College Union

By Allison Frase

I didn’t like poetry until the third day of my freshman second semester. I was in a poetry class, which I had decided to dislike because we spent the whole first day talking about the philosophy of poetry. You should know that I try to avoid philosophy because, generally speaking, I despise it.

This is what changed my mind (about poetry, not philosophy). On the second day of class my teacher drew a giant frog on the chalkboard. The frog looked like a picture from a biology class, with lines drawn out from its various organs, like we were about to dissect the frog. But instead of the organs being labeled with biology terms, he wrote things like “metaphor,” “similes,” and “symbolism.”

“This is how most people learn to look at poetry: as a sum of its parts,” he explained. “This metaphor means this…that symbol means that, and so on. But what about the umph of the poem?” (He used a hand symbol for the word umph that kind of looked like his hand was riding a roller coaster). “Good poems make you feel something, make you think, move you. Dissecting them doesn’t.”

That totally changed my perspective of poetry. I suddenly felt like understanding every part of it wasn’t what was important. It was the experience of the poem, not, as my favorite poet Billy Collins put it, “beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.”

I started thinking about poems, literature, and eventually the Bible. How often do we (me included) pick apart one verse and beat it with a hose? It’s a difficult thing, because so often it’s good to just stop and examine one verse. But one verse can be interpreted to mean almost anything: justification of slavery, oppression of women, or make Christianity sound entirely legalistic, etc.

Instead of picking apart the Bible like a textbook, what if we read it like we were having a conversation with God? What if we moved past “trying to figure out the Bible” with critical analysis to the point where we use the Bible to figure out ourselves—allow us to be moved, feel, and be confused, and ultimately interact with God? As my poetry teacher might say, experience the umph of the Bible.

If a chalk drawing of a dissected frog could change my opinion about poetry, imagine what could happen with the Bible.

Allison Frase is a sophomore English major at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.

Categories: Nurturing the Soul of the College Student
Tags: