Thursday, January 25, 2007
The mindful museum
'The fact is that poetry is not the books in a library... Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book. '
When was the last time you read a bunch of Lord Byron sonnets for fun? Tell me honestly. When was the last time you actually sat down with Shakespeare outside of a classroom or a Hallmark store?
There is something wrong (okay, a number of things wrong) with the way we conventionally teach, discuss and dismember poetry. Not that there's anything wrong with dismemberment. Someone asked me the other day whether I really thought everyone should love poetry, whether it's even something everyone is capable of connecting to. My answer, of course, was a long, drawn-out Yes in such a way that she almost fell asleep while we were walking. I think that Yes is worth sharing, though. You are allowed to fall asleep.
When I read Rabindranath Tagore or Rumi or Yeats, I don't just see their writing as an interesting piece of history, difficult to analyse but worth dissecting for the sake of understanding the quaint ways of the past. They speak to me directly and immediately, of my own life and of the moment I am reading them in. There's a certain amount of thinking sideways involved, a semi-fluency you have to pick up to know how to interpret metaphors about Irish independence into nectar to pour into your own soul, but it's not so different from the multiple levels you have to think on to read an article or watch a documentary.
Almost all of us intuitively know what to draw from those types of media, what to exclude, and how to apply it to the way we live and the choices we make. The difference, I think, is that our culture surrounds us with chances to develop those drawing/ excluding/ applying skills almost every day, and a thousand different ways to do it. Poetry lacks almost all of this support in our everyday lives, so when we are confronted with it we're usually a little bit baffled, bored, and embarassed by the encounter. Understandably.
How do we actually read poetry? Well, I started thinking about all this tonight listening to the very-functionally literate Adam Gopnik talk about the changing roles of museums. The great museums of a hundred, two hundred years ago, he says, were essentially mausoleums: institutions that presented artifacts and totems of the past as facts, as headstones of what was in a context that made it very easy to see them, to digest them.
As the 20th-century started winding down, Gopnik says, this role mutated into the one our generation is probably more familiar with. For those of us who are young enough to have tender memories of the Bug Room at the Provincial Museum, the museum's role was that of the educator. The audio tape. The walking tour. The informative interpretive brochure telling you what you should know about these Greek marbles, and why.
Today though, the role of the museum is changing again. From a place to learn, it's changing into a place to have a discussion, to argue, to teach and be taught. Gopnik says that's the process that places like the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto are part of now, transforming themselves into places where it's not just okay to talk, your talking is actually part of the experience of the museum. You are part of the exhibit. That sounds a little bit creepy, actually.
Gopnik says it's partly because our museums are becoming places to engage with artifacts, sculptures, and memorabilia as a way of interpreting, discussing, and dismembering ourselves. What he calls the Mindful Museum is less of a monologue and more of a conversation. Instead of walking through a curator's 'clandestine bid for power' by being forced to interpret objects from their perspective, he says the 21st-century's museums are going to draw you into the discussion. But, you know, probably shush you if you go on for too long. You get the idea.
This is how poetry should be taught. This is how poetry should be loved.
Who cares what Harold Bloom thought about anything? To frame different ways to approach poetry, great, let's spend five minutes talking about his opinion on Elizabeth Bishop. But it's the rest of the day spent tearing her poems apart, gushing over them with your friend, whispering them to your lover, that count.
Poetry means nothing before it leaves the shelf.
Another interesting thing Adam Gopnik brought up is the what an amazing tool chronology is for telling a story. It's immediate, it's universal, it's easy to understand. Things start at one place and end in another, and you can interpret what happens in between because we think in terms of time. It made me wonder what the arc of this blog has been so far. Where do you guys think the story is going?
More to the point, what can I do to bring you into the discussion?
-Jorge Luis Borges
When was the last time you read a bunch of Lord Byron sonnets for fun? Tell me honestly. When was the last time you actually sat down with Shakespeare outside of a classroom or a Hallmark store?
There is something wrong (okay, a number of things wrong) with the way we conventionally teach, discuss and dismember poetry. Not that there's anything wrong with dismemberment. Someone asked me the other day whether I really thought everyone should love poetry, whether it's even something everyone is capable of connecting to. My answer, of course, was a long, drawn-out Yes in such a way that she almost fell asleep while we were walking. I think that Yes is worth sharing, though. You are allowed to fall asleep.
When I read Rabindranath Tagore or Rumi or Yeats, I don't just see their writing as an interesting piece of history, difficult to analyse but worth dissecting for the sake of understanding the quaint ways of the past. They speak to me directly and immediately, of my own life and of the moment I am reading them in. There's a certain amount of thinking sideways involved, a semi-fluency you have to pick up to know how to interpret metaphors about Irish independence into nectar to pour into your own soul, but it's not so different from the multiple levels you have to think on to read an article or watch a documentary.
Almost all of us intuitively know what to draw from those types of media, what to exclude, and how to apply it to the way we live and the choices we make. The difference, I think, is that our culture surrounds us with chances to develop those drawing/ excluding/ applying skills almost every day, and a thousand different ways to do it. Poetry lacks almost all of this support in our everyday lives, so when we are confronted with it we're usually a little bit baffled, bored, and embarassed by the encounter. Understandably.
How do we actually read poetry? Well, I started thinking about all this tonight listening to the very-functionally literate Adam Gopnik talk about the changing roles of museums. The great museums of a hundred, two hundred years ago, he says, were essentially mausoleums: institutions that presented artifacts and totems of the past as facts, as headstones of what was in a context that made it very easy to see them, to digest them.
As the 20th-century started winding down, Gopnik says, this role mutated into the one our generation is probably more familiar with. For those of us who are young enough to have tender memories of the Bug Room at the Provincial Museum, the museum's role was that of the educator. The audio tape. The walking tour. The informative interpretive brochure telling you what you should know about these Greek marbles, and why.
Today though, the role of the museum is changing again. From a place to learn, it's changing into a place to have a discussion, to argue, to teach and be taught. Gopnik says that's the process that places like the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto are part of now, transforming themselves into places where it's not just okay to talk, your talking is actually part of the experience of the museum. You are part of the exhibit. That sounds a little bit creepy, actually.
Gopnik says it's partly because our museums are becoming places to engage with artifacts, sculptures, and memorabilia as a way of interpreting, discussing, and dismembering ourselves. What he calls the Mindful Museum is less of a monologue and more of a conversation. Instead of walking through a curator's 'clandestine bid for power' by being forced to interpret objects from their perspective, he says the 21st-century's museums are going to draw you into the discussion. But, you know, probably shush you if you go on for too long. You get the idea.
This is how poetry should be taught. This is how poetry should be loved.
Who cares what Harold Bloom thought about anything? To frame different ways to approach poetry, great, let's spend five minutes talking about his opinion on Elizabeth Bishop. But it's the rest of the day spent tearing her poems apart, gushing over them with your friend, whispering them to your lover, that count.
Poetry means nothing before it leaves the shelf.
Another interesting thing Adam Gopnik brought up is the what an amazing tool chronology is for telling a story. It's immediate, it's universal, it's easy to understand. Things start at one place and end in another, and you can interpret what happens in between because we think in terms of time. It made me wonder what the arc of this blog has been so far. Where do you guys think the story is going?
More to the point, what can I do to bring you into the discussion?
posted by Christopher at 12:46 a.m.
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