personal association" as the more superficial level--is reflected in what Tara wrote just before we began our discussion: "I did not have a close relationship with my grandfather and now he is dead all I have is a photo and his train set. He had so much to teach me but I was never there to learn. The poem makes me remember and wish I had done more." Her comment was prompted by reading what I'd written about my own relationship to my grandparents (quoted above). I found this contrasted in an important way with the initial response she'd written at the beginning of our session. There she'd kept personal matters at a safe distance by generalizing and using the language of abstraction: "The poem is very fast. It shows how age can change your view of things and how people that have passed away are never forgotten. It tries to tell us how love can be so difficult and complicated in different ways." This way of responding suggests that poetry is supposed to teach the reader a lesson, and, to be sure, in this instance the lesson for her includes some important sentiments. I read Tara's words as being safely poised between the abstract and the personal, written as they are in the prose of the impersonal literary essay. I wondered what experiences in Tara's life had given rise to such propositions.
Under Tara's comment I'd written, "I wonder if this is true of all people; so what makes the difference?" Glenda in turn replied to my query, "I think if they were special to you they will always have a very special, moving part of your memories." I then came back with, "What makes her special?" From my perspective Tara had set off a chain of thoughts well worth exploring, but such a chain remained incomplete without the events and incidents that peopled the actual lives of these students. Sooner or later, I surmised, we'd have to consider our own grandparents or at least our relationships with old people, who now may be held only in memory, if this poem was truly going to resonate for us.
As the written conversation evolved, it became clear that, because I had no ready answers as to the poem's "true" meaning and was ready to sanction personal stories, the girls had convened and entered their interrogation of the poem, not mine. By passing notes they saw it was safe to correct me by continuing a conversation in the margins, one which was no longer marginalized. This allowed us to be both playful and serious with our remarks. When Melinda wrote on her paper, "Gran lingers on in the attic," I pictured a creepy image and so responded, "Sounds like a Friday the 13th movie." Melinda's remark, however, led Tara in a different direction: "Yes, I agree the attic will always bring back Gran." Finally, after Melinda's paper circled back to me a second time, I wrote next to Tara's words, "memories triggered off by association."
On Tara's paper this back-and-forth writing can be seen starting with her comment, "From age ten to teens, very fast moving." Next to this I noted, "The notion of fast-moving didn't occur to me at all"; she then came back with, "In years not in motion!"--a misreading of my careless handwriting? At a later point she wrote, "Her age made the ring change in a visual aspect." I then added, "which translates into a monetary aspect," and she concluded, "Yes!"
Another conversational chain was begun by Glenda. Next to the line in the poem, "(Or perhaps it was I who'd changed)", she declared, "I don't think that line should be there. The line before was far too special to be followed by that." This clearly was a strong response on Glenda's part for on another paper she wrote once again, "I didn't like this line which followed such a great meaning line before." Tara took an opposing position, "I don't agree, it was her who had changed, not the ring," as did Melinda, "I disagree, strongly!!!, it is a sudden afterthought, a realization that she is a child no more." And finally Kari lent her support to both these objections, "I agree!", before I tagged on, "I wonder if I could get it without the parenthesis." With such a disagreement firmly located in the margins, we could return in our subsequent discussion to explore further the competing readings of this line.
On an earlier line of the poem, "to await 'the future'", Glenda's gloss, "like the ring her memories had to 'await the future'", drew further expanding remarks by the other girls. First Melinda added, "Maybe she needed time to accept that 'gran' was gone, maybe she needed to make a break." This led Tara to assertively confirm Melinda's more tentative query, "She did need time to accept her Grandmother's death." Finally, Kari offered a more elaborate extension of what Glenda had started, "Yes, I agree. But I don't think she wanted to deal with it straight away. And the ring symbolises this. It's put away, not to be looked at again until she is a lot older. (I'm not sure if that makes sense!)."
It does, of course, make perfect sense and shows how a particular conversational chain written out in this fashion can lead a reader to develop an understanding by building on a theme or question initiated by others. We'll never know whether, independent of this written conversation, Kari would have made such an association between the time a person needs to "adjust" to a death and the ring being put away. On this occasion at least, working on the poem silently in concert with others seemed to prompt and push the girls beyond the first comments they'd made independently.
In many instances, once a line of thought was opened, most of us felt compelled to throw in our own reactions. Kari opened her paper with, "It's a sad poem. I would imagine Grans was a very fun loving lady. The girl was very close to her." Melinda added, "I don't think Gran would want to be remembered sad." I chimed in with, "I don't see it as a sad poem" and then promptly added, "So we need to resolve the `evidence'?" Tara, then rounded off this chain with, "moving maybe, sad?" Here was something we could pursue later, wondering about whether poems are sad or readers bring sadness to them.
Many questions were asked as we wrote in the margins, and sometimes a hesitant answer appeared. Kari: "Why should she sound mature?" Tara: "it can sound mature to try and cope with her loss?" Then I responded, but ended with my own question, "I guess this is from the point of view that as children sometimes we wanted to act 'grown-up' because we're practice playacting. I want to know why she thinks she failed or 'what is mature behavior at this point'?" Next to the phrase, "my clothes all scruffed," I wrote, "Why this line?" Tara helped me out with, "Maybe its because she had never been rich and wanted to express this in her poem," and Melinda added, "It is the little ten yr old school girl."
There was much point counterpoint at the surface reading level as we played with individual lines and meanings. Similarly, the written conversation revealed a split among the girls at the deeper level of what the poem signified for each of them. Three of them talked about how the poem moved them. The emotional connection in each instance involved being drawn back to thoughts about how their grandparents figured importantly in their lives. As Melinda wrote, "It is a very touching poem, though it is about good things, it is ringed with sadness, it also symbolises change, the way in which somebody you knew long ago, comes back and is unrecognisable and you think--is it really them?"
In contrast, Kari admitted to a different story. Melinda had written first: "When I was about 7 my grandfather died. All I remember was a fat jolly man sitting by the fire rocking me on his knee. My gran lives with us now. My other grandfather I don't know his name & I have never seen him. I think the poem in a way symbolises lost treasure, a longing to know." But Kari showed how her underlying experience had led her to receive the poem in a quite different way: "I'm not close to any of my grandparents and I'm lucky enough to have all of them with me. I feel guilty when I see that others wish that they could know them better, but they don't have the chance and I do. I'm taking them for granted and I need to change this." In exploring these differences the girls quickly appreciated how the circumstances of life contribute powerfully to the stances we take as readers. Here the poem was also suggesting to Kari that there might be another way to live a relationship.
The whole emotional dimension of the poetic responses displayed by these girls, including the layers of Kari's disagreement, only surfaced because I was able to stay out of the way as a "teacher" long enough for it to develop. In joining the circle of response, my presence obviously set a tone, but finally all of our voices were being celebrated in both the margin commentary and the discussion that followed. By writing our responses within the network of a conversation, Tara, Melinda, Glenda, Kari, and I were able to create a spell of equality that helped us see layers of the poem we might otherwise not have noticed.
Variations on a Theme
Buoyed by the success of this "experiment,"(1) I have since tried any number of variations using writing in the margins to slow down and make more deliberate and more open the process of responding to poems. Much of the time, readers can be so caught up with what they want to say that they leave little room to take in the perspective of others. This tendency to show off one's individual wares seems best disrupted in small groups, where more informality and less competition prevails.
In one class of university students, I shuffled the deck by giving groups two versions of the same poem. The different copies were interspersed in each pile of six that I handed to the groups, so no one knew they weren't all getting the same version. Every student immediately began reading and then gradually wrote some marginalia. At some point after they made the first exchange of papers, the discovery came; but not everyone had the same experience of recognizing the different versions. In some instances, students had written on the back of the sheet, so the next person failed to look at the poem again, and assuming it was the same version, quickly began to write an answering response. Eventually, despite the vow of silence, someone shouted out, "Hey, these aren't the same poem!" Yet, rather than feel betrayed, the students attended even more closely to the language of the poem as they worked to sort out the two versions and their preferences.
In part this heightened involvement had been my intention, but such directives are better coming from the students themselves. While each version of the poem I used in that class had been written by the same author, either the teacher or students can create other drafts for consideration in this way by the small groups. The versions might be radically different, or perhaps there will only be subtle shifts in wording or phrasing that might at first go undetected. The point is not so much to finely tune a student's sense of literary form as it is to keep her being a contributor, not just a expropriator, when it comes to talking about her reading of literary texts. Indeed, many students themselves begin to select poems for discussion, once they discover that the classroom forum exists to serve their purposes.
On another occasion I gave each of the six group members a separate poem from Counterpoint, a collection by R. S. Thomas. These poems had specifically been arranged by Thomas to open a sequence of short religious meditations he'd entitled "BC." The first poem contains passages like, "If you can imagine a brow puckered/ before thought, imagine this page/ immaculately conceived/ in the first tree, with man rising/ from all fours endlessly to begin/ puckering it with his language." In this vein, the last sentence of the sixth poem reads, ". . . Wiser/ the Buddha who, though he looked/ long, had no name for the packed/ bud never to become a flower." Thomas appeared to me to be thinking in terms of some global historical development, but the clues were subtle at best. I wondered what kind of sequence readers would place these poems in if they originally came upon them in no particular order, and what kinds of arguments they would choose to justify their selections. So I asked the groups of graduate students to hammer out some kind of consensus regarding what sequence worked best for them.
Normally they would have been able to pass the poems around and make individual choices before trying to negotiate a group decision; however, always on the lookout for a new wrinkle to push the students into collective autonomy, I asked them not to let anyone else see their sheets. Instead, they could only read their individual poems aloud, letting them be taken in solely through the other members' ears. This caused quite a stir, but it awakened in them a deeper sense of the importance of sound and repetition in poetry. Thus all members read the poem they had been given numerous times to the rest of the group in order that everyone might have access to it.
I was amazed at how they stuck with this, reading orally over and over--and discovering in the process that reading well took some conscious effort. Still, with each reading came improvement in rhythm, pacing, and emphasis, along with an increased commitment to the poem they were reading. Each reading was interspersed with some commentary, and the students who were listening occasionally wrote down a phrase or two, but mostly they showed a concentrated effort in staying with the sound of the words as the words began to fall into a discernable pattern from poem to poem. In negotiating an order for the poems, the students began to discover how words and themes connected across the poems. Somehow the reading repetitions placed the individual poems in their heads in a way that doesn't seem to happen when we receive the printed page only through our eyes. This activity lasted almost an hour, and, at the end of class when I left, one group was still going strong. What mysteries in their own responses had each student at last been authorized to discover?