Terrance Ilayes
More Theories of Duncnde & Teaching th e I nexp licab le "I want d1ere lo be no eyes for d1e mghl, I no flower ofgold for my heart" "Ghazal of the Terrible Presence," Federico Garcia Lorca Suppose for a moment that you arc a poet and a teacher of poetry. In your Beginning Poetry W orkshop you have been exposing your students to what you know to be safe poems. When you taught them the principles of imagery, you brought in a few poems by the deep image poets. When you taught them how to employ figurative language, perhaps you brought in a few poems by Billy Collins, the genius of metaphor. It is late in the semester now. There have been quizzes and midterms concerning the craft of poetry. There have been several of the flat, cliche-ridden wo rkshops you dread. Perhaps you have mentioned Lorca. If you have risked reading his work to tJ•em, you have been careful to steer them away from less "concrete" aspects of his poetry. Rightly so. In the wrong hands/minds such a poet could inspire anarchy. lie might give certain misguided students a license to write poems that mistake mystery for obscurity... It is nearing the end of the semester and you still have not discussed that inexplicable llniJg you believe essential to poetry... In his pivotal 1975 book, Leaping Poe/Jy: An Idea wid1 Poems and Translations, Robert Bly alTers several assertions about the history of surrealism and its roots in American poetry of' the era. Early on he traces the Poet' s loss and subsequent rediscovery of the powers of the unconscious:
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