THE CURSE OF TEACHING ENGLISH

I have an inherited friend, a dear friend of my mother’s. They met in writing class, and it is writing that connects me to this friend. Every day I call to share a poem with her, for it is poetry that truly speaks to her as she ages toward one hundred. Like my mother, she is happy to read poem after poem in books of poetry.

Though I appreciate poetry and write it, I cannot bear to read poem after poem in a book of poems. I find the experience too overwhelming. Still, I do read others’ poems, but lately I have been finding it difficult for another reason altogether—the English is wrong. Errors stop me, choke the flow of the words.

Today as I searched the web for a poem to read to my friend, I found myself editing the poet’s choice of words so that my friend’s ears would not also be startled, dragged from sense into questioning what was heard. Some of these errors are due to a simple lack of spell checking the “help” that the autocorrect feature supplies as we type online. These I can forgive. I don’t always catch them myself.

Some errors can be explained as the typical errors made by non-native speakers of English. These, too, are easily forgiven. More so, even, than failure to proofread a final draft.

But this morning I found a poem which seemed so promising, only to find myself thinking errors in parallel structure. A term I haven’t used for years, a relic from my years of teaching English to teenagers. I just couldn’t continue as there were too many corrections to make as I read. I did not share that poem with my friend. Even so, if the poem had not also survived copy editing and been published, I would not be writing this now.

It seems to me too many poems today are full of errors and yet are published. Yes, I know that it is the writer’s prerogative to purposely break rules to create a desired impact. I try to allow for this as I read the poems with errors, but the mistakes seldom add anything to the message, style or feeling of the poem. They are just wrong, and my curse is to find them.