Did I really expect the students to write as well as Wordsworth? No, of course not. I just wanted them to learn something about verse, how to put a few lines together (how many lines does a sonnet have?) and how to find a few rhymes (is it aabb? or abab? or abba? everyone always forgets). So I said to the student: “Of course I don’t expect you to write as well as Wordsworth”. But then when I saw my answer was causing her to relax too much, I quickly added: “I expect you to write better  than Wordsworth!”

A week later, much to my surprise, back came twenty or so sonnets, several of which (give or take a wobble or two) were as accomplished as the following:
 

(Untitled)

As the Sun fought with the Night,
the cold and blue clouds were led
away by the warm, pink Dawn, which had
such bright sunbeams today as a guide

that it filled me with overflowing delight.
It chased all the dark thoughts from my head
and, as I waited for the new day in my bed,
it seemed that the air would be full of light
and that the whole of Nature was in love.
And the birds they were so keen,
whirling and flying in flocks above,

to sing their morning songs in the green
leaves of trees - like the poplar with the dove
which cooed. What a great awaking I have seen!
                                      (Vásárhelyi Anna)

Unfortunately, I cannot take up several more pages of this issue with the best of the sonnets I received that day. But even from the single example above, you can begin to see that some of the students did give Wordsworth a good run for his money. If you put the above poem in front of a group of first-year college students and told them it was by Wordsworth, probably even the brightest would feel little reason to challenge that attribution. Yet few if any of my class of students had ever written a poem in English previously, or thought they could do so. Not all of the twenty wrote a complete sonnet, but there was not one of them who did not come up with a good image or two, a nice couplet, a fine phrase or a sensitive thought. For the very least of them, it was time better spent than sitting turned off at the back of the room.

It is an easy life teaching bright students in university, of course. The difficulties Bajner Mária describes in the October 1999, issue of novELTy are worlds away from the JPTE classrooms where she took her degree. Nonetheless, while I agree with most of what she says about teaching, I do wonder if we need to be so afraid (as I am always afraid) of poetry in the classroom? Each time I venture out on poetry writing, I do not really believe it can work, and yet (the usual false starts apart) it always does. As I write this, I am once again genuinely astonished to find out from their home-work just how much poetry matters to yet another group of students who will not say a word about it in the classroom. But then why should not the hands-on  approach Kodály took towards music also work for poetry?

It will probably be blazing hot by the time you read this, but it is snowing as I write and another student at JPTE has just given me a poem on the fresh snowfall. She took as a model a poem she liked called: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (by Wallace Stevens) and changed the image from blackbird to snow. So far, she has come up with five ways of looking at snow; here is one of them:
 
 

Thirteen ways of looking at snow
 

II

Do I know just one kind of snow?
Do I know just one kind of white?
One word for 13 things?
Just because I’m not an Eskimo?
(Kiss Judit)

Along with that poem on snow, I got another one on the same subject, too long to include here. It was constructed on quite a different principle. The student, Barbarci Bulcsú, begins the poem with the line: “Look at the thick white landscape” and ends it with: “Hissing its ghastly song endlessly”. If you read the first letter of each line of his poem downwards (an acrostic) you discover its “hidden” message: LETSGOTOTHESOUTH. This reminds me of a poem written recently by a student of mine at ELTE. Ambrózy Zsófia constructed her poem not round the first letter  but round the first word  of each line to give us her message. 
 

Leaf

She lived in town, but she
Wanted to live in the wild,
To live like a child, a flower, a flea.

“Be simple or be dead”,
A strange young man said once,
“Tree or true are the same in my head”.

In the quiet green garden she found
His gift - a dead leaf - and she did not 
Mind he was hiding under it, on the ground.
 (Ambrózy Zsófia)

Poetry may very well need to be inspired, but while waiting for inspiration (which may or may not come once or twice in a lifetime), it can be delightful as well as instructive to play the various games with language which versification requires. József Attila’s literary executor tells us that, after his death, three sacks were found full of verse games  which he used to play with, among others, Karinthy and Kosztolányi. In the old days, verse, because of its metrics, was often called “numbers”. In another of her experiments, Ambrózy Zsófia very effectively uses numbers as a way of holding together a poem about that telephone call we all know about which never comes. It begins:
 

(Untitled)

I know you could call. One.
So why don’t you? Two.
One button and I’m there. Three.
I mean here, waiting. Four.
You slowly grind my nerves. Five.
Over-excited. Six.
Own up. Seven.
Say no and I’ll scream and howl. Eight.
But at least I could scream. Nine.
Say yes and I’ll fly. Ten.
OK, I’ve had enough. Eleven.
Twelve. Thirteen...
One hundred and sixty-four
Minutes have passed
Without your call
…
  (Ambrózy Zsófia)

The author actually came to write this poem as a way of updating an old poem from the 17th century, when there definitely were not any telephones. The telephone is invariably a good subject on which to get students to write.

I am sure, many English teachers will take pleasure from seeing the poems above. But they may feel they could not possibly do the same thing in their own classroom. Well, maybe, maybe not, but I am writing this because my students at Pécs specifically told me that they were sorry that they had not had a chance to do the same sort of thing years ago in school. The grasp of English will, of course, vary, but the principle governing writing remains the same, it is very simple language and, most surprising of all, needs no special expertise.

So, what does it need apart from a deep breath? Well, some people disagree with me about this, but I think it is helpful for students to have a model to go on. I think a model allows for two sorts of learning: those who feel safer copying can stay close to the original while those who want to go off on their own track can use the original simply as a point of departure. Either way, students learn a lot - about both shape or form and about creativity, even as they gain experience and confidence in handling the language.

Which model? The teacher has the job of finding a model appropriate to the students’ level of English. Well, poems do turn up - why not try the ones that have just turned up in this article (if need be, adapted, simplified, cut up into bits)? They may work, they may not. Poetry, and an open classroom, is always a high-risk business, but at least it is alive. (I say that having just had two unproductive workshops this week). Perhaps the students can find a better model, if not a sonnet, some rap or dub. And just as a model is helpful because some students feel much less safe writing poetry than others, so, too, it may be helpful to have a Hungarian translation at hand.

What about marking? It is not only students who think they will not be able to handle poetry. Teachers feel the same. Perhaps you think you need to be a native-speaker and an “expert” to evaluate the poems your students write? Nothing could be further from the truth. Poetry actually does not like “experts”: it turns its back on them. To paraphrase Robert Frost, poetry is what gets lost when teachers try to teach it. It cannot be taught (even though versification can). It can only be encouraged to come into existence. Poems can be evaluated but it is usually better to wait till the poets are dead. One thing is clear: it is absolutely fatal for a teacher (or anyone) to comment on a poem which has just been written. It is too hot. Moreover, you cannot say a poem is wrong. I often do make suggestions about details here and there but, fortunately, nobody can read my handwriting. No, with a poem the best thing is simply to sit back, enjoy it and, if anything at all, say what it is you especially like about it: a phrase, a line, an image, a thought or feeling. Nothing more. Nothing less.