This is my last Literacy Links for 2024. Today is my final day for the school year as I begin a term’s Long Service Leave. This is my first long break in forty-eight years of teaching. The question people are asking: ‘What are you going to do?’ And my answer: ‘I am going to write!’ I’m going to sit at my desk each morning and attempt to do what I frequently ask my students to do. 

I plan to write poetry – an activity which brings me joy. I find writing poetry energising. It gives me life. It also brings with it the shadow side of any creative endeavour – doubt and frustration. Poet Mary Oliver suggests that ‘a poem on the page speaks to the listening mind’. Another poet, William Carlos Williams urges readers to ‘Listen… don’t try to work it out. Listen to it. Let it come to you.’ And my favourite poet of all, T.S. Eliot boldly states that a poem ‘refuses to give up all its secrets.’ Regardless of the outcome of this writing project, I plan to remain committed to the task – to keep the appointment!

I’ll leave you with contemporary poet Tracy K. Smith’s depiction of reading a new poem. It is a wonderful account of this very magical experience.

Like a stranger in somebody else’s home, I proceed gently with a new poem, taking things in rather than trying to bend them to my own habits, tastes or expectations. Along the way, I take stock of what I notice. What does the poem itself teach me about how to go about reading and responding to it? What information does the title contain? What kind of expectation does it establish? How does the first line of the poem go about responding to that expectation? Is there any effect of the visual shape of the poem? How does the poem use white space, and how do I move through the lines of the poem as a result of how they are formatted? In addition to following the sense of the sentence, I observe lines as individual units. Which lines seem to carry the most weight in the poem? Why? 

Sometimes a poem’s literal meaning is less essential than the effect it produces. In addition to looking for what a poem is “saying,” I try doing the following: Listen to the music of the poem’s language. How do the sounds of words create drama, meaning and tone? Look at the images in the poem. From what kinds of contexts are they drawn? What do these images connote on their own and in conjunction with one another? What is the cumulative effect of the images in the poem? Where does the transformation, turn or “discovery” take place in this poem? What changes as a result? What does the poem cause me to notice or take new stock of? What questions does it raise?

I try to consider and feel all of the many things the poem has made me notice, and to let those things—the effects of the poem—mingle a while. I look at the title again to see how my experience of the poem affirms or changes my initial understanding of the title. Then I read the whole poem again, a little less like a strange guest this time.

Clare Murphy

English Coordinator and Literacy Instructional Coach