13 A Poet Teaches Analysis
Beth Devore
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18 minute read
What You Will Learn in this Chapter
In this essay, you’ll learn how analyzing a poem can help you build skills for analyzing other types of texts and rhetorical situations. In poetry, authors make very intentional choices in language, punctuation, and structure to convey meaning; this essay will focus on how learning to notice those choices in poetry can help us become more critical of the choices made by writers of other genres as well as become more intentional in our choices in writing.
Key Terms
- Diction
- Syntax
- Form
Somewhere between the time we first read Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends and the time we enter a first-year composition classroom, poetry transforms from a fun, playful read to a frustrating, mysterious genre. Poems are deceptive. They use few words, often containing only a sentence, but despite looking simple, they contain layers of meaning.
Poetry is a genre of noticing and capturing moments and of rendering the abstract concrete. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser (alongside Scottish painter Mark Gilbert) worked with third-year medical students at the University of Nebraska to provide “lessons in looking.” During these lessons, the medical students were asked to record observations, either in writing or by sketching, about the standardized patients, or actors pretending to “suffer from various ailments. The visual cues they provide, like the slumped posture and lack of expression that could signal depression, are easy to overlook in a hurried examination–but they become more obvious when the medical student borrows a page from the painter’s easel or the poet’s notebook” (Mangun) [1]. Kooser noted that while one can look at a list of symptoms and make a diagnosis, when doctors really observe their patients, they may come to a different conclusion. Kooser suggests that rather than burying themselves in charts and test results, “the doctor should take a close look at the patient, paying attention to body language” (Mangun). Students in the program found that the close observation required by poetry and sketching helped them to be aware of each patient’s individuality and come up with more accurate diagnoses and treatment plans.
Just as the practice of writing poetry can help medical students gain skills for diagnosing patients, analysis of poetry can help readers gain critical reading and writing skills through “lessons in looking.” Writing an analysis essay involves breaking down all of the pieces of the text to understand how they work together to create the whole text. When analyzing a text, we often get into a routine. Class discussion of a text frequently follows the same format as we pick out the main points of an article, discuss an author’s credentials for writing a piece, and look for numbers as evidence of logical appeals or personal anecdotes meant to evoke emotions. After a few class period