Poet: I can’t answer questions on Texas standardized tests about my own poems

To echo the other comments questioning that premise, there's also the famous Isaac Asimov anecdote:

Isaac Asimov often repeated an anecdote based on this: He once sat in on a class where the topic of discussion was one of his own works. (He did this in the back of a large lecture hall so he could remain semi-anonymous). After the class ended, he went up and introduced himself to the teacher, saying that he had found the teacher's interpretation of the story interesting, though it really wasn't what he had meant at all. The teacher's response: "Just because you wrote it, what makes you think you have the slightest idea what it's about?"

Well, that's very much up for debate. The Intentional Fallacy claims that authorial intent is not a valid part of artistic criticism or interpretation. That all you can judge a work on is the internal text and surrounding body of context, not notions of what was going on in the artist's head.

The idea is debated, to be sure.

This is the crux of the matter. James Joyce (just to pick someone whose work is heavily discussed) may have made a reference to a common Catholic belief and not realized it because he was embedded in Irish Catholicism. It could have made some metaphor stronger or weaker. When you discuss the metaphor you may be discussing the author's unwitting intent. Thus the author themselves might not be the proper authority (except for their own overt motivations).

Literature isn't special in this regard -- after all we go to psychiatrists & therapists to help us learn about our own actions that we don't understand.

> What we teach is that works have one correct interpretation and if you do not read it that way, you are wrong.

That's not my experience. At least in my school days, in Germany, it wasn't common to only accept one interpretation as correct. As long as we could reasonably justify and explain our interpretations we were fine.

Why is that?

There are a myriad of ways to analyze a piece, and many focus on reader response rather than authorial intent. You can dismiss reader response as merely incorrect initially, but this becomes complicated when you try to analyze works written by reader response critics. Indeed some authors like Burroughs take this to the extreme, introducing randomness (via cut-up technique) to their writing in an attempt to eschew even the possibility of authorial intent. Burroughs was somewhat limited in his approach by the technology of his day, but it's not hard to imagine approaches using modern technology which remove an author from the system completely.

I am not saying I agree that reader response criticism entirely: just because authorial intent isn't special doesn't mean that reader response is the answer. Frequently reader response is used as a way for critics to use a piece of literature as a soapbox for their own ideologies, and I find that distasteful. But I do think that there's some validity to the idea that authors don't have any special authority to interpret their own work.

For example, look at the song "I'll be watching you". Sting had said that he intended this song to be about government surveillance. But almost universally this song has been (mis?)interpreted as being about a stalker. Any analysis of the song which focused solely on Sting's intent would be incomplete, because the interpretation of the consumers of the song is far more related to its cultural relevance.

As an artist myself, I have a huge problem with assessing qualitative analysis using something as mechanical as multiple choice. Authorial intent definitely falls under that umbrella. Rigid assessments would better show the students' ability to recognize the mechanics/techniques of a piece, such as the use of metaphor. And in general, you're really not supposed to speculate about authorial intent anyway.

If anything, the stereotype is that engineers are overly prone to answer-seeking while non-engineers are much more comfortable with relativism?

Like, what is the isle then? Yourself?

QuercusMax objects in sister comment to interpreting "singuliers" as "only one".. The line "Des arbres singuliers" clearly indicates to me that there are many trees, regardless of whether their "singularity" means they are all "remarkable, unique" or "free-standing, isolated" (which, the more I read it, the more I understand the basis of your interpretation).

In any case, to be accurate, I think your interpretation needed to be compatible with there being many phalluses. (Phalli?) :)

my freshman year of high school i had a project where i had to write some kind of collection of poems. i ended up putting together a calendar, with certain days having a poem. there was some kind of rationale to how i picked the days, but i can't remember. i had an error printing it though, and i couldn't get the last two months to print, but i had met my requirements for the project, so i just turned it in.

this brought me a very long and irritating discussion with two counselors and the vice principal. they thought: maybe i was gay, maybe i was trans, maybe i had been molested, maybe i was being abused, maybe was planning something violent, maybe the whole thing was a big joke, and maybe i was planning to commit suicide. they wanted an explanation, and all i could say was that i was just... writing some poems shrugs.

# TL;DR

- I don't think the questions are unreasonable - I'm not surprised the poet says she can't answer them - I agree with you that the point of analysis is the process, but that gets tested in writing assessments - reading assessments get bad rap because people forget reading/understanding the questions is just as important as reading/understanding the texts

# BODY

Before reading the whole article (so before reading her analysis of the questions near the end), I followed the source links from the first section to try answering the 5 questions about "A Real Case" myself.

I got them all correct and (discounting the initial time taken to read the poem) spent more time scrolling up and down in the pdf to refer back to the text than I did thinking about the questions.

This is a reading assessment for 7th graders. Perhaps all the commotion in the article and in the news and in this thread is because people are assuming that it is assessing 7th graders' abilities to read and understand poetry. I don't think this is true at all. I think it's assessing 7th graders' abilities to read and understand questions.

The question of whether the ability to read and understand poetry is of lasting value may be up in the air, but the ability to read and understand questions is an essential communication skill in modern life, imo. The material the questions are about is - not quite incidental, but honestly no more than half of the picture.

The single question that I spent more time on than all the others combined was 35. Maybe my approach to answering a question that I considered poorly worded (at first) might be of interest.

Here it is, with the stanza it concerns included and the highlighted lines marked:

  --> My mood’s as welcome as
  --> incoming dog breath,
  --> or a terminal case of split ends.
  --> I sparkle like a dust rag,
      I could attract mosquitoes -
      maybe - not friends.
    
  35) The imagery in these lines helps the reader understand-

      A) the shift in the speaker’s attitude
      B) the speaker’s unpleasantness
      C) why the speaker has no friends
      D) what the speaker thinks of others

I eventually decided on B for two reasons:

1) Friends are only ever mentioned after the highlighted lines. To put it in programming terms (sorry!) a first-time reader streaming the poem (i.e., the way most people read) would lack a mental "parser" labelled "now the speakers's talking about friends" with which to process the highlighted lines. My experience is that most straightforward writers (the ones we can reasonably expect 7th graders to parse) do not expect their readers to manage their own mental "heap" of unexplained information and compare all of its contents to each new bit of information received as reading proceeds. When unexplained information does come along ("Where did my bike go? I parked it right here!") it's usually clearly labelled as such, so the reader need only maintain the heap of "information the author labelled for me as unknown". This is both less work for the reader than figuring out the labels on their own, and requires them to remember less. When this sort of labeling is not done, it's called a mystery novel.

[Aside: of course, writers who are not targeting 7th graders can and do write however they want; a favorite example of mine is Neal Stephenson, who seems to take perverse pleasure in quietly building up a narrative out of elements that he introduces so familiarly and with so little fanfare or detail that you swear he must have explained this thing a few pages back and you just missed it somehow, but after checking the previous 50 pages you can't find any mention of it so you eventually give up and continue and 150 pages later you read a paragraph that tumbles around in your head for a few seconds and then it clicks snugly into place in your heap and completely illuminates the question you had earlier. And I love him for it.]

2) Most of the rest of the poem is composed of atomic ideas expressed in one or two lines (with the exception of the first stanza that keeps the "sickness" ball bouncing for 5 lines). To match the rest of the poem, it seemed more likely the highlighted stanza expressed four nearly-independent thoughts: I smell bad, I'm irritating, I'm boring, and I'm unattractive. In that structure, the concept of friends is restricted to the "scope" of the final thought, and only used to illustrate just how unattractive the speaker is. None of the other thoughts are involved. As such, C is unrelated to the highlighted lines but B is still a good match.

Of course, most of this was unconscious when I was doing it. I wrote down B with about 70% confidence and kept going, because that's what you do on a timed test. Now that I put my reasoning it all down on paper, I'm much more confident in the result. (It helps that it turned out to be correct!)

If I recall correctly, I got a perfect score on the reading section of the SAT. I helped several of the international students at my school study for that section specifically, and my top recommendation was that they read books. I imagine that I'm to the left of the bell curve of reading speed/comprehension; I had read Ivanhoe by age seven or eight and the Lord of the Rings by age nine. (the hard part was getting started; after my mother had read the first two or three chapters to me, I got hooked and read the rest myself.)

Still, I have no aspirations as a poet or author. Likewise, I'm sure there are many superb poets who are quite terrible at analytical thinking. If poet was truly unable to answer the test questions confidently, I'm not surprised. On the other hand, if the poet could actually answer the questions just fine but was being hyperbolical to frame a strong point about how test writers are ignoring author intent and the result is bad test questions, that would not surprise me either. (After all, it makes sense that an author would take the conservative position in the "death of the author" discussion!)

You [my parent commenter, if you're still here!] stressed that the the problem with the test is that it has 1 correct answer for each question, and so cannot accurately test the test-taker's ability to perform a process for which the point is not the result, but the ability to justify the validity one's process.

I agree with you!

But testing someone's ability to justify their analysis is called a writing assessment. What we are dealing with is a reading assessment.

This assessment measures the test-taker's ability to internalize the analysis process performed by the test-writer, apply that process to the text themselves, and demonstrate that they were successful by accurately predicting which conclusion the test-writer arrived at.

In other words, this is testing the test-taker's ability to accurately and productively process thoughts that originated outside of themselves. This is something that 7th graders are not very good at without practice. (This is one contributor, I think, to why bullying is common at those ages - kids have not yet learned to empathize.) This is a good skill to learn, and a good skill to test.

You might find that you personally dislike them but than that too has helped shape your esthetic views, education should indeed bring you to encounter significant milestones of cultural and literary heritage; at the very least to give a student some understanding of the landscape.

This incentivices teaching to the test rather than teaching a rounded education and then testing the functional aspects.

So in order to ensure pupils are exposed to culture, you must put it on the test to make sure it gets covered.

I imagine the US uses a similarly shitty system of school funding allocation.

It raises the question "what is school for?"

I could see a scenario where "elite" parents complain that their kids spent a year in school being drilled on reading credit card applications, at the expense of things like literature and poetry. (I'd probably be one of those parents, and in my locale, educated parents are constantly complaining that the school curriculum has too much drill work and not enough liberal arts). So, in order to broaden the curriculum, the tests have to somehow be broadened.

I suspect that the best education is also the hardest to test. There will always be a conflict between education and testing.

It wasn't about the "F", it was about the teacher's reply to KV's essay about himself, saying that the author (KV) didn't know anything about KV .

Missing that wouldn't cause the downvotes on its own - but combined with comment about the offtopicness probably did it.

I am not saying that there is no context within which analysis has meaning, but that sort of component analysis I think is a misapplication of a certain kind of thinking to a medium that does not benefit at all from it.

If we knew the components of good poems we could actually produce them with some consistency. We can't. So to teach it that way is only to turn poetry into a cypher for a different activity altogether.

I guess thats fine, those skills may be needed for other areas of life and are worth developing, but it doesn't seem like learning about the function or creation of art, so in turn seems like a takeover of the field for the sake of something else entirely. I dunno, maybe its all good, but it seems like something potentially valuable and encouraging is being sacrificed for the sake of analysis.

It sounds to me that the reaction in favor was as knee-jerk as the the reaction against the thesis in the first place. This isn't "producing research" or "making unsubstantiated assertions"; it sounds like pandering to the instructor's bias.

All in all, it's a great way to encourage group-think. But then again, so are most academic departments.