Poetry Response Essay

On the first day of my Literary Genres class, an undergraduate literature survey, I asked my students what a poem was, and how they might differentiate it from, say, a novel or a play. Their responses were remarkably similar. All of them agreed that a poem had to look different on the page; to be a poem, it had to orient its words through stanzas, lines, and line breaks differently than prose or drama would. And most of them added that poems pay attention to language in some special way—but they had no idea how—and whatever that attention was, it was that which made poems hard to understand. I then asked them to rank the four genres we would be studying—poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and drama—in order of their understanding and comfort level

And I repeated this ad nauseam as scripture to anyone who would listen, like some poetry street preacher in the English department hallways. (I imagine I was not well-liked during exam week.) But it was at that moment, packing up my extra syllabi, that I started to doubt the simplicity and (seeming) truth of this alleged gospel. It felt incomplete, somehow. It felt too easy. So: I went home, made some cookies, and sat down with my favorite poem, Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.” I was about to teach the poem to my students in three weeks, to show them how to read “One Art” as a mastery of the villanelle form just as the poem was transforming that form—as my class motto read in the syllabus, “All of the texts we read will break the rules.” I wanted them to get excited about the poem’s formal tricks and turns just like I had when I read it in that Poetry 101 class so long ago. So it was beyond time to test my professor’s hypothesis: if I read the poem—and even if I read it almost like a formal excavation (which is how I was taught—architecturally), then would I feel something? And would that feeling, whatever it was, make “One Art” a