Poetry and Place

by Samuel Horrocks

February 15, 2015

As Professor Slocum put it early in our class session this week, one of our great joys as English teachers is the reading, writing, and teaching of poetry, and we spent the rest of our time modeling various strategies for teaching poems with an Appalachian focus. To help us extend our earlier conversations regarding critical place-based pedagogies, Professor Slocum selected two poems presenting the narratives of young Appalachians leaving the mountains for supposedly brighter futures elsewhere. In Mark Defoe’s “Leaving the Hills,” the speaker lamentfully recalls the last hours of a young girl’s life in her hometown, as she “loads / her red Camaro with quilts to pawn” and “serpentines the curves . . . over the interstate.” The experienced speaker of Maggie Anderson’s “Ontological” presents a vaguer warning to a young individual “following some train whistle” in search of “what’s lost.” We also examined a short story by Lisa Koger entitled “Extended Learning,” in which a successful academic returns with his young family to visit his mother at their West Virginian homeplace. Studying these pieces together inspired both lively discussion of the tensions surrounding the issues of rural flight and “brain drain,” and strategies for teaching place-based narratives and poetry dealing with these issues in the secondary Appalachian classroom.

Paired Poetry Analysis

            To start us off, Professors Slocum and Weekley led us through a 30-45 minute lesson plan which can be used with middle and high school students. First the class was grouped into pairs, and each pair assigned one of the two poems. Each group received a large sheet of poster paper upon which a copy of our poem had been pasted in large font. We were then directed to discuss and annotate the poem, paying particular attention to any questions we had, whether they be regarding the meaning of a word, the basic narrative of the poem, or something more interpretive. Professor Slocum stressed to us that poems have no “true” answers but only “tentative” ones: our goal is, by the end of the discussion, to make a claim regarding what the poem is saying by using its text as evidence.

            We passed a pleasant ten minutes or so annotating our poems—animated discussion was heard from pairs around the room, and Professors Slocum and Weekley wandered from group to group offering words of encouragement and advice. When we had finished, all of the poems looked very different, with some featuring more textual annotations, some heavier on interpretive arrows, some asking more questions and yet others providing more explanation. We then shared out, each pair getting a chance to explain their thoughts and methods to the full class. The groups who looked at “Ontological” went first, with each group proffering a different explanation for the significance of the poem’s odd name. Audra said she thought the poem was about a young person pursuing a country music career, and Jen spoke about the significance of the recurring imagery of the fiddle, while others did not notice this aural aspect of the poem at all. The groups looking at “Leaving the Hills,” which was a more straight-forward piece, found similar interpretations, though Jon and Britney thought that the female subject of the poem may have been fleeing some traumatic event.

            We then returned to our seats to continue the discussion, this time with the goal of “imagining what the poems might say to each other.” We first took this prompt quite literally, venturing to guess what a conversation between the speakers and subjects of each poem might look like. This got us thinking about tonal and stylistic differences in the pieces: the speaker of “Ontological” presents a stern warning to his/her “honey,” while the “Hills” narrator is more wistful, lamentful even of the subject’s departure. The question of the “Hills” speaker’s potentially judgmental tone toward his female subject sparked off a lengthy debate. I, Sam, posited that the poem’s frequent use of sexual imagery suggests that the narrator views the subject’s supposed promiscuity negatively, but then Audra drew our attention to the extent to which the subject seems to be fleeing a bad reputation that may not be deserved: while “leaving is a copperhead fear,” “staying” in this “land too wide for whispers” provokes a “deadly . . . bile.” We closed our discussion with a quick writing assignment, in which we were all asked to jot down a concise interpretation of the poem, with emphasis on how the discussion had changed our initial suppositions.

            Professor Slocum then asked us to switch roles from participants to teachers who might one day lead such an activity. She quickly reviewed the outline of the lesson (reading the poetry at home and writing a response, analyzing in pairs, sharing out, full group discussion, and a short-write) and then asked us to analyze it, with special heed to these questions:

• If you were a high school student, how do you think that this process would shape your                      academic literacy?
• What’s happening in there that might help the student to become more fluent with academic                        literacy?

Carmen said, and we all agreed, that the activity is “a great way to help students get comfortable with thinking critically,” and Caleb posited that this might be because poems in particular can “help kids on the lower end of the reading spectrum [with] reading slowly and intentionally and asking questions.” Because poems have no “answers,” they can also foster what Jen called a “permissive atmosphere” in which, as Britney put it, “the floor is open for your own interpretations[, making] students feel comfortable voicing their own opinions.”

Brain Drain and Rural Flight

            We next shifted gears to Koger’s short story and the problem of “brain drain.” Professor Weekley started us off with a short lecture on the concept, drawing heavily from the book Hollowing Out the Middle. In it, Patrick Carr describes a rural school system which focuses most efforts on the “best and brightest” students, who are often thus impelled to go to college and begin a career elsewhere. We’re particularly affected by this problem here in West Virginia: we are the only state in which less than 20% of the population has a Bachelors degree, and only 48% of West Virginians who do graduate with BA/BS degrees from West Virginia Colleges and Universities stay in the state (Christiadi, et al. 2014). Professor Weekley then drew our attention to the ways that the common presentation of “brain drain” is problematic, namely that it assumes that people who stay behind are not capable, and pays insufficient attention to structural problems making it difficult for individuals to remain in their communities. For example, out of the 50 jobs projected to grow the most in the next ten years in West Virginia, only 3 require baccalaureate degrees; many students who graduate from college are simply unable to find jobs relevant to their degrees close to home.

            Professor Weekley’s presentation provoked passionate discussion from our class; I think nearly all of us have first-hand experience with this issue. Our talk veered back and forth from the political, as we discussed causes of and possible solutions to this problem, to the pedagogical, as Professor Slocum suggested ways we might have similar discussions with our students. We were all excited at the prospect of making “brain drain” the topic of a longer term, multi-genre unit, which would be a perfect way to incorporate critical, place-based pedagogies and techniques in our classrooms. 

We could explore the issue through academic writing, such as Hollowing out the Middle, poetry and narrative pieces such as the ones we worked with earlier in the day, and through primary research within our own communities. Such a project would position our students not as mere receivers of information, but active and engaged citizens within their own communities, capable of tackling problems actively, effectively, and considerately.

Works Cited

Carr, P. J., & Kefalas, M. J. (2009). Hollowing out the middle: The rural brain drain and what it       means for America. Boston, MA: Beacon Press Books.

Christiadi, Deskins, J., &. Lego, B. (2014). Population Trends in West Virginia through 2030.            Morgantown, WV: WVU Research Corporation.