Genre decisions and the reading of

poetry: Development through the

school years

Joan Peskin

University of Toronto

Funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research council of Canada grant and a grant

from the Spencer foundation.

Thanks to Anjali Lowe, Saba Mir, Lisa-Marie Collimore & Marilyn

Ricketts-Lindsay for help with data collection and coding.

Introduction

Formalists: poetic interpretation is driven by the intrinsic textual features of a poem (e.g. Jakobson, 1987; Makarovsky, 1964; Shklovsky, 1965)

Interpretation is Text-driven

Conventionalists: genre-driven conventional expectations direct the reader to generate meanings (Culler, 1976; Fish, 1980; Schmidt, 1989)

Interpretation is Reader-driven

“Modified Conventionalist” stance: Both reader-

driven and text-driven (Hanauer, 1998; 2001;

Carminati et. al.).

Linguistic and typographic features of the poem

Decision about the genre

1. Genre-specific conventional expectations

2. Appreciation of textual features.

Q:Does this only apply to experience readers?

Reader-driven processes

(Genre-specific Conventional Expectations)

1. Significance: (Culler, 1994)

2. The convention of thematic unity

3. Resistance to automatic understanding: (Culler,

1994; Groeben & Schreier, 1998; Schmidt, 1989)

Multiple meanings

4. Symbolic extrapolation (Culler, 1994; Frye, 1978):

“The basis of poetic expression is the

metaphor”

Text-driven processes

(Textual features)

“Defamiliarization” -Textual features make the

familiar “strange” thereby call attention to

themselves

Forces reader to focus on form (form amplifies

content)

Foregrounding devices:

Deviation • e.g. unusual word order

Parallelism • e.g. similar features (e.g., assonance, repetition, and

alliteration)

• opposite features (e.g., binary oppositions)

Poetry Expertise

Gradual buildup of a cohesive network of

concepts (Ericsson, 2002; Sternberg & Horvath, 1995)

Experts see large and meaningful patterns.

Study on expertise when reading difficult poetry:

8 Ph.D candidates versus 8 novices

Think-aloud study

On a drop of dew Andrew Marvell

Sustained metaphor

On a drop of dew Andrew Marvell

Experts categorized poem in terms of historical

period/author, which then directed what they

noticed in the text.

“..words like Manna, so it’s going to have a

religious meaning..

"I’m seeing an imaginary transparency (over

the poem) which has Donne’s name at the

bottom with notes in the margin“

“I’m scanning up and down looking for

words that sort of pop off the page. Manna...

Orient…Coy…Is there a pattern?”

RESULTS

Text – driven processes (Textual features)

1.Structure:

“The Sun ends the first part, Till the warm Sun pitty it’s

Pain, and ends the poem itself, Into the glories of th’

Almighty Sun. Not that this tells me anything at the moment

yet. I‟m just looking for patterns.”

Experts Novices

Textual feature Poem A Poem B Poem A Poem B

Textual Structure as

Cue to Meaning

21(8)

12(8)

1(1)

5(3)

2. Binary oppositions: Expert: “One of the things that comes right away is the definite sense of polarity,

of inside, outside, where elements are first established as something distinct

and then at some point dissolve into each other. “

Novice: “So you've got sort of an equation, or you've got a scale there, but it

doesn't give me any sense of clarity. The one word seems to negate the other

somehow, and it just jumbles everything for me. I don't like lines like these.

They just jumble things.”

E Experts Novices

Textual feature Poem A Poem B Poem A Poem B

1.Structure as Cue

2.Meaning at the locus

Of Binary Oppositions

21(8)

11(6)

12(8)

7(6)

1(1)

4(3)

5(3)

1(1)

3. Language as Cue: Expert: (After reading the last line, "Into the Glories of th‟ Almighty

Sun“)

“The word, Sun, is probably a play on son, like Jesus, and it gets

Christian overtones.”

Experts Novices

Textual feature Poem A Poem B Poem A Poem B

3. Language as cue/

Word-play

11 (6)

4(3)

1(1)

0(0)

RESULTS related to Reader-driven

processes (conventional expectations)

- Guided most novice readings of both poems

1. Rule of Significance: (Culler, 1994)

“I’m not sure if the poet is writing this to point

out… the importance of Dew … how the smallest

little thing that we take for granted should be

considered, and we should take some time to,

excuse the expression, stop and smell the roses.”

2. The convention of thematic unity

“I can get many streams of ideas but I don't know

how to tie them together. What is he telling me?”

“It seems to be funneling, like pinning each thing

on to the previous thing, feeling a little more

secure about what I have established.”

“I don’t know, some of the phrases don’t, I’m sure

they, like, fit together, but I can’t see how they fit

together.”

3. Symbolic extrapolation (Culler, 1994; Frye, 1978):

“The poem seems to be not really filled with

metaphors and similes but pretty straightforward,

when you first look at it.”

The Development of Poetic Literacy during

the School Years (Peskin, Discourse Processes, 2010)

Paradigm: poems in original form and in

shape of prose texts. (Genres)

Major Research Questions

At what age does the genre of poetry trigger

1) the conventional expectations?

2) Observation of textual features ?

3) Genre-categorization?

Minor Research Questions

4) Do students spend more time reading the poetic

than the prose texts?

5) Are there differences in personal response

when reading the passages in prose versus

poetic form?

Participants

Two schools with detailed poetry curriculum.

48 students tested using think-aloud methodology: 16 students in each of grades

4 (9/10 years),

8 (13/14 years)

12 (17/18 years)

Procedure 4 sets of paired texts:

--two genuine poems also presented as prose (William Carlos Williams & Robert Creeley.

--two short prose passages also presented as poems

To rule out the confound of content, all participants read all 8 texts order counterbalanced

Think aloud

Timed

Response Rating scale:

1. Rate your enjoyment of this reading on a scale from 1- 10, 10 being 'I greatly enjoyed reading this' and 1 being 'I did not enjoy this.'

2. Rate whether you felt any emotion when reading the passage …

3. Rate whether reading the passage made you create images in your mind…

Underneath the tree on some soft grass I

sat, I watched two happy woodpeckers be

disturbed by my presence. And why not, I

thought to myself, why not.

Underneath the tree on some

soft grass I sat, I

watched two happy

woodpeckers be dis-

turbed by my presence. And

why not, I thought to

myself, why

not.

RESULTS: Q1) Conventional

Expectations

17 years

Mean SD

Poems 3.63 3.07

Prose .88 1.50

Q1. CONVENTIONAL EXPECTATIONS

A. The rule of Significance

“He‟s talking about the environment versus

the human race.”

“Getting to the root message is not so clear”

Q1. CONVENTIONAL EXPECTATIONS

B. Resistance to automatic

understanding

“Ok, I‟m gonna assume that there‟s something

beyond the surface of what‟s being said here”

“Ok, it‟s open to two suggestions for

everything...you can think outside the box.”

Q1. CONVENTIONAL EXPECTATIONS

C. Symbolic extrapolation

“This is a tricky poem to sort of

decipher..Woodpeckers could be representing

two people in a relationship that‟s intimate.”

“I‟m just going over possible reasons they

split it up like that. Like could it be symbols?

RESULTS Q1) Conventional

expectations (cont.d)

9 years 13 years 17 years

Mean SD Mean SD Mean SD

Poems .06 .25 .31 .60 3.63 3.07

Prose .00 .00 .31 .70 .88 1.50

RESULTS Q.2) Appreciation of Textual

features

17-year-olds

Mean SD

Poems 3.31 3.59

Prose .50 0.82

RESULTS Q.2) Appreciation of Textual

features

A) Repetition

“the way she repeats the „Why not… Why

not?‟ it‟s like she is trying to show something

happened to her and she is upset.”

RESULTS Q.2) Appreciation of Textual

features

B) Sound Textures

Sound textures amplify meaning

e.g. emotional effect:

dis-

turbed

Underneath the tree on some

soft grass I sat, I

watched two happy

woodpeckers be dis-

turbed by my presence. And

why not, I thought to

myself, why

not.

RESULTS Q2) Textual features

(Younger students)

13-year-olds did not think about the Textual features more when reading the poems than prose

9-year-olds

13-year-olds

17-year-olds

M SD M SD M SD

Poems .06 .25 .44 .73 3.31 3.59

Prose .00 .00 .13 .34 .50 0.82

Q.3) Genre categorization

Frequent among 17-year-old AND 13-year-olds.

“It‟s split into four stanzas…yeah…four two-line

stanzas…I‟m assuming that this is a poem.”

9 years: “…it‟s a nice kind of little paragraph,

and you can tell a lot about this thing, this story.

Q.4) TIME taken reading Prose versus

Poetry

Q.5) Ratings of Personal Responses

A. Enjoyment

Q.5) Ratings of Personal Responses

B. Emotion

Summary of results

17-year-olds:

Knowledge of conventional expectations and textual

features

Spent more time processing texts in poetic form

Enjoyed the poems more

Higher ratings for emotion and imagery.

13-year-olds

Noticed typographical elements and made genre-

categorizations

9-year-olds XXX

Conclusion

Poetic Literacy seems to involve a long

process of literary education.