This Morning

Not experienced readers of Sask poetry, my Sask Literature students, in this round of essays I've got to finish marking by noon, have come to certain conclusions about poetry collections they chose to write about:

"Parenthood" is a central theme "inside the walls" of Michael Trussler's Accidental Animals.

Robert Currie's Learning on the Job offers "a general understanding of what it means to be a father, a husband and a human being".

Poems in Judith Krause's Mongrel Love are said to be "alluring".

Shelley Leedahl's A Few Words for January covers "everything from pain to poverty".

In Ring Finger, Left Hand, poems by Katherine Lawrence express "a strong voice of love, loneliness and anger".

And so on. There's lots of room to push further with such observations, of course. The main thing missing is consideration of form. Even if most of the poetry being considered is conventionally lyric in form, that fact in itself is worth noting, I'd say. These readers tend to treat form as simply a transparent servant of content.

The "old-time education" option for this assignment, by the way, was to memorize a poem and deliver it to the class, following up with discussion questions and a short written commentary. Only six chose that option.