Approaches to teaching poetry

Thus far, I have brought Ted Hughes's poems into class with very little introduction. I have given them the poem and asked "What do you think?" I am trying to ascertain to what degree they are honoured and inspired and egged on by this challenge, and to what degree they are frustrated by being faced with stanzas of difficult to comprehend poetry without any help of guiding light. I remember how useless and senseless poetry felt in high school. I'm hoping to leave them with a taste for it, not a bitter aftertaste.

So today, when we looked at a poem which I had initially decided to ditch because it was too hard for the "sink or swim" "What do you think?" approach, I told them,

"We're going to try something different today. I'm going to tell you what the poem's about." There were some hushed "no!"s which made me smile on the inside. ("Aha!!! So you do like being asked to make sense of it on your own!!") I told them, "I submit to you" (echoing a business professor from college) "that this is a poem about the process of thinking."

We then considered the title of the poem.

"The Thought Fox."

This elicited more moans and groans. "What it is with Ted Hughes and animals?" demanded M. After several students gave their sarcastic responses "He was attacked by an animal as a child." "He is an animal." we got down to a deeper discussion of why a poet would choose to write about animals rather than humans.

People in this class are often quick to disregard comments by A, a student whose analysis is sometimes off base, but mostly he's just not popular. Today, when the class was asked "why would a poet write about animals?" he said "Hughes probably sees similarities between animals and humans and can use animals to show us things about our own experience through them," I saw others roll their eyes, just because it was A. I said "Let's assume that this is 100% correct. If Ahmad is right, then how can we explain Hughes's choice to write about these animals, rather than just writing about the humans to which they're similar?"

It felt nice to hold up as quite valuable Ahmad's comment, since he is often shot down, as much by his classmates' looks as their words. I'm not quite sure what my role is in protecting/defending him, since often what he says is way off the mark, but today it was nice to be able to hold him as an example of having a great, well-expressed idea.

D. said it might be that humans have too many millions of emotions. Animals are seen by us to be more one-dimensional, emotionally, so he can give a simpler portrayal of a living being through an animal.

A. had the somehow both complimentary and contrasting pint that animals have greater physical and emotional freedom than humans do, so our human limitations can be left behind by a poet who writes about animals. I found these very intriguing ideas.

We then watched two clips of foxes in the wild which I found last night, in case these students are not familiar with foxes:

http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/an-arctic-fox-sniffs-around-the-tundra-in-millers-stock-video-footage/3B2FBBF2_0165

http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/an-arctic-fox-walks-around-on-the-tundra-stock-video-footage/3B2FBBF2_0120

I also loved the commentary as the clip rolled:

So cute!
Look at those eyes, Miss, he wants to kill you!
He's the devil.
Why's he digging?
Is he digging?
Why isn't he red?
Oh my gosh so cute!

Then we finally read the poem aloud:

THE THOUGHT-FOX

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox,
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

I adore this poem. I gave them about 12 minutes to talk in groups about the way the ideas of the poem that we'd talked about (the fox, the process of thinking, animals used to tell human stories seemed to be represented.) It was fantastic. I got around to every group in both classes (something I've been working on, since Monica noticed my tendency to stay with one group for too long, leaving others potentially stuck for minutes at a time) and then we had a great feedback session, in which people from each group participated. 

Kanafe

Feedback sessions in which every group contributes something are one of the ways in which classes can earn points in the fourth quarter basket of doom challenge, where not just spelling words, but timely arrival, being prepared for class, and quality of feedback counts and earns them points. The prize for the class with the most points? Kanafe and an extra 100% quiz grade for the quarter.