In his penultimate semester, our son, a double-degree senior in business and economics at Large Public U., discovered he was three humanities credits shy of what he would need to graduate. We weren’t that surprised.
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In his penultimate semester, our son, a double-degree senior in business and economics at Large Public U., discovered he was three humanities credits shy of what he would need to graduate. We weren’t that surprised.
What did surprise us was the course he chose. Who would have thought that our ESPN-watching undergraduate, whose favorite courses were game theory, corporate finance, and basketball, would choose “What Is Poetry?”
As an econ student, he understood that the United States in 2011 had the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression. Undaunted, he hoped his degrees would land him a job, preferably in finance, with a large company, ideally not far away, where he might hang out in the city on weekends with his friends.
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But first he had to graduate. Which was how “What Is Poetry?” entered our lives.
Son to mother in car after one of his infrequent visits home: “So have you ever heard of a song called ‘Richard Cory’? It’s by Simon and somebody.”
“Garfunkel. Simon and Garfunkel. Of course I know ‘Richard Cory’!” I pictured the Sounds of Silence album I owned in high school.
“It was a poem,” he said. “A 19th-century poem by an American writer, I forget who. Simon and Garfinkel just set it to music.”
“Garfunkel. Art Garfunkel. I never knew that about ‘Richard Cory.’”
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“‘Mary Hamilton’ — that was a poem, too. It was sung by that woman you and Dad listen to.”
“Joan Baez.”
“Yeah, her. That was a poem written by Anonymous. OK, gotta go. Have a good day.”
Let me tell you something about mothers and sons. One minute you are reading them A.A. Milne, and the next minute they are adults watching boxing on TV with the guys, and you haven’t talked to them about poetry for 17 years.
“What Is Poetry?,” only a day into the semester, was thus offering up promising fodder for mother-son dialogue, which usually starts with “Mom, be a doll and mend these gym shorts” or “Could you wash this stuff, please?”
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Soon, on another visit home, pages of poems, copied out by hand, appeared on the breakfast table.
“When I have fears that I may cease to be…,” I read out one morning as our son devoured a box of Honey Puffs.
“Keats,” he said, mouth full. “Iambic pentameter, just like Shakespeare’s sonnets.”
“Really?”
“All Shakespeare’s sonnets are iambic pentameter,” he said authoritatively. “You knew that, right?”
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I didn’t. Or if I did, I forgot. He gave me the “How could such a stupid person possibly be my parent?” look.
One morning we came downstairs to find a poem on the kitchen counter, title obscured, with a note: “Everybody: Read this poem. What do you think it is about?”
Meanwhile, somewhere in the state of Colorado, armed to the teeth
with thousands of flowers
two boys entered the front door of their own high school
and for almost four hours
Gave floral tributes to fellow students and members of staff,
beginning with red roses.
The lines are from “Killing Time,” by Simon Armitage. You didn’t need a textbook to know they were about Columbine High School.
“You get why he used flowers for the metaphor, right?” our son asked me on the way to the subway.
“Um, irony?”
“Well, du-uh. Yeah, that. And what was the name of the high school?”
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“Oh, right. Columbine. I hadn’t thought of that.”
“I was so young when that happened.”
Right, I thought. You were 10. And you’re young now, too. But I didn’t say that. I asked him how much he remembered about Columbine. Had we adults tried to protect him from that? Neither of us could remember.
Before the final, I was assigned a role: I was to ask our son poetry terms, to which he would respond with the definitions he had memorized an hour before.
“Alliteration.”
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(Disdainfully.) “I know what alliteration is: Peter Piper picked. Next.”
“Anapest.”
“A metrical foot of three syllables where the first two aren’t stressed. Seventeen. Next.
“Apostrophe.”
“Mom, she’s not going to ask them in alphabetical order.”
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With the final the day after next, our son did what every successful student who hasn’t studied does. He drank lots of coffee and did not go to sleep. Then he methodically copied out dozens of poems by hand. His professor would be reading a line; the students would have to write down the title of the poem, its author, and something about the poem’s meter or structure.
After the exam, I asked him how it went.
“Good. I got a 93.”
In the debates over accountability and “learning outcomes,” over whether college is worth the money, there’s a trend toward teaching every subject, even those in the humanities, as a marketable tool you can use on the job. So college isn’t about the difference between “Poppies in July” and “Poppies in October” (“Have you ever heard of Sylvia Plath?” was another question in the car), but about the skills you learn when you compare poems that way.
So in the fall, as he was sending out résumés to banks, I asked the business student what he had gained from his poetry class. Had he learned how to make an argument, to think in a different way?
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“Maybe some talking points,” he said.
What, then, is poetry? Powerful stuff; who knows? If it helped a business student talk with his mother, maybe it even came in handy on the job market.
Heidi Landecker is a copy editor at The Chronicle. Her son is an economist in Washington, D.C.