Abstract
Studies continue to demonstrate that many people are dismayingly (and increasingly) unable to distinguish dubious from credible sources. This, coupled with the fact that a majority of Americans get their news from social media, reinforces the need for educators to help their students acquire a versatile set of literacy practices. This chapter proposes, first, that poetry is a beneficial site for developing and refining these practices, and, second, that analyzing poems through the lens of the poetic turn is a robust method for doing so. With reference to the critical work of John Crowe Ransom, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Michael Theune, and Randall Jarrell, this chapter calls for more instructional attention to be paid to structural elements of poems, as this attention will help students build confidence in analyzing poetry while attuning them to the linguistic and rhetorical subtleties necessary for sorting reliable information from streams of dubious data.
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Notes
- 1.
Though other New Critics invoked structure as well, no others were able to establish its function and operations with such clarity and rigor. Cleanth Brooks was onto it when he noted that the structure is “the ordering of the material,” which is also “the solution” (1947, 194) of the problem the poem sets out to solve or pose, but he omitted the essential complement of texture that Ransom knew, wisely, was just as critical to the poem being poetic.
- 2.
It is important to note, however obviously, that haikus and sonnets come to us from vastly different cultural spaces and traditions and utilize formal patterns which do not necessarily translate from one to the other: the haiku dispenses completely with rhyme and repetition and, though it stipulates line length, it does so without stipulating a meter—just a syllable count. However, the turn is common to these poems and allows us to consider the harmony of structure and form, and not the poem’s deployment of historically-vetted, monocultural formal elements, as an important condition of any poem’s formation. By approaching poems at their points of commonality—i.e. the turn—we are better able to place different poetic traditions in conversation and not in opposition—an important component of multicultural, civic literacy.
- 3.
Solmaz Sharif, “Vulnerability Study,” from Look. Copyright © 2016 by Solmaz Sharif. Reprinted with permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Graywolf Press. www.graywolfpress.org.
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Bracken, C. (2018). Expanding the Turn: Using Poetry to Prepare Students for a Post-Truth World. In: Kleppe, S., Sorby, A. (eds) Poetry and Pedagogy across the Lifespan. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90433-7_16
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