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Spivey's March Through PoetryBy Katherine Spivey, The Northern Virginia Review, Fall 1991, pp. 19-20. "Hey, Ms. Spivey," Ray, my military pharmacist, said. "Why do we study poetry? I mean, I just don't get it. I like the short stories, and plays are like the movies, but man, those poems!" He shook his head in disbelief. I considered my answer. Here I was at Fort Belvoir, an Army base in Northern Virginia, teaching English 112 (Introduction to Literature) in the Combined Arms Room. I'd started with short stories, since students like stories; I'd ended with plays, another narrative form. But Ray was right. Poetry was hard enough for my "regular" freshmen students habituated as they were to poetry in their high school courses; it was even more difficult for the typical Fort Belvoir student. The student, whether military or civilian, worked on base, and had had a job for several years. High school English was only a vague memory. Since the military doesn't systematically emphasize creative expression, description, or even word play, the very essence of poetry eluded my students, much to their frustration. They were so used to being ordered by a clear, direct, unambiguous sentence that having to tease out and toy with a meaning was foreign. They had to relearn meaning, sound, and structure, as if poetry were not merely a new genre, but a different, and very difficult, language. Not unnaturally, they resist the process: "This is dumb. Why can't the poet just say what he means? This is too much work." So I pull a fast one on them. "What do you mean, this is dumb? You've been doing poetry since you were in basic training." Dead silence. —"What? Naaa. We would have remembered. I can just hear Sgt.—" "Cadence calls," I interrupt. "Remember marching?" Groans. "What did you do, besides march?" "We sang." "Why?" "To make us forget. No, to make us stay in step!" "You got it. Stand up; let's march." So, with much grumbling, we all stand up and line up according to height. The students really like this part because, at 5'6", I'm relegated to the end, and also, since I lack military training or experience, I have to turn the class over to them. We start marching around the Combined Arms Room. Soon, training tells, and I see people standing up straight, squaring corners, and correcting themselves when they get off step. Usually, we just do the "Left, left, your left, right, left" bit for a while, and then the older career-military students will start the calls. Everyone knows the classic "Jody" calls:
Soon everyone contributes his own favorites. Finally, our feet hurt, and we sit down. Then they look at me as if I have lobsters coming out of my ears. No, this isn't a sneaky way to get students to do aerobics until they're too tired to argue. But it is a very good way to demonstrate a number of textbook poetic terms that they claimed they didn't understand and couldn't apply. Marching to cadence calls associates ideas that they considered foreign—stress, rhythm, couplets—with actions that are familiar. For example, it's one thing to mark a poem's stress in a book; it's quite another to realize that any cadence call will be either iambic or trochaic, not ever anapestic or dactylic (since soldiers have two feet and don't march in waltz time). A second immediate benefit is that they recognize rhyme schemes. First, they understand couplets, since most cadence calls rhyme in couplets (see Jody calls above.) I asked my students to consider marching to a sonnet, but they couldn't. Who wants to wait three lines for a rhyme? Even more important, marching and singing get them back to saying the poem aloud, which they have to do in order to realize the correct stresses. Verbalizing the poem gives them a better chance of understanding it than merely reading it silently; verbalizing uses their mouths and ears, not just their eyes, to reach the brain. Once they comprehend pattern, they tend to prefer it. They would rather read Shakespeare or Wordsworth than e.e.cummings. As I was explaining how e.e. cumming eschewed regular punctuation and didn't adhere to fourteen lines for his sonnets, Ivan raised his hand and said, with the support of everyone in the room, "Let's not do him. He sounds unconventional." (This, despite cumming's accessibility!) Once they begin to understand poetry a little better, their papers show a remarkable improvement. I give them several choices for their papers: explicating a hymn, a Christmas carol, a popular song, or, you guessed it, a cadence call. This assignment proves very popular. Many students have xeroxed booklets of Jody calls and brought them in, thrilled to have perplexed their fellow workers. "You're doing what in English class?" One student, Terry Smith, wrote about the Airborne Rangers, one verse of which reads:
He explained that this rhyme gives the soldiers a process for jumping out of planes, and that it's in couplets so it's easier to remember. Ivan Schlemitzauer brought in some cadence calls that he and his assistant drill sergeant had developed during the hostage crisis in Iran: (To the tune of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again")
His paper on some of his calls concluded with a thoughtful and masterly explanation of cadence as poetry:
So, in answer to Ray's question of why military students have to study poetry, which could just as well have been "Why study anything?" I give Ivan's defense. My students read and understand poetry and literature through cadence. For me, a sergeant in the literature trenches, marching my students in cadence allows me to lead them into poetry. In Style. With Feeling. Or, as I put it:
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