The Eye of the Beholder

“What is literature? Is it different than other kinds of texts that we encounter? If so, what’s the difference?”

Friends, I’ll admit it: asking teenagers questions that are, in a word, bonkers is one of my new favorite hobbies.

Some of you already know this, but I recently took the plunge into teaching upper school English at a rigorous new charter school. As I type this, we’re well into our second week of school and I’m positively dizzy from the newness, the excitement of it all (and it’s not just the fresh paint, I promise) because, as it happens each and every time I gear up to teach a new batch of students, I find myself seeing poetry from a new perspective. This time, I’m seeing it through the eyes some odd hundred of 13, 14, and 15 year olds.

So I asked them, “What’s literature?” I didn’t have an answer in mind, which is perhaps a terrible thing to do to a wonderfully bright bunch of 8th graders. I’ll admit, I just wanted to see what they came up with, how they’d respond to a Big Question. I put them in groups and eavesdropped.

“It’s just a feeling, you know? That feeling? At the back of your neck?”

“It’s not just anything. It has to do with story, but not, like, entirely and just stories, right?”

“I feel like literature is really in the eye of the beholder. Like, Harry Potter is literature to me, but maybe not to some of our teachers?”

“The language is fancy.” “No, it’s sophisticated.”

In short, I’m feeling lucky. So far, we’ve read a tangle of poems (like a murder of crows, you know) and are working on finding our best way to talk about poetry. For me, it’s an opportunity to get back to a place where using language to examine language is an altogether new and thrilling thing. Reading Sara’s post on workshopping and Brian Teare got me thinking back on my own workshops, what they did for me, and how much the voices of my colleagues—my friends—have become inextricably linked to certain poems, certain moments.

May this be a year of new links. Here’s to chain after chain after chain of them.