Today’s episode argues that traditional AP poetry analysis in the US, focused on metrics and deconstruction, fundamentally misunderstands poetry. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks—an autistic gestalt language processor and poet herself, contends that a poem's meaning is inseparable from its complete form, including its sound, rhythm, and imagery. Drawing parallels to Leonard Cohen’s approach to explaining his work, Dr. Hoerricks criticises the “violence of over-explanation” inherent in templates that force students to reduce poems into discrete components like theme, devices, and effect. She advocates for a different “literacy” rooted in lived encounter and personal resonance, suggesting that true understanding emerges from inhabiting the poem as a whole rather than dissecting it for analytical purposes. Ultimately, Dr. Hoerricks champions allowing a poem to simply “be enough,” resisting the pressure to translate its essence into quantifiable terms.
Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/the-poem-is-the-meaning-why-ap-poetry
Let me know what you think.
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