Listening and learning

My American Lit Survey students are ending the semester where they started: by contemplating Franz Wright's poem "Learning to Read." On the first day of class, they wrote brief analyses of this poem that none of them had ever seen before, and today we discussed it in class after spending the entire semester honing our literary analysis skills. This is the first time I've included Franz Wright in the syllabus, and I placed this poem after Friday's discussion of Theodore Roethke and this morning's discussion of James Wright. Roethke taught James Wright who fathered and taught Franz Wright, and I hoped my students would pick up on the way the later poets echo the earlier ones.

And they did! Okay, only one student noticed that the phrase "break / into blossom" (from James Wright's "A Blessing") pops up in Franz Wright's "Learning to Read" as "break / but not into blossom," but others noted some persistent imagery (growth from decay, blossoming from breakage) along with stylistic similarities. I hope they absorbed the idea that poetry is not just words on a dead page but a conversation that started centuries ago and keeps going on, whether we're listening or not.

And I hope they keep listening and learning to read poetry.