A Life with Poetry: The Development of Poetic Literacy

A Life with Poetry: The Development of Poetic Literacy synthesizes a multidisciplinary body of theory and research around two key questions: What do we know about how people’s developmental age, experience, and learning interact with their poetic literacy, and how can teachers and researchers use this knowledge to enrich the poetic experiences of students across their lifespan? To answer these questions, authors Joan Peskin and David Hanauer do a remarkable job integrating scholarship from developmental and social psychology, literary studies, neuroscience, and education, among other fields. We (Sarah and Madison, both researchers in cognitive poetics and teachers of language arts education) have not found a more comprehensive or accessible look at research on the reading, writing, and teaching of poetry, much less one that views this research through a developmental lens. Anyone interested in these areas, separately or together, should find this book valuable.A Life with Poetry is organized into nine chapters. The first two focus on educational and developmental psychology and literary theory, followed by two chapters that examine research on the cognitive and developmental mechanisms involved in reading poetry, as well as research on expertise in poetry reading. Chapters 5 and 6 do the same for studies of poetry writing. The last three chapters integrate all this scholarship to consider how educators might support students’ engagement and enjoyment of poetry reading and writing. The authors’ conclusion lingers on their hopes that A Life with Poetry will “facilitate a process in which [poetry] can be taught to students in developmentally appropriate ways that augment their enthusiasm, creativity, wonder and awe” (164).The authors take a generally sociocognitive approach to the development of poetic literacy, inviting readers to consider the relationships between knowledge-building and poetry writing, and the connections between stages of development and stages of poetic reading and response. In doing so, they offer multiple overlapping accounts of learning and literacy, and help readers explore questions such as: What is the relationship between general and poetic expertise? How do models of schema-building fit in with nonsense nursery rhymes and complex metaphors? Why does feeling connect to free verse? When does alliteration alter affect?The authors begin to answer these questions in their first two chapters, as they draw a helpful line from scholars’ relatively early debates about cognitive development—for instance, whether humans are born with biological predispositions to learn or with minds like “blank slates”—to current constructivist and socioculturally situated theories of learning, which argue that humans actively build their own knowledge through interactions with their communities and environments. The authors offer a similarly useful review of research on the development of general expertise. Often, reviews of general learning theories can be dense and abstract, but we found these two chapters to be downright enjoyable, for at least two reasons.First, the authors offer clear and accessible definitions of key concepts across their disciplines. For instance, they define constructivism as “children discovering knowledge about the world through their own activities” (14). They define expertise as “what specific knowledge is required and what particular form it takes in the progression toward excellence in a particular domain” (13). Poetry reading and writing “involve the ability to carefully control language, emotion, and thought” (5). Second, they ground these abstract concepts with specific examples from the world of poetry. For instance, they apply models of schema-building and cognition to describe what might happen in one child’s mind upon hearing a line of poetry like “Listen, lads, from your campfire’s ring” (18). They explain how, in terms of cognition, developmental period, and literacy acquisition, a child can easily create a metaphor such as “a chimney is a house hat” (25). These accessible definitions and concrete examples would enrich any general course in educational psychology, learning sciences, poetics, or pedagogy.In Chapters 3 and 4, the authors discuss theories and empirical research on poetry reading and expertise, including clear explanations and definitions of literary movements and research on emotion, phonology, and developmental patterns in poetry reading. Then, Chapters 5 and 6 offer a similarly comprehensive and connected explanation of poetry writing.Some readers might be more familiar with research on response to poetry, and specifically with expert–novice studies in this area. However, readers may be less familiar with cognitively oriented research in poetry writing, since that body of work is smaller. Thus Peskin and Hanauer’s writing-focused chapters are especially informative. For instance, these chapters allow readers to see the surprising consistency across different models of poetry writing. In the authors’ concise synthesis of these models, poetry writing is characterized by:The authors also show readers the consistency in findings from expert–novice studies. Overall, compared to novices, experts engage in more uncensored, creative playfulness when generating ideas; more reflection and recognition of patterns and ideas in the discovery phases of composition; and more active revision, with experts tending to condense their drafts, and novices tending to expand.From a pedagogical perspective, these chapters are valuable for many reasons, especially as they relate to older students. First, as Applebee and Xerri have noted, in many schools that follow Western curricular traditions, younger students sometimes write poetry in class, but older students rarely do. By devoting space and time to research on poetry writing, the authors communicate the general value of this endeavor, offering support for teachers who believe in the importance of including poetry in their classrooms. Further, in describing the combination of complex, iterative processes that experts undertake when they write poetry, the authors make a case for giving older students opportunities to engage in composition. These older students may be more likely to experience poetry writing as a process of self-discovery, where younger students may not be developmentally ready to do so.The authors’ syntheses on these chapters do additional work by highlighting creative research methodologies used in different studies of poetic literacy. For example, when it comes to studies of poetic writing, researchers must determine how best to identify writers’ genre knowledge, how to understand their cognitive processes during writing, or how to measure the quality of a piece of writing when it is finished. Typically, researchers might engage in think-alouds to assess cognition or call on outside experts to assess writing quality. In this book, readers learn about alternate approaches. For instance, Peskin and Hanauer relate how researchers studied participants’ understanding of genre. Not only did participants describe how poems generally differ from prose, but participants wrote a poetic version of a prose passage, and then described ways that their own poem differed from that prose passage. This is a novel way of getting at participants’ understanding of genre. Peskin and Hanauer describe another study in which researchers went beyond the typical think-aloud to ask expert and novice poets to write and revise their poems while in an MRI machine. The authors also described an alternative approach to measuring the quality of a piece of writing: researchers asked their participants whether they were still satisfied with their work six months after their initial writing.In their final chapters, Peskin and Hanauer focus on teaching interventions and other classroom studies of students’ poetic literacy, and they make developmentally based recommendations for instruction. Here, the authors’ ability to connect research to practice is especially impressive, and to our minds, the authors make a strong case for changes in the current approaches to poetry instruction. Take, for instance, the authors’ descriptions of the powerful role of affect and feeling in poetic literacy, which they highlight both in experimental and classroom-based settings. The authors demonstrate that readers often experience heightened affective responses when they encounter foregrounding (e.g., unusual metaphors) or even when they encounter the end of a line or a stanza. Their moods might shift to align with those of a poem, or they might feel sympathy with a poem’s speaker. Perhaps even more important, readers—especially experienced readers—can experience beauty in visceral ways, as this grad student did when reading a poem in one of Peskin’s studies: “The circle imagery is reflecting the rhyme-scheme which reflects the name of the poem which is about the round perfection of God. It’s all so beautifully interconnected it makes me shiver” (6).Feeling plays a similarly powerful role in multiple models of poetry writing. Poets experience freedom in generating uncensored, associative ideas; pleasure in sounds and rhythms of language and their relationship to meaning; and satisfaction of discovering new meanings in one’s own words. Likewise, the authors’ reviews of classroom research show that when students explicitly attend to their emotions when reading poetry in the classroom, they are more likely to engage in interpretation and more likely to experience pleasure.A Life with Poetry’s focus on the cognitive, developmental, and literary importance of feeling makes an argument for test-makers, curriculum writers, and teachers to pay more attention to feeling in the classroom. Such an argument is especially important for schools that make use of high-stakes standardized exams in language arts. As Au and Levine et al. have shown, teachers in such schools often feel compelled to focus on poetic devices and formalist analyses, as opposed to reader-response-oriented transactions.Likewise, the authors highlight the developmental importance of linguistic play for young children, as well as the role of play in expert poets’ work. This emphasis, we feel, is also an argument for linguistic play and pleasure at every stage of the poetic journey. There is little emphasis on play at the secondary level; but there should be. As the authors point out, when students have positive experiences with poetry, they are more likely to continue to engage poetry. Their book also suggests that lack of attention to the fulfillment, challenge, and pleasure of poetic literacy may push students away from engaging with poetry.At its conclusion, A Life with Poetry does what good research should do—it answers many questions and invites many more. As mentioned earlier, this volume is cognitively oriented in nature. This orientation invites culturally oriented questions that might require a second volume to answer, and would draw on an additional set of empirical and theoretical work, such as that by James Gee, Lauren Kelly, Sarah McCarthey, and Ernest Morrell. For instance, in the studies outlined in this text, who are the novices and experts? What are their academic, social, and cultural backgrounds, and to what degree might those backgrounds influence the studies’ findings? Relatedly, if the poetry in these studies were to include spoken word or song lyrics, how might models of composition or expertise change? The same questions apply to matters of audience: To what degree might novices engage in revision or reflection when writing for a meaningful audience (perhaps someone outside the classroom)? To what degree might Norma González and Carol Lee’s concepts of everyday and cultural funds of knowledge support their classroom poetic literacy?As teachers and researchers, we found Peskin and Hanauer’s book enlightening, accessible, excellently written, and an actual pleasure to read. It is serious about helping teachers teach, and helping students enjoy a fulfilling life with poetry.