A Poet at Twenty?

February 28, 2019

“To be a poet at twenty is to be twenty; but to be a poet at forty is to be a poet.”

         Eugene Delacroix

All generalizations are flawed, including the one above. Yet they can also useful. In addition to containing elements of truth, they help us transform seemingly unrelated events and experiences into ideas and then into sentences.  That, in turn, allows us not only to gain an understanding of the patterns that lie below the surface, but also to use them to share those insights with other people.

The generalization from Delacroix quoted above is flawed – some poems written by poets in their 20’s have endured –  yet it is also true. Most poems written at twenty, drawing as they must upon a narrow range of experiences, will be sloppy or superficial: Sloppy because the would-be poets have not taken the time to become acquainted with the structures and the traditions of the art they are trying to master, superficial because they will will have little to write about beyond their own personal angst.  They have not lived through nor attempted to come to terms with the range of demanding experiences that life eventually forces upon all of us. They will not have grappled seriously with questions that have no answers or problems that cannot be solved.  They are not yet aware of the extent to which their ignorance exceeds their knowledge.  Paraphrasing the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, while life must be lived forward, it can only be understood backward. Beyond some amount of talent, a crucial requirement for writing poetry is to have lived long enough so that when one looks backward, something worth writing about is there.

Edward Hirsch at 20 and Beyond

The distinguished American poet Edward Hirsch, now president of the John Guggenheim Foundation, lived through the dilemma of trying to be a poet at 20 and failing. In an interview published in August, 2016, in  The New Yorker, he said that in high school he played football and wrote poems, “although it’s generous to call it poetry. I had feelings I didn’t know what to do with, and I felt better when I started writing them,” he said. “I thought  of it as poetry. I did notice girls really liked it. They liked the combination [of football and poetry].”  During his first year of college, an English teacher who, in Hirsch’s words, “gave me the one thing that was more powerful than anything else,” told him “You could be a poet – you have the imagination, the intelligence, the passion – but what you’re writing is not poetry…you’re just writing out your feelings. You need to read poems,” his teacher continued,  “and  [then]  you need to try and make something.”

Following her advice, he began to read widely. Almost by accident he stumbled upon the “terrible sonnets” that Gerald Manley Hopkins wrote during a spiritual crisis between 1885 and 1886. “Holy cow,” said Hirsch, “these are sonnets – he shaped them into something, he didn’t write them out the way I’m writing.  I began to imitate what I was reading, and I started to be a poet, even though what I was writing were not good poems.”

Talented and determined, and helped by a teacher who opened a door to the future, he learned over time to write good poems and eventually came to be recognized as one of America’s best poets.  Author of nine books of poetry, six books of prose, and editor of five others, in 1987 he won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and in 1997 he was honored with a McArthur Fellowship, the so-called “genius grant.”

 Meg Ryan’s Discovery

The challenge of “being a poet at 20” is not just the dilemma of a young person trying to write poetry, but one for all people everywhere. One’s version of what life is in late adolescence is mostly a fantasy – incomplete, unrealistic and distorted  No one should be surprised. During our childhood and adolescence, many of us have not experienced life in the raw, especially as members of America’s privileged middle and upper classes.  During those early years, parents, teachers, and often society itself, have conspired to cushion children and adolescents  from the rude shocks and painful jolts of an unprotected life.  Yet, as novelist Graham Greene once wrote, “There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.” For some young people, that door opens when they join the military and see and hear things that previously only existed in comic books or video games.  For others that door opens as they confront life away from parents and home on a college campus or real first job.  For still others, the future begins to take on a darker cast when they experience their first important failures, rejections or betrayals.

Meg Ryan, one of the most successful actresses in the 1990’s and early 2000’s, gained an understanding of what happened to her when she was young and naive only after she reached middle age and, tying to make sense of it all, looked backward. “You’re at a disadvantage as a young, famous person,” she said in a recent interview in the New York Times Magazine, “because you don’t know who’s telling you the truth…All of a sudden I was told I needed a publicist and a manager and a lawyer.  People fly in because you’re inexperienced, and someone says: ‘Don’t worry. I fixed the problem…’ Then suddenly you’re grateful to someone about solving a problem that you didn’t know you could even define. You’re doing things that people tell you that you need to do, but you don’t.”

Facing problems that one can’t understand, or even define, is part of being 20. While it is often clear that things are not the way they should be and that changes need to be made, many 20-year-olds find it difficult to get beyond their feelings of anger, frustration, or depression.  Coming up with a plan for constructive action is frequently beyond their capacity, impeded as they are by an inability to make sense of what is happening.  Without this understanding, and lacking the ability to put it into words, it is next to impossible to take the next steps.

The Role of Significant Adults

Throughout history, children and adolescents have generally not been preparedto manage successfully the problems they face – a dilemma made more acute in recent times as the societies in which they live have become more complex, more complicated and more problematic.  The responsibilities for helping young people learn what is required to be successful in moving forward is assigned to adults.  Parents, teachers, uncles, aunts, grandparents, bosses, ministers, priests, and rabbis, among others, are expected to teach the young what to do and how to do it.  Significant adults in all societies share these four responsibilities:

1.  To keep the children safe.

2. To instill in them the beliefs, behaviors. attitudes, values and skills of their community and society.

3. To teach them “correct” behaviors, and identify the situations where these behaviors are appropriate and inappropriate.

4.  To prepare them to cope successfully with the problems they will face throughout their lives.

Clearly, this list is  important, but it is also vague, abstract and overly simplistic.  It also contains a serious problem: Many of the adults who are supposed to teach and model these behaviors and values have not mastered them themselves. Not only do they mumble when they try to “talk the talk,” they are even less prepared to “walk the walk.” And compounding this problem, there are often serious disagreements over which values, attitudes and behaviors are the most important, how they should be taught, and who should teach them. As a result, what ends up being taught and modeled is often contradictory, confusing, and  irrelevant to the problems with which the young are grappling.  No wonder many children  ignore much of the teaching from adults,  often rejecting it outright, and then turning elsewhere for answers.

 Problems at the Center

Perhaps the most important dilemma for those who are teaching,  and therefore for those who are expected to learn, is  found in  preparing them to cope successfully with problems.  Philosopher and economist E. F. Schumacher once wrote, “To live means to cope, to contend and keep levels with all sorts of circumstances, many of them difficult. Difficult circumstances present problems, and it might be said that living means, above all else, dealing with problems.” Many adults are ill prepared to understand the problems they face, let alone manage them successfully.  For teachers to attempt to teach young people to cope with problems that they neither understand nor are unable to manage themselves is a travesty than a contribution.  Not only are many adults unable to teach by example, they frequently base their teachings on false beliefs and assumptions. They err in believing that problems can be solved if only they work hard enough, if they can find the right technology to use, or identity the guru or expert to tell them how to do it.  These beliefs can be helpful for tame problems but not for wicked ones.  Since most of the crucial problems young people will face are wicked, adults who teach concepts that are appropriate only for tame ones are contributing to making the lives of young people even more difficult than they already are.  When we have mistaken the nature of the problems we struggle with, the amount of hard work invested in the  problem is irrelevant, searching for the right technology is fruitless, and enlisting an expert to provide answers a waste of time. Since most of the crucial problems young people face are wicked, adults who teach concepts that are appropriate only for tame problems are contributing to making their lives even more difficult than they are. What needs to happen then is to find and utilize better, more effective strategies and approaches for helping young people learn to grapple with wicked problems.

Helpful Adults for Wicked Problems

There are adults who can  “open a door,” to the future who, understand the nature of the problems that young people are facing and  have developed effective ways of teaching them. As a result, they offer young people a glimpse of the problems that are coming and present them with ideas, concepts and skills that will be helpful as they struggle to learn how to “cope, content and keep level,” with them.  They have discovered how to get young people started on paths that can lead to higher levels of competence and mastery of the messy, wicked problems that are a part of growing into adulthood.

Here are three examples:

 Dr. Jay Roberts: In February of 2019, Jay Roberts, Ph.D., professor of education at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana was invited to address students at St. Norbert College, in De Pere, Wisconsin, on the question, “Do our schools prepare students to solve ‘wicked problems?”  His answer?  “No!”  The great mistake of our educational practices and policies, he said, is that we teach students about the problems they are facing in their lives, rather than allowing them to experience them directly.  Roberts calls this approach of experiencing problems directly, “Conscious Experiential Learning,” a pedagogy that relies not upon answers and solutions, but upon questions that are based upon “uncertainty.”  Approaching education that is founded upon uncertainly would be the equivalent of an “earthquake in higher education,” he said, and instead of encouraging passivity and acceptance by students, would lead to “direct experience and reflection.”  If widely accepted, it would require education to be “purposeful, unscripted, student-centered, authentic and integrated.”

 Dr. Katy Crossley-Frolick In the autumn of 2016, students from Denison University in Granville, Ohio traveled to Holland to join with students from the University of Tilberg in Rotterdam for a seminar examining “Wicked Problems.”  Wicked problems is a phrase, said the seminar director, Dr. Katy Crossley-Frolick, that is “widely used in the social sciences to describe the stubborn, intractable, social problems that are constantly changing, defying simple solutions, and continuing to confront policy makers today.”  During the seminar, the Denison students came to realize that” wicked problems – such as terrorism, immigration, and climate change…are connected across disciplines and across borders.”  A major learning activity was a day-long U. N. Security Council simulation on the Syrian refugee crisis.  After a two-hour briefing on the Syrian refugee situation, the students were split into groups representing 15 different countries. After a day-long struggle,  however, “no one could come up with a solution for even one minute aspect of the Syrian refugee crisis because of the complex, social, economic, and governance factors involved in the problems.  “And that’s the point,” (Italics added)  said Dr. Crossley-Frolick. “The goal of the seminar was to understand that there are problems that are not solvable. Wicked problems are dynamic and constantly moving, and all we can hope for is to manage them on the margins.  That’s a hard lesson for anybody to wrap their head around.”

“Wrapping heads” around the idea that most of the problems that really matter in our lives cannot never be solved is, for anyone, an important concept to lean.  The Denison and Tillborg students were fortunate to learn it in the 20’s, and learn it in a low-risk, supportive  environment with guidance from teachers who knew what they were talking about.

Professor Roger Pielke Jr: In 2016, Professor Roger Pielke Jr. published a book about “war.”  It was not , however, about war between nations, but a “war for the soul of sport.”  Professor Pielke’s argument was that a war is being waged by sport federations, nations, and the athletes themselves, against the rules of the games.  “Sports depends for its very existence on rules:  take the rules away,” he writes” and what you have left might be a fistfight or a workout, but it won’t be sport.”

The main battles of this war are being fought on five fronts: the fixing of games by referees and officials; amateurism; doping; new technologies; and sex testing.  “Today,” Pielke writes, “the edge between what is acceptable in sport and what is not has become blurred, and this blurred edge threatens the soul of sport itself.”

The name that Pielke chooses to describe the issues with which sports is struggling is “wicked:” “…the controversies facing sports today are wicked problems…By definition,” he writes, “we can never really solve a wicked problem; we can only do better or worse at trying to manage it…Wicked problems can only be addressed by negotiation, and negotiation can’t solve the problem. [It] can only make the problem better or worse.”

Pielke is not content just to write about the wicked problems that organized sports are facing.  He is also committed to teaching the young people in his classes at the University of Colorado that wicked problems are an important part of their lives as well, both in the present and in the future, and that learning to identify what they are and what can be done with them is a crucial part of education  Here is how Pielke describes his strategy to make the lesson about the nature of wicked problems clear:

“As a professor, I sometimes play tricks on students in my graduate seminars on policy and decision making.  One of these is to present them with a wicked problem and then ask them to solve it. The trick, as you know, is that wicked problems cannot be solved but only managed. After students inevitably struggle with “solving” wicked problems, they often admit defeat and then recommend that a committee of super smart experts be put together to solve the problem. I return all such recommendations, with a note that says ‘Incomplete, please try again.'”

Helpful Insights

Since “to be poet at twenty is to be twenty,” expecting twenty-year-olds to  write real “poetry” is a stretch.  Delacroix’s generalization also holds true for young people struggling with problems, especially wicked ones. Because of their youth, inexperience, and lack of information, they are out of their depth.  Most of what they to do is either sloppy or superficial. And yet that does not exempt young people from struggling with problems.  In fact, struggling with problems is how young people spend most of their time.  And, because what they lack is an understanding and experience about the kinds of problems they face and the choices that are open in order to to deal with them, they are not very good at it.

The helpful adults described above were aware that their students were not prepared to deal effectively with problems. They stepped in and offered helpful insights about the nature of the problems they were facing and would face throughout their lives.  Though the students may not have realized it at the time, learning about wicked problems would turn out to be especially helpful in their future relationships and careers.

These teachers informed them that these problems had a name – they were wicked.  And they offered them opportunities to learn about wicked problems by struggling with them in safe and supportive environments.

Here are the important lessons they taught their students

• Wicked problems exist, are important, and when struggling with them,  require different way of thinking and acting.
• Wicked problems are dynamic and constantly changing.  Not only are there no solutions, it is a struggle even to define the problem.
• Rather than a single correct solution, what exists are many possibilities.
• Finding the “best” solution is the goal.  That itself is also a wicked problem.
• “Uncertainty” is a not a condition to be avoided when struggling with these problems, but since it can encourage  essential skills and attitudes – especially innovation and creativity – it is one to be appreciated.
• “Unscripted” need not be feared but opens doors for us to write our own scripts.
• Wicked problems are connected across all disciplines and borders.
• Wicked problems are complex and involve social, economic, philosophical, and governmental factors.  One begins with complexity and then seeks to create sufficient simplicity in order to take action.
• The substance of our problems lies in the obstacles that block our way from moving from an Undesirable Present to a more Desirable Future.  Finding, naming, and then organizing to attack these obstacles is the way for individual and groups to move forward.
•  Handing off the problem to “experts” in the hope that they will find a solution, leads inevitably to a dead end.  While the expertise of “experts,” is relevant for tame problems, it is generally not helpful when the problems are wicked.
• When it comes to the wicked problems we face in our lives, we are our own “experts”

Young people who are fortunate to learn these principles and concepts when they are young, and especially when there are supportive and experienced adults and teachers to provide guidance and support, will leave school with invaluable gifts that will serve them well in the future.

Ignorance Abounds.  Who Will Help?

Most of the problems that make a difference in our lives are wicked. But few young people are aware of this. They are aware that many of the problems they struggle with are troublesome and in some cases sometimes debilitating,  but they are unclear what kinds of problems they are or the best way to go about working on them.  Experienced, knowledgeable and helpful adults can be a young person’s most valuable resource.  They can help 20-year-olds understand that there is no “get out of jail” card for wicked problems.  Wicked problems are inevitable part of living.  They are also the raw materials from which both progress and poetry are made.