Loafing in Poetic Spaces: Creating Opportunities for Transformation and Activism Through Connection With Poetry

• In Event: 46.024 - Creating Spaces to Transform Social Justice Dissertation Research Into Teaching Practice

Abstract

Poetry can be instrumental and invaluable in encouraging the development of a rich inner life and self-understanding. At the same time, poetry also can occupy important roles in building relationships with the world through understanding the other and developing a deeper sense of empathy. Poetry also has the potential to encourage transformation through activism and disruption of the status quo. Delese Wear (2000) believes:
Poetry…can evoke thought and press one to action: theory-building scholarship, perhaps; inquiry into the previously unexamined; or new examination of the taken-for-granted…Something it seems can happen in that wondrous electric space between the mind and the written word which urges us to move. (p. 262)
This third space that Wear mentions exists as a space of understanding and connection that happens between the reader and the text. These deeper understandings and connections cannot take place in a school culture that is preoccupied with consumption of material and test scores.
I use the term, “loafing,” to signify the way that poetry allows readers to slow down and simply contemplate. Loafing in poetic spaces involves the reader taking control of his or her life by letting go of control. After dwelling, lingering, and loafing, the reader is less of a passive observer of a poem who merely passes over the lines of verse than he or she is an active participant in the life of the poem. After loafing inside of a poem, the reader experiences and interprets the poem in a way that is more a combination of the experiences and interpretations of the poet and the reader rather than the reader’s own attempt to decipher the intentions of the original writer. Gadamer (1975) says, “Not just occasionally but always, the meaning of a text goes beyond its author. That is why understanding is not merely a reproductive but always a productive activity as well” (p. 307). The reader is not simply taking in the meaning of the original writer, but is rather experiencing a new understanding created by a real connection with the poem. The reader creates a third space where new understandings occur.
Loafing in poetry, or in any text for that matter, is an activity that is not currently encouraged in schools. To loaf in a poem requires one to slow down. Dennis Sumara (1996) recognizes that most schools today participate in a race that he calls “covering the curriculum” which means that “the reading of literary fictions has become buried under the covering of the efficient use of materials, time, and space” (p. 182). Loafing in poetic spaces in schools allows room for students to slow down, reflect, and regard rather than continue to speed through curriculum for a cursory understanding of material. Through loafing in poetry, we can come further to an understanding of poetic spaces as transformative spaces that allow room for imagination, exploration, and activism.

Author

• Mary-Elizabeth Elise Vaquer, South Effingham High School