Responding

At lunch I read the foreword to Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled. It's a delightful how-to book about poetic sound-effects. Very British. I hear it was a surprise bestseller in England.

He thinks people are actually somewhat afraid of learning about poetry:

It seems to many that while there is a clear road to learning music, gardening or watercolours, poetry lies in inaccessible marshland: no pathways, no signposts, just the skeletons of long-dead poets poking through the bog and the unedifying sight of living ones floundering about in apparent confusion and mutual enmity. Behind it all, the dread memory of classrooms swollen into a resentful silence while the English teacher invites us to 'respond' to a poem.

The worst thing about the "respond" request, for me, is that it's so vague. Spew something forth from your deepest soul? What if nothing much comes up?

The teacher says she wants
An honest aesthetic response,
But you know that "I don't care"
Is something you won't dare
Announce.