|
ESSAYS AND COMMENTARY Essays about the Bardic Tradition
Joe Bethancourt on Bards and Bardic Circles The Poetic Imperative, or: Hone Your Harpstringsby Myra Hope Bobbitt A recent Harper's magazine featured two articles which, when read individually, might be viewed as having no relationship to each other.
One was a short essay on the "floating standard" grading scheme in today's high schools, written by a teacher in the Ohio school system. Fixed standards, the author writes, result in low morale, angry parents, and frequent disciplinary problems. Students and their parents complain that deserved failures "aren't fair", but can give no concrete reason why not. Floating standards, the author notes, breed high self-esteem, longer attention spans, and assurances of renewed teaching contracts at the end of the school year. The only repercussion is that the average student enters college or the work force ignorant and with a poor work ethic.
The other feature was an Algonquin forum, that type of article which is transcribed from the conversations of a few literati sitting around a dinner table at the Algonquin hotel. These five folks were prominent American poets, each of whom brought a "favorite poem" for the others to read and discuss at the table. I thoroughly enjoyed this feature, not only because it was a marked departure from the cynical and abrasive "feminism" discussion of two months ago, but because these people seemed to like each other. They read each other's poems and really got into it! They had fun at that table, and sounded relaxed and happy. They also gave five poems a palpable, audible and succulent depth I hadn't read in them before.
I found myself ruminating on the current state of Poetry as an art form in the United States. To quote the Harper's forum introduction: "Poetry today is something that the federal government should fund, that our publishing houses must support, that the public schools ought to permit a larger place on the syllabus." People don't get into poetry any more.
And how does that discussion connect to the one about floating standards? I came out of the readings striving to answer a single question: How can a person without solid footing reach for something greater than him- or her-self? On a more fundamental level, how can someone who can't read and understand anything more complicated than an evening news sound-bite comprehend Yeats? Poetry can be the most simple expression of complex ideas and emotions; it requires an understanding of the ideas, and a fathoming of the emotions, before one can grasp the art of its concision.
If we stretch a little, we can liken this debate to Morgan Llywelyn's warrior/bard conflict: Are we Sword Land or Bard Land? Sword Land will only thrive, rhetorically speaking, if the Bardic half of the human spririt is allowed to flourish: to foment and grow, ivylike, around that sword. If our children are to grow into thoughtful adults, we need to give them languages with which to think and feel. I know that my children will not be perfect. I also know that they will not be imposters: they will fully experience their accomplishments as well as their failures, and, I hope, will never have cause to doubt the love of their parents either way. Fixed standard or no fixed standard.
Bard Land.
|
