Writing Poetry In First-Year Composition Courses

By Art Young, Clemson University

I would like to revisit an issue that has been around for a long time but has rarely appeared prominently in the first-year composition curriculum. I've been thinking about the value of requiring students to write poetry as part of a college writing course, especially if the course is a general-education course with explicit goals about teaching students to write effective academic prose in preparation for the writing they will do in college and then in the workplace.

Obviously, we don't need to do an elaborate study to determine how little the writing of poetry occurs in college classes and in the modern workplace. (But I do wonder about all the George W. Bush poems that have shown up on my e-mail screen—are they all being written and sent "off" hours?) On the other hand, I still hear complaints from professors and from people in business about the writing done by alumni of our first-year composition program and our institution's degree programs. While there is no mandate for colleges to train more professional poets, more flexibility and sensibility in writing and more "creative" thinking, problem-solving, and language use would be most welcome.

I first encountered the educational concept of the “poetic function” of language from reading James Britton, Nancy Martin, and their colleagues at the Schools Council Project in England. The poetic function is not just poetry and other literary genres but a way of writing and speaking about experience, a way quite distinct from “transactional” writing (i.e., to transact business). In the poetic we are spectators on experience, while in the transactional we are participants in experience. And because the poetic and the transactional exist on a continuum, there is transference between the two in the development of an individual's language ability. The poetic is distinguished not just by genre and language, but by the writer's or speaker's stance, or psychological perspective, toward experience. The poetic creates and delineates values, while the transactional communicates information or opinions, either implicitly or explicitly, about already held values.

The poetic has value, even utility:

• the development of the imagination through language;
• the rejection, accommodation, or assimilation of new knowledge and experience;
• the use of language for its own sake;
• the use of language for the writer's sake.

These characteristics are why many teachers find it impossible to “grade” poetry or other creative writing, and because they can't grade it, they don't value it—and neither do their students. But I believe that the poetic function has important social and pedagogical uses, in addition to personal uses, in writing and other courses.¹

As I see it, the role of poetic writing in composition courses is not to educate potential professional poets but to develop students' writing abilities and their imaginative and critical faculties as well. Poetic writing activities give students opportunities to reflect on the value of new knowledge and experiences. And when such activities are made social by sharing in groups or public readings, they often enable students and teachers to build classroom communities based on a respect for language and on a connection to texts and to each other in which further learning and growth occurs, sometimes in surprising ways. ²

Let me tell you briefly about a current project of mine. This past fall semester, 2000, I worked with nineteen teachers and over eight hundred students in ENGLISH 101, Clemson University's first-semester composition course. The teachers asked students, who were already participants in a colloquium on the topic of “the idea of a university,” to write poems about education. Thus the students were not writing poetry for poetry's sake, but as a way of developing knowledge and imaginative possibilities, exploring new perspectives, and furthering their discussion of this academic topic. The poems were not to be graded, and teachers assigned them for different pedagogical reasons (for example, as a response to a text they were reading or as a prelude to group discussion). Judges selected five poems for special recognition, and the authors were awarded $100 gift certificates at the University Bookstore. I'm now conducting interviews with teachers and judges to determine if the project should continue and, if so, how it might be strengthened. ³

This semester, spring 2001, I am participating in a similar project with twenty-four teachers in seventeen disciplines, including Architecture, Biology, Business, Psychology, and Women's Studies. As part of the writing-across-the-curriculum effort on our campus, I have previously collaborated with individual faculty on poetry assignments,⁴ but this is the first time I've attempted anything on this scale. These faculty are asking students to write poems as part of course requirements or as an extra credit opportunity. We've agreed to meet a couple of times this semester and trade stories, to see what is happening with poetry in our various classes, and to consider whether such writing is valuable and under what conditions and for what purposes. We again will be awarding five $100 bookstore gift certificates, and depending on what we see when we read the writing of each others' students, we may publish selective poems on the web and in a chapbook, and we may hold a public reading toward the end of the semester.⁵

I am eager to discuss the possibilities for writing poetry in composition classes and as a “writing to learn” strategy in other disciplines. Here are some questions that might get us started.

1. Doubters: Tell us why poetic writing should not be part of a composition class. Believers: Tell us why poetic writing should be part of a composition class. (Believer and doubter, of course, are often the same person.)
   
   
2. Do any of you assign poetry as part of composition classes? What are your experiences?
   
   
3. How should we assign poetry in composition courses?
   
   
4. When we think programmatically about implementing a poetry component in a composition sequence or into a writing-across-the curriculum program, what are the issues we need to consider?
   
   
5. When I meet with faculty from various disciplines who have never done anything like this before, and we together share stores and read poems written by their students, what hard questions should we be asking of each other?
   
   
6. If poetry does have a significant role to play in composition and other courses, persuasive evidence will be needed. What persuasive evidence would you like to see? What “compelling” research needs to be done?
   
   

1. For a further discussion of my understanding of Britton's poetic function and a discussion of classroom practices, see my “Considering Values.”
   
   
2. For example, I have used student poetry in a composition course to assist students in revising critical essays about literature. See my “Beginnings: Voice, Creativity, and the Critical Essay” in David Starkey's Teaching Writing Creatively.
   
   
3. To read the five students' poems, go to Focus on Poetry.
   
   
4. For further discussion of writing poetry in courses across the curriculum, including examples from accounting, biology, entomology, philosophy, and psychology, see Annotated Works Cited.
   
   
5. I would like to thank Donna Reiss for invaluable advice and editorial assistance.
   
   

Britton, James, Tony Burgess, Nancy Martin, Alex McLeod, and Harold Rosen. The Development of Writing Abilities (11-18). Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1975. This now classic study classifies language as expressive, transactional, and poetic along a continuum. Pages 90-94 describe the poetic.

Britton, James. Language and Learning. 2nd ed. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1993. This book describe Britton's theory of oral and written language development in children and the importance of language to cognitive and social development. Chapter Three is on “Participant and Spectator,” 97-125.

Gorman, Michael E., Margaret E. Gorman, and Art Young. “Poetic Writing in Psychology.” Writing Across the Disciplines: Research into Practice. Ed. Art Young and Toby Fulwiler. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1998. 139-159. A discussion about a large introduction to psychology class using writing-across-the-curriculum pedagogy. The students' poetic writing is contrasted with their transactional writing.

Young, Art. “Beginnings: Voice, Creativity, and the Critical Essay.” Teaching Writing Creatively. Ed. David Starkey. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Boynton/Cook, 1998. 137-145. In this essay, I give a case study of a student revising her critical essay and the interventions I suggested to give her new perspectives on her writing. One intervention, after she had written the first draft, was to write a poem on the subject of her essay.

---. “Considering Values: The Poetic Function of Language.” Language Connections: Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum. Ed. Toby Fulwiler and Art Young. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1982. 77-97. Republished 2000 by the electronic journal academic writing. This book chapter describes my understanding of the poetic function of writing and then discusses poems about Descartes' Meditations written by students in a philosophy class.

---. Focus on Poetry. Fall 2000. Clemson University. This web site describes the “Focus on Poetry” project conducted with 101 students and teachers at Clemson University, Fall 2000. Includes five student poems selected for special recognition.

---. “Mentoring, Modeling, Monitoring, Motivating: Response to Students' Ungraded Writing as Academic Conversation.” Writing to Learn: Strategies for Assigning and Responding to Writing Across the Disciplines. Ed. Mary Deane Sorcinelli and Peter Elbow. San Francisco : Jossey-Bass, 1997. 27-39. Describes a context for assigning ungraded “writing to learn” tasks. One such task is poetry, and examples of poems about insects by students in an entomology class are provided.

---. Teaching Writing Across the Curriculum. Prentice Hall Resources for Writing. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999. This booklet is an overview with numerous examples of my approach to writing across the curriculum. Pages 19-23 are on poetry and include examples from accounting, biology, psychology, and educational psychology.