CREATIVITY/IMAGINATION
JUNE 8, 2011. A funny thing happens when you try to teach students a class in poetry. You end up carving a poem into lots of pieces, and you tend to impose some sort of system on it.
Of course, that’s counterproductive, because the poem isn’t a system, and it isn’t meant to be dissected like a dead frog.
I found an interesting way around this.
We would read a great poem in class. Dylan Thomas, Yeats, Hart Crane. We’d read it out loud six or seven times, so the sound would come through and the meaning would gradually sink in. Then I’d tell the students to write something about the poem. Anything. That was their between-class assignment. Write as much as they could about the poem.
When I got the assignments handed in, I’d take them home and read them, looking for a sentence here, a sentence there, that had a glint of fire and imagination…and I would circle those sentences.
The next class session, I’d read those sentences and indicate they had a spirit of poetry in them.
Then we’d move on to another poem.
Doing just this for a month or two, with poem after poem, some students began to get the idea. They began to make a connection between poetry and what they were writing. And so they’d dive deeper into that spirit of poetry in their own writing.
They made the shift from audience/spectator to creator. Which is the whole point.
When imagination is directed into psy-op PR and propaganda, one of the biggest preoccupations of this culture, you get something very different: passivity. Non-creation.
And that really is the objective. Holding a population in a kind of trance.
Breaking the trance, in the long run, leads to a future that is open, ifin the process, audience becomes actor, spectator becomes creator.
In that poetry class, the students, at the beginning, didn’t really feel they had what it took to create something. They were just looking to understand my system, my approach, so they could win a good grade. But I didn’t have a system. Instead, I turned the tables on them.
We ended up dealing, first-hand, with the fire of imagination. That was all the class was about.
I was just pointing to a sentence here, a phrase there, and saying, “This. This is it. This is something. You wrote it. Keep going.”
Imagination is never boring. It’s alive. It cuts through all sleep-inducing structures.
If you want to take this illustration (the poetry class) and extend it out to the whole of life, you’ll be walking a different road.
JON RAPPOPORT