The Fluidity of Literature

 

Mr. Eugene Lam

 

Over the course of the summer holiday, I was lucky enough to be invited to observe several poetry classes designed for gifted students. Here’s what I took away from the experience:

 

In the first half of the lesson, students were given the poem The Hairy Toe for a group drawing activity. The illustration attached to the original print of the poem was not given, which reduced the possibility of students copying from the example. Very often, students treat what is shown in the source material as “model answer”, which in ways limit their creativity.

 

On the application of Hirvela’s reader-response theory, Carlisle (2000) argues that the reading experience of literature evokes in readers’ “feelings, ideas, images, and characters”. Making use of figurative language, poetry is the perfect platform for readers to experience and guess freely the emotions a text tries to convey. Poetry gives students a vast space to express their own feelings towards the text with their own experience, in which there is no right or wrong. Therefore, Carlisle (2000) suggests readers to keep a reading log to document various aesthetic elements like thoughts and feelings as they read. For young learners, however, this might be a bit too dull and daunting, which defeats the purpose of facilitating in students the aesthetic transaction of poetry in the first place. Thus, it is more suitable to ask learners to express the feelings they gather from poems through drawing.

 

I was not allowed to take any pictures of their works, but I remember one group in particular, as they expressed their feelings towards the hairy toe beyond the poem. There was a heated discussion in one group arguing if that toe “smells”, for their experience with feet often results in a revolting sensation for the odor, or so I was told. This echoes with Carter & Long’s perspectives (1991) on how readers connect their life experience with literature. It is never mentioned in the poem the smell of the giant toe, but since they are not restricted to think in a certain way, students were able to expand the idea expressed in the poem with their own imagination. Similarly, another group tried to draw the entirety of the giant and had a debate about its gender, which might not have happened if the illustration was given.

 

I love listening to these debates and the reasons behind their arguments, because their personality was able to shine through them. And since this was a group activity, they had to tell each other the picture inside their heads, which allows students to notice that a piece of poem could contain a multitude of meaning, and that everyone has different interpretations. I believe this responds to Carlisle’s (2000) interpretation of the reader-response theory in the aspect of “picturing”, since the image readers got from reading the text was illustrated on paper.

 

For the second half of the lesson, each group is given a poem related to sounds. Some of the poems make use of onomatopoeia to represent sounds, while some cleverly describe sounds using different metaphors. One particularly interesting example is The First Men on Moon by Edwin Morgan. Many of the words used in the poem were invented by the poet and were like alien language. However, when you are halfway through the poem, you start to understand the alien language more, whereas the human astronaut becomes more incomprehensible, as you gradually “learn” the alien language. Like the drawing activity, I believe this poem also provided rooms for students to boost their creativity, since no one could be entirely sure of what the conversation is about, and any guess could be correct.

 

Literature is fluid, especially in the form of poetry. It is obvious to me that the fluidity of poetry allows students to realise their unlimited potential, once they are not confined by unnecessary rules or conventions.