In my experience, it’s rare to encounter an undergraduate student who will admit to liking poetry. Often, students will say, outright, “I don’t like poetry.” When I ask what they mean by “poetry,” they are hard pressed to answer. Generally, they seem to mean the kind of poetry taught in English classes, and by that they seem to mean what they take to be the hidebound, the overly familiar, and /or the boring—a reaction that seems to stem from how poetry has generally been presented to them. These same students will readily admit to liking, even loving, say, hip-hop; and all of them have their favorite popular songs. But they don’t think of these things as “poetry,” which of course they are. (How much is “good” poetry is, of course, another question.) In any case, I find that reading William Carlos Williams with them—both his poetry and his revolutionary comments on ‘form”—can widen their horizons considerably, as Williams does with mine every time I come back to him. Sometimes in discussing him with students I relate both his poetry and his theory to the Russian Formalists’ concept of ostraneniye or “making [it] strange,” as articulated in particular by Viktor Shklovsy: “art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony”—in other words, to cut through habitual, reflexive ways of seeing and see things newly and in all their strangeness. This to me is what Williams means by “[drawing] from every source one thing, the strange phosphorus of life.” What an arresting thought! And how astonishingly phrased. With that phosphorous image he enacts what he recommends. (I read “phosphorous” here in its etymological sense--that which brings light--and conclude that if it truly is light, and therefore truly enlightening, it has to be strange, strange.)
In my experience, it’s rare to encounter an undergraduate student who will admit to liking poetry. Often, students will say, outright, “I don’t like poetry.” When I ask what they mean by “poetry,” they are hard pressed to answer. Generally, they seem to mean the kind of poetry taught in English classes, and by that they seem to mean what they take to be the hidebound, the overly familiar, and /or the boring—a reaction that seems to stem from how poetry has generally been presented to them. These same students will readily admit to liking, even loving, say, hip-hop; and all of them have their favorite popular songs. But they don’t think of these things as “poetry,” which of course they are. (How much is “good” poetry is, of course, another question.) In any case, I find that reading William Carlos Williams with them—both his poetry and his revolutionary comments on ‘form”—can widen their horizons considerably, as Williams does with mine every time I come back to him. Sometimes in discussing him with students I relate both his poetry and his theory to the Russian Formalists’ concept of ostraneniye or “making [it] strange,” as articulated in particular by Viktor Shklovsy: “art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony”—in other words, to cut through habitual, reflexive ways of seeing and see things newly and in all their strangeness. This to me is what Williams means by “[drawing] from every source one thing, the strange phosphorus of life.” What an arresting thought! And how astonishingly phrased. With that phosphorous image he enacts what he recommends. (I read “phosphorous” here in its etymological sense--that which brings light--and conclude that if it truly is light, and therefore truly enlightening, it has to be strange, strange.)