Poetry and Teaching, or “Show, Don't Tell”
Enseñar as Praxis, and Language as the Craft of Truth-Speaking
“...Everyone is a poet, a creator, somewhere, somehow... It's in the sense of helping to create a new society that we are poets in whatever we do. And it is our gesture against death. We know we are immortal because we know the society we are helping to build is our singing tomorrow.”
Walter Lowenfels
“This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, reexamine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem...”
Walt Whitman
In Spanish, enseñar means both “to teach” and “to show.” Recently, in the process of writing my Div III and thinking about relationships between poetry and teaching, I rediscovered this dual-meaning, which in this context struck me afresh as particularly illuminating and important. I believe an effort to understand the broadest possible meaning of enseñar, which involves asking why the Spanish language makes less distinction between “teaching” and “showing” than English, can reveal much about relationships between the two words, as is often the case with pairs of English verbs that are joined in Spanish as in querer which means both “to love” and “to want,” and hacer which means both “to do” and “to make.” Furthermore, I will attempt to illustrate how a multi-dimensional understanding of enseñar might help us to understand ways in which teaching is related to poetry. Specifically, I hope to show how Truth-speaking is at the heart of both the Teacher's and the Poet's work, and, in the broadest sense, the work of all human beings.
I have tried my best to arrange these ideas in an order that will make the most sense. However, the path I have made for us here is not quite a straight one, but somewhat winding, and in a large circular motion in which the end will lead us back to the beginning. I hope it works.
Enseñar as Illustration
Let us begin by looking at the verbs “to teach” and “to show” in English. We can immediately see a relationship between the two insofar as teaching involves showing-by-example. Any effective teaching, in the sense of sharing/communicating knowledge and skills, must involve some sort of modeling, demonstration or illustration. To teach someone how to effectively shoot a basketball, it would be necessary (or at least very helpful) for the teacher to show or demonstrate how it is done. Similarly, to teach someone how to write a sonnet, it would be necessary to show a model or many models of sonnets that could be referred to as examples. I remember a certain teacher at my high school would illustrate the concept of supply-and-demand in macroeconomics class by removing chairs from the classroom. By demonstrating directly, the educator makes the abstract concrete and so helps the learner to understand.
Another way of teaching-by-showing can occur through comparison and analogy. These are also forms of illustration, though they are different from direct demonstration in that they provide examples that are similar in some way to the object or act being described, rather than examples of the object or act itself. By highlighting specific similar qualities, comparisons and analogies can also help to draw relationships between the macro and micro levels, making abstract ideas concrete and thus more understandable. This is especially true when comparisons use images which evoke the senses. In my experience, music teachers do this a lot, perhaps because music is rife with allegory. For example, a jazz teacher might encourage a soloist to “try walking, then jogging, then breaking into a sprint at the end,” in order to illustrate how to build intensity and speed. This is the art of comparison, which in poetry takes the form of metaphor and simile. We will explore this concept further when we discuss relationships between Teaching and Poetry.
Thus, we can see how “showing” in these senses involves an illustration of an act or object which creates a logical relationship between its abstract and concrete contexts, and so aids in the communicative process of “teaching.” This is the most immediate and basic level on which we might better understand teaching by understanding enseñar.
Enseñar as Integrity/Praxis
There is also a more profound level on which we might understand the practice of teaching in terms of enseñar, if we take teaching-by-showing to imply the quality of integrity. This is teaching in a more profound sense – teaching as true leadership, not merely as the transferring of knowledge but as praxis, or the process of simultaneously acting and reflecting in mutually reinforcing ways.1 Integrity is the quality of consistency between one's actions, words, and values/beliefs/ethical principles. It means living up to one's values; practicing what you preach, “walking the walk” and not just “talking the talk.” Understanding enseñar to mean that teaching implies showing (and showing implies teaching), we can see how we learn all that we learn – both good and bad, constructive and destructive practices – by observing and following the lived examples of our world: parents, siblings, relatives, friends, popular figures such as politicians, celebrities, media icons, and other “teachers” of all sorts. To effectively teach in the sense of leading, educating, and influencing, then, requires that one speak, act, and relate to others in integrity with one's own knowledge/beliefs. To help instill any sort of ethics, morals, or values in a child or learner, one must themselves honor those values in their actions as well as their words; one must set a good example. If an educator demands respect but then yells angrily at the learners, how can they expect the students to learn the value of respect? They have not been shown an effective model of respect in practice. Similarly, to lead or guide learners in a useful pedagogical practice such as reflecting upon what has been learned at the end of a lesson, one must model this practice consistently by remembering to ask “What have we learned today?” at the end of every lesson. In this way, we might also understand enseñar to mean both “to model” and “to lead by example.”
Revolutionary educator and founder of the perspective of critical pedagogy Paulo Freire writes the following in his book Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach:
An educational practice in which there is no coherent relationship between what educators say and what they do is a disaster. ...It would be much better for them [the learners] if they were not subjected to such a discrepancy between what is said and what is done. And of the testimony of saying and the testimony of doing, the stronger is doing because it has or can have immediate effects.
The proverb “actions speak louder than words” comes to mind. The mystic poet and sage Lao Tzu of sixth century China, to whom is attributed authorship of the Tao Te Ching, one of the most revered sacred texts in world history, wrote “the sage leads by quiet example.”2 The “sage” in this context signifies a spiritually realized person, a Teacher in the highest sense. It is a Taoist term comparable to the title “Buddha” which means “Awakened One.” Both of these terms are also used in their respective traditions to denote the highest inner Self or heart of all human beings. To follow the sage or the Buddha means not only to follow their teachings in a simplistic sense, but also in a more subtle sense to follow the Buddha within. Or, as the Thai Buddhist monk Venerable Ajahn Chah puts it in even more subtle terms: “The Buddha is the Dhamma [the teachings of Buddhism].” The Teacher and the Teaching are one in the same; both are the true Self. In terms of enseñar as integrity/praxis, we may take this to imply that true teaching involves fully practicing and embodying one's inner knowledge. The true Teacher must be their teaching in integrity, and so go beyond mere telling of it to become the “showing” of it, which is the process of enseñar in the full sense of the word.
The Sufi Muslim Master Hafiz, mystic poet of 14th century Persia writing in the tradition of Rumi and other Sufi poet-saints offers us this short poem on the subject of integrity:
Few
Have the strength
To be a real
Hero –
That rare
Man or woman
Who always keeps
Their
Word.
Even an angel needs rest.
Integrity creates a body so vast
A thousand winged ones will
Plead,
“May I lay my cheek
Against
You?”3
That seems like an appropriate transition into our next topic, which is how these senses of enseñar relate also to poetry.
“Show, Don't Tell”: The First Rule of Poetry
“Show, Don't Tell” is a commonly heard mantra in writing classes, especially, in my experience, in application to poetry. It means, essentially, to illustrate, in ways that are analogous to the illustration techniques listed above in our discussion of the first sense of enseñar. This is taught in order to help learners keep their writing grounded in the concrete, tangible, and specific realms, rather than relying on abstract and vague terms which risk overgeneralizing and distancing language from reality or experience. By illustrating with words, poets and all writers make their language “up close” and real. It is what makes language “come to life.”
In poetry and other writing, the most common and in many ways most effective method of showing-as-opposed-to-telling involves the use of imagery, or language which evokes the senses. This use of language is analogous to the direct demonstration of an act or object, as in the earlier example of shooting a basketball. Simply put, imagery demonstrates by showing what it is, whatever “it” may be. For example, if I were to “tell” the story of a nervous, frightened man walking by a graveyard at night, I might say, simply “The man was nervous and frightened.” But if I were to show this with imagery, I could say “The man walked and breathed quickly, kept glancing to one side, and began to sweat slightly. He raised his hands, which he was fidgeting by clenching and unclenching his fingers, to his heart, where for a brief moment he clasped them still.” Imagery makes the abstract concrete, the macro micro, the vague specific.
The other technique of illustration discussed earlier, comparison/analogy, is common in poetry, where it takes the forms of metaphor and simile. While there is still a level of abstraction in the act of comparison, in drawing a relationship between two objects it serves to make both more concrete/specific. To continue with the example of the frightened man, I might say that he glanced “like a mouse who catches the scent of a cat,” or that he had “the face of a child who has just woken from a nightmare.” Either of these comparisons might show or convey the man's frightened, nervous nature, by highlighting similarities between him and other things.
We will return to the topic of comparisons soon in order to examine more closely how they function in the works of both poetry and teaching, and what this reveals about relationships between these two works. First, though, we must digress, take a step back, and “zoom out,” in order to discuss some philosophical principles about language as it relates to both poetry and teaching, and introduce a central metaphor with which we will be working: language as a medium with which humans “craft” Truth.
Language as the Craft of Truth-Speaking
There is a element of teaching to the work of poetry, and an element of poetry to the work of teaching, which both have to do with enseñar. First of all, let us note that the medium of both the Poet and the Teacher is language. Both work with language as a craft, which is to say simultaneously a science and an art. Craft is logical art and artistic logic. A carpenter is an example of a craftsperson, an artist-scientist, who works in the medium of wood to build things – chairs, tables, desks, etc. – that are both functional and beautiful. Teachers and poets are craftspersons of language; both work scientifically and creatively to make thoughts, feelings, questions, concepts, ideas, facts, etc. understandable to a given audience/learner by putting them in terms that are as simple as possible while still honoring their important subtleties and nuances. They are by no means the only craftspersons of language – certainly counselors, therapists, translators, journalists, and anyone whose profession involves linguistic communication would also fall into this category. And, in the broadest sense, we are all craftspersons of language (at least as amateurs), as we use the medium of language to speak our Truths in our daily lives; in this sense we could say that all people are teachers and poets, which is to say all people are Truth-speakers, at least in the sense of their existential vocation if not their actions. In other words, all people are engaged, individually and collectively, in the work of Truth-speaking, though they may be at very different levels of consciousness in this work.4 This is a central concept in this essay to which we will return.
Obviously, the teacher's and the poet's works are each in their own ways both very complex and very different in how they relate to the use of language. To name just one such way, the teacher must work to communicate with whoever happens to be in front of them in the moment, i.e. the learners, whereas the poet, from the isolated safety of their study, is free to write in whatever way they please, and is not obligated to communicate effectively with any person outside their intended audience. However, in this essay (which is largely about comparison, after all) we are focusing on understanding ways in which these works are similar in their relationships to language, and what we might learn from these similarities. At the risk of oversimplifying, I proceed with this intention.
Let us again state that both teachers and poets are practitioners in the business of meaningful communication in one way or another. To communicate through words is to co-create meaning with other people through words. This work as a practice involves speaking, listening, reading, and writing in order to better understand and be better understood. Returning to our metaphor of language as a craft medium, we may see that the teacher is traditionally viewed as more scientist than artist (working to guide others logically with language), whereas the poet may be viewed more as more artist than scientist (working to express with language). There is undoubtedly some accuracy to this. However, we must not make the mistake of dichotomizing the two goals. Meaning exists in both truth (used here in the lower case to denote “logic/rationale”) and beauty; therefore to effectively communicate (co-create meaning) must involve putting words into relationships that help to bring out their greater truth and beauty. This is the craft of language as Truth-telling. Whereas truth in this sense (with a lower case t) corresponds to the science of language and beauty to the art, we may see how in the crafting of words the two are not dichotomized but are in fact inseparable, collectively bringing out higher Truth (with a capital T). The accuracy of the language – the quality of language which explains itself – has its own kind of beauty; the aesthetic quality of language – its natural music and beauty – resonates with its own kind of truth, and serves the functionality of language to the extent that it resonates. We can resolve and reconcile this opposition of form and function, poetry and pedagogy, by stating simply as a philosophical premise that Truth is Beauty and Beauty is Truth.
Comparisons: “Lies in the Service of Truth”
We saw earlier how poets and teachers must both be able draw clear relationships between abstract/theoretical and specific/concrete contexts so as to be better understood. This is the work of enseñar or “showing-not-telling” as illustration. We will now look more closely at comparisons as a skill within the craft of Truth-speaking (using the medium of language).
Showing through comparison is an essential skill in the craft of language, i.e. the work of making language both functionally understandable and formally beautiful. It is through the subtle art of comparisons, and particularly imagistic comparisons which awake the senses, that poets and teachers make abstract concepts real in a concrete sense. Comparisons as a way of showing can serve form or function in different ways at different times, or both at once. More often, effective comparisons are both logical and creative or aesthetically “fresh”. The overall meaning of the comparison relies both on its clear analogous relationship to the object being compared (its truth), and its artistic resonance (or beauty).
It is very interesting to note that comparisons rely on both an element of trickery and an element of clarity. Or, more specifically, they attempt to employ a certain kind of trickery or “lying” in the service of a greater clarity or Truth-telling. It is said that poets “use lies in the service of Truth,” and this seems apt. Is not a metaphor a certain kind of lie? And yet, the “lie” of a metaphor often contains a deeper Truth, a clue or sign that points in the direction of a certain subtle, elusive fact. Pablo Neruda, a master of the craft of poetry and particularly the technique of comparison, gives us this series of metaphors for his head in his poem “Oda al Cráneo”, “Ode to the Cranium”:
...la huesuda
torre del pensamiento,
el coco duro,
la bóveda de calcio
protectora
como una caja de reloj
cubriendo
con su espesor de muro
minúsculos tesoros,
vasos, circulaciones
increíbles,
pulsos de la razón, venas del sueño,
gelatinas del alma,
todo
el pequeño océano
que eres,
el penacho profundo
del cerebro,
las circunvoluciones arrugadas
como una cordillera sumergida
y en ellas
la voluntad, el pez del movimiento,
la eléctrica corola
del estímulo,
las algas del recuerdo.
In English:
...boned
tower of thought,
tough coconut,
calcium dome
protecting the clockworks,
thick wall
guarding
treasures infinitesimal,
arteries, incredible
circulations,
pulses of reason, veins of sleep,
gelatin of the soul,
all
the miniature ocean
you are,
proud crest
of the mind,
the wrinkled convolutions
of an undersea cordillera
and in them
will, the fish of movement,
the electric corolla
of stimulus,
the seaweed of memory.5
Few poets would be able to write the lines “gelatin of the soul” and “the seaweed of memory” in ways that actually make as much poetic sense as they do here. But then, few poets are as skilled as Pablo Neruda. His masterful metaphors are both beautiful in their truth and made more true by their beauty. And so we see how comparisons can put “lies in the service of Truth.” This subtle, paradoxical concept is essential to the craft of language as Truth-speaking.
I first began thinking about this relationship between Poetry and Teaching in the context of my Div III during the fall semester, as I was preparing to lead a discussion on Rumi and Sufi Islam for a class I was T.A.ing called “Religious Experience and Literary Form.” In looking over poems by the Sufi Masters Rabia, Rumi, and Hafiz, I was struck anew by the ways in which these spiritual leaders taught through their poetry, in ways that still make sense to me reading their works centuries later. Indeed, the very notion of the poet-saint (of which there are some vast number in the history of Sufism alone as well as in religious traditions around the world since ancient times) implies a certain relationship between poetry and leadership. It would be fair to say that all saints are teachers, and that the leadership of a saint is essentially that of a teacher in the highest sense, presupposing kindness, love, humility, patience, a willingness to listen, and a commitment to guide and inspire. Saints, in their words and deeds, offer us useful reminders that true leaders are followers and true teachers are servants.
The Sufi poet-saints used the power of language to illuminate subtle spiritual truths, often through the techniques of illustration and metaphor. Though their religious context was in many ways very different from the ones in which modern American poets and teachers work, we may look to the Sufi poet-saints as models of poetic-pedagogues in a broad sense. Their goal was to offer others through their poetry inspiration which could be used as a means of self-empowerment toward spiritual realization, or, we might say in the language of critical pedagogy, self-actualization. As Masters, the Sufi poet-saints were self-actualized persons who through poetry and other teachings sought to guide and aid others in their own self-actualization. Comparative imagery is a common technique in Sufi poetry. For example, the Sufis famously used dozens (or maybe even hundreds) of words and names for God, including the Friend, the Beloved, Love, the Wine-Giver, the Sun, the Moon, the Sky, the Ocean, Light, the Beautiful Bird, the Mother, and the Flute-Player.
Many of their poems are very brief and simple, containing only a single comparison, making them easier to digest, as in the following poem by Hafiz. If heard, meditated and reflected upon, these poems provided useful “tools” which one could apply in service of their own learning, growth, and liberation:
No
One
In need of love
Can sit with my verse for
An hour
And then walk away without carrying
Golden tools,
And feeling that God
Just came
Near.
The comparison of inspired, inspiring and illustrative words to tools is also found in this next Hafiz poem. Note in the fifth stanza that these words are being “sung,” emphasizing their musicality and beauty in union with their functionality:
You carry
All the ingredients
To turn your life into a nightmare –
Don't mix them!
You have all the genius
To build a swing in your backyard
For God.
That sounds
Like a hell of lot more fun.
Let's start laughing, drawing blueprints,
Gathering our talented friends.
I will help you
With my divine lyre and drum.
Hafiz
Will sing a thousand words
You can take into your hands
Like golden saws,
Silver hammers,
Polished teakwood,
Strong silk rope.
You carry all the ingredients
To turn your existence into joy,
Mix them, mix
Them!
It is worth noting here, too, parenthetically, the skilled communicative craftwork of Daniel Ladinsky, the translator of these poems. Certainly there is an element of poetry (and, thus, of teaching) to the practice of translation itself. To translate (meaning, literally, “to bring across”), one must search for connections between words and phrases in languages that are often very different, as in this case. This also requires skill in comparison. Surely many translators would not have used the expression “a hell of a lot more fun” to translate whatever Farsi expression Hafiz used in the original, deeming it too contemporary and unfaithful. To many readers, however (including myself), this line and Ladinsky's translations in general seem fresh and truthful to the joyful spirit of Hafiz; they carry the Truth of Beauty. Like Neruda's imaginative metaphors, they too employ “lies in the service of Truth.”
In Conclusion: Tying it All Together
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire teaches that the work of humankind is to transform the world by naming and re-naming it together. To do this, each individual must speak their “own word,” which is to say speak their Truth: “To speak a true word is to transform the world.”6 The role of the teacher in the Freireian sense (which is the sense in which I use the word, and is for me the true sense, writing from a critical pedagogical perspective after Freire and bell hooks) is to help enable others to name the world as they see it, to speak their Truth authentically. In order to do this, teachers themselves must first in integrity practice the same: we must speak true words in order to name the world as we see it. This, it seems to me, arrives at the heart of the relationship between Teaching and Poetry in the highest sense of both. The work of the Teacher, like that of the Poet, is to speak words that are simultaneously as True and as clear and simple as possible, and so in speaking their Truths to the best of their ability help others to speak theirs. This is language as the craft of Truth-speaking. When we as humans do this work individually, we are working together in the process of transforming our world into one that is more loving and just.
Saul Williams wrote: “...the future of language would involve us getting closer and closer to articulate the unspeakable.”7 A former poetry teacher of mine, Paul Jenkins, would joke in our poetry class that our work as poets is to “eff the ineffable.” This, I think, also describes the work of all people: to support each other in our own efforts to speak our Truths, which together form our collective effort to approach the articulation of ultimate and ineffable Truth, which is part of humanity's never-ending effort/process/struggle/evolution toward a world with greater peace, love, justice, and freedom; in short, toward the ideal Utopian world.
It seems to me that we may now have arrived at a point at which we might tie together the loose strands of this essay, namely integrity and “the craft of Truth-speaking.” At the beginning, we noted that integrity implies praxis, which involves a constant striving to name and thus transform the world. This praxis necessarily involves Truth-speaking, and this is where enseñar-as-integrity, enseñar-as-illustration, and poetry all meet. As humans/Poets/Teachers, we can measure the craftwork of our language by the Truth of our words, which we can measure by the extent of our integrity. True comparisons then, must emerge authentically from this praxis: from knowing as a process rather than a static act, and our honest attempts to illuminate and clarify our perceptions of the world (including ourselves) as part of this process. To do so – to live, speak, write, and act with integrity, to do our work as praxis – is to be the “real Hero” of Hafiz' poem. It is to be a true Poet/Teacher, a true leader, a human being in the full sense of the term.
Language is a tricky medium; it is far more subtle than wood. This is not to degrade carpenters whose work is equally vital to society as that of poets. (I don't know the first thing about building a chair such as the one I am sitting in, or a desk like the one my computer is now resting upon, and so I'm very grateful and impressed that someone out there does.) It is to say, though, that the businesses of teaching and poetry-writing are in a big way more difficult than the business of carpentry because language as a medium is intangible, abstracted, symbolic, and ever-changing, which makes it in many ways a more nuanced and flimsy material to work with than wood in the crafting of objects that are both functional and beautiful. (As you can see, my metaphor is now reaching the limits of its sense-making capabilities, and so I rest my case.) Mastery of the craft of language involves, among other things, developing the skill of illustration, of showing. This can be done through comparisons and metaphors, which make words behave in ways that are seemingly magical. A good poet can take the slippery and difficult material of language and find just the right form for it in order to make single words mean multiple things at once in ways that illuminate subtle connections. A teacher should be able to do the same, and good teachers often are. And so, we conclude where we began, with the title: “Show, Don't Tell.” The first rule of poetry turns out to also be the first rule of good teaching, and it all boils down to one word: enseñar. And it seems, as usual, that I am having trouble following this rule in integrity; I feel like I have been doing too much telling in this essay and not enough showing. So let me conclude by offering as a final illustration of this concept one more poem by Hafiz. It seems appropriate that he should have the last word.
THIS TEACHING BUSINESS ISN'T EASY
The most
Difficult task in hunting you, God,
Is using those arrows and bow
You gave my heart.
They are made of plain water I aim
A great distance
At the Sun.
Hafiz, who can understand
The profound absurdity of all effort
On this
Path.
Why not state this ancient dilemma
From another view.
Listen:
Not once in our history
Has an ant gone out and captured
An elephant single-handed.
Does that tell you anything new?
Maybe not.
This teaching business
Isn't
Easy.
1Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire
2Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu, translated by Brian Browne Walker
3Hafiz poems from The Gift: Poems by Hafiz the Great Sufi Master, translated by Daniel Ladinsky
4 Indeed, we know there are those who seek to control and manipulate language itself so as to distance it from reality and thereby dominate and oppress others; these people are actively engaged in the work of lie-speaking, which is in this sense Truth-speaking in its lowest, muted, or perverted form. The Truth-speaking impulse is essential to our being. It is Love, or Understanding, which all people have and want on some level, even when this is muted by a maladapted mind or ego.
5Selected Odes of Pablo Neruda, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden.
6Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire, Chapter 3.
7“The Future of Language” by Saul Williams