And we're not doing the Locomotion either

Do I have to retire Allen Ginsberg's "Sunflower Sutra" just because a few students don't recognize the word "locomotive"?

My American Lit Survey class spends the final three weeks of the semester discussing poetry from Gwendolyn Brooks to Natasha Trethewey, a fun and varied group of authors: Sylvia Plath! Elizabeth Bishop! Li-Young Lee, Yusef Komunyakaa, Amit Majmudar! 

And, of course, Allen Ginsberg. We spend a whole class period discussing "Howl" without touching "Sunflower Sutra," even though it's on the syllabus. We don't always have time in class to discuss every poem listed on the syllabus, but I tell students that on the final exam they'll be asked to write an essay analyzing a poem that we haven't discussed, and if they're doing all the assigned reading, they should be prepared. (That's a big if.)

The exam itself is broken into two parts: a set of discussion questions and a 30-point essay question. Students turn in the first part of the exam before being given the essay question, and they are allowed to use books, notes, and any printed material on the essay question but no technology. (Nobody ever brings a dictionary.)

I really love reading these essays. Students remark on the grime and pollution and "gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery", the sunflower with its "dead gray shadow", the "corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like a battered crown", and they feel the thrill when the poet shifts from despair to exaltation as he grabs the sunflower and says, "We're not our skin of grime, we're not dread bleak dusty imageless locomotives, we're golden sunflowers inside."

Nearly every student quotes "We're not our skin of grime," but only the brave few try to tackle the locomotive.

It's all over the place in the poem: the sunflower is "crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye"; its "grime was no man's grime but death and human locomotives." At one point the poet asks the sunflower, "when did you forget you were a flower? when did you look at your skin and decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive?" All really interesting images unless you're shaky on the meaning of locomotive.

Some students used the word effectively while others avoided it entirely. A few, though, struggled to make sense of locomotive, suggesting that it might have something to do with transportation or walking around or movement. Which it does! But the whole poem makes a whole lot more sense when you visualize a train engine. If a student think locomotive refers to walking around, how do they understand "the smoke of olden locomotives" in the sunflower's eye? I don't get it at all.

In the end the confusion about vocabulary was just a minor distraction; the poem offers plenty of material for analysis and most students do a pretty effective job. But I wonder how much richer their experience of the poem would be if they could see the rusty steam locomotive sitting on the siding or hear it chuffing through the lines. I'm happy to be a sunflower inside but even happier that I'm not doomed to be a bleak chunk of steel machinery unable to choose my own path.

But how can we rejoice in not being locomotives if we don't know the meaning of the word?