https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/detail/90664
Owed to Pedagogy BY JOSHUA BENNETT For 1995 It was the dead center of summer, & anyone but us would’ve been outside hours ago, flailing like a system of larks against the hydrant’s icy spray. But a girl had her orders, & to disobey our mother was, in a sense, to invite one’s own destruction, cause to pray that a god of mercy might strike first. So we lay, still as stars on the living room floor, poring over algorithms: divisors & dividends, quotient the first synonym for resolution I ever learned, & would later come to love for its sound alone, how it reminded me, even then, of words like quantum & quotation mark, both ways of saying nothing means what you think it means all the time. The observable universe hides behind its smooth obsidian dress, & all we can do is grasp at it in myths & figures, see what sticks, give all our best language to the void. What dark irony, these coy, child philosophers, theorizing how things break from the floor of a house where everything is more or less in flux, indeterminate as the color of the blood in a body. Or the speed at which I learned to obliterate the distance between myself & any given boy on the block, the optimal angle of the swing most likely to drop another kid cold in front of his crew, to square up, square off, & this too was a kind of education, the way my sister held both fists semi-adjacent, each an inch or so from her switchblade eyes, showed me the stance you take when the math doesn’t quite shake out, so it’s just you & the unknowns & the unknowns never win. POEM ANALYSIS: Dedicated to “1995”, Bennett writes on his childhood experiences, growing up with an austere mother, and what life is like when you realize nothing is everlasting and the world is full of “unknowns”. He includes examples of events from when he was young that make him realize how he faced childhood can relate to how he confronts adulthood. A major component of the poem is when Bennett ties his emotions to the word “quotient”. He works through the meaning of the word as a synonym for resolution and as a descriptor for things in the university that are unknown. This is a significant contrast to the beginnings of the poem where he describes his mother and her strict ruling. Things for him when he was young were more permanent, more controlled. He also contrasts the math he does as a child to real-world problems. Math has concrete answers and steps through which they can be solved. Bennett is saying what we face in the real world are transient situations and we have no rule book. Bennett uses kinesthetic imagery to tell the story of his poem. It's his descriptions of a child flying off a swing, his sister in a fighting stance, and how he can “obliterate the distance” between people that drive the action of the poem forward. The movement that Bennett is able to generate in the poem pushes the reader right up till the end, where he drops the reader off with a simple “never win”. Pedagogy is “the method and practice of teaching, especially as an academic subject or theoretical concept”. Bennett has a little play-on-words here as he titles the poem “Owed to Pedagogy” as opposed to “Ode”. This is symbolic to the dedication he gives to the poem to represent how his experiences in childhood led to his view of the world as an adult. The author is making the statement that constrictive teaching when he was younger gave way to a free-thinking, less in conformity view of the world as initially indeterminate and “in flux”.
4 Comments
Kelsey L
12/5/2016 06:29:58 am
Good analysis! I liked how you got down to the emotional aspects of the poem quickly. I agree that Bennett tying his emotions to the “quotient” is a major part of the poem. After reading the poem, I did not catch the meaning of “quotient” as a synonym for resolution and as a description for the unknown. However, now I see why you said that and I agree with you after looking back at the poem.
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Heather
12/5/2016 08:33:38 am
I like that you focused on little details about the poem and brought meaning to them, such as the title or individual words. I think that sometimes the smallest aspects of a poem hold a lot of meaning.
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Kylie O
12/5/2016 08:39:46 am
This analysis is super impressive all around! To start, I loved the style of the poem itself and the way the author uses enjambment, ampersands, and lower case letter to fit the emotion of his subject matter—it has an almost nostalgic effect. Your analysis of subject matter was spot on, and I like how you picked up on the 'kinesthetic imagery' and the way the word quotient played into the poem as a whole. I didn't pick up on this at first, but it is a great point!
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Mallory
12/9/2016 07:36:33 am
I really liked how you used the tiny details to get the big picture. It really helped me understand the poem a lot more. I also like how you gave the meaning of the word "pedagogy" I loved how I learned something new with your post!
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