“Can anyone tell me what ‘poetry’ is?” I asked the fifteen faces staring blankly up at me. This summer, I spent three weeks on Smith's campus teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) to visiting groups of Japanese high school girls. During one of the lessons, a co-leader and I were charged with giving a lesson about Emily Dickinson, the poet whose house we would visit the next day.
I never once imagined myself in front of a class teaching poetry. To me, poetry was an intimately personal style of writing, secret and sacred. My poetry is always scratched down in waves of emotion, gripping me at the heart and leaking through my pen. If asked, I don’t think I could explain my own poetry, but now I was expected to speak about the work of Dickinson, which I had only briefly studied in AP Literature in high school. Although Dickinson spent most of her life at her home, she wrote over 1,700 poems that were found and published after her death. I was scared to teach her work because I didn’t have Dickinson to help guide me through her intricate, personal words. I wanted to do justice to her memory. I reminded myself that poetry has many interpretations. There are no wrong ways of reading a poem, I would hammer home in my lesson.
We broke into small groups and discussed Dickinson’s poem, “Hope is the thing with feathers.” This poem treats the indescribable nature of hope. I broke down the vocabulary with my group, highlighting tricky words like “perch” and “gale.” I prompted the girls to describe how hope made them feel. They spoke of the lightness they felt inside themselves, the emotion which calms them against fear. I explained how Dickinson compared these sentiments to a little bird in her soul, battling a vicious storm of doubt and opposition. I acted out a bird being whapped by the wind, complete with "whooshing" sound effects and flapping wings. I answered questions until the girls understood.
After discussing Dickinson’s poetry, the girls were asked to write and share their own poem about one of the poet's themes. The girls selected bright markers and hunched over big sheets of paper, poised to write. I waited anxiously to hear how the girls would express their ideas in symbols.
In their poems, my Japanese ESL students transcended their native language to translate their thoughts into English poetry. The poems spoke of dreams like stars which guide us onward to reach our goals. They attributed colors to their emotions, feelings they could see as if they had rainbows in their hearts. They named the contagiousness of positive feelings and how these feelings turn into love. They declared ownership of an English poem that encapsulated a piece of their existence.
Teaching ESL is always a challenge, as I find that I, myself, don’t always understand the complexities of the English language. English is used in such varied ways by its international populations of native speakers. For example, it can be difficult for native speakers to understand exactly what another native speaker is trying to say with their words.
This is why hope, the thing with feathers, is so necessary to both ESL teachers and learners. We all have doubts about our mastery of this complex language, but it’s important to relinquish our doubts and embrace the hope for a more complete understanding. We realize that every day is a new opportunity to use our language to make mistakes and to learn. We speak loudly, we listen carefully and we work together to make sense of the words around us.
