sheenaghpugh | Poem-shaped boxes? (Reply)

'Tis the season to be getting emails from frantic AS-level students with exams coming up (good luck, all of you). I thought I'd put my answer to the latest up here, because it has a wider relevance. This student, all names naturally withheld, is finding it difficult to place poems under the designated themes - could I please indicate which of mine fit under "oppression". Reply follows:

I'm not surprised you find that difficult. So would I. Like most poets, I don't sit down thinking "I'll write a poem about patriarchy today". Most poems are "about" a bunch of stuff, or at least they have several very different triggers. I would hate to think any of my poems were as easily pigeonholed as that, and any teacher or exam question asking you to put poems in pigeonholes is doing a silly thing (you can quote me on that). Trying to help: I have certainly written about oppression, in poems like "Torturers" and "Nothing Happened Here". But of course those poems are not just "about" oppression. In "Torturers", (set in Argentina), a former dictatorship had killed dissidents and given their children to army officers who couldn't have children and wanted to adopt. When the dictatorship fell, the grandparents of these babies went looking for them and in many cases the children were returned and the officers prosecuted. But while that may have been justice, it must have been very traumatic for the children, who knew these people as their parents. Nothing is black and white. And "Nothing Happened Here" (set in Tiananmen Square) is in the voice of someone who sincerely believes the nonsense he is spouting; you could say it was about propaganda as much as oppression. I hope this helps, but I am quite glad the poems are proving hard to pigeonhole; I'd be worried if they fitted neatly into boxes! Good luck with the exams.

This isn't the first time I've had students ask what "themes" various poems fit under; this technique of putting them in boxes is plainly much in favour in schools at the moment. Limiting, unimaginative, stultifying way to teach poetry, folks. Of course that's just my opinion. Also that of the late great John R Cash: "You put me in a box, I'm gonna break out of it".