MOBILISING AND MODALISING POETRY IN A SOWETO CLASSROOM

t is true to say that poetry is a defunct genre in most South African English second language classrooms. This was certainly true of the school in which I our case study is situated, Lamula Jubilee High School, Soweto, where the teaching of poetry was dropped in 1996 since it was ‘too difficult’ for students. Outside of the South African context, and even within contexts of English home language instruction, it appears that this condensed, dense and sometimes complex genre has lost its position of prominence in English classrooms, as testified by many writers on English in education. As early as the 1930s, Jenkinson reported the unyielding resistance to poetry and deplored the unsuitable diet of poetry offered at school in the UK (Jenkinson in Andrews 2). Fox and Merrick, reporting on an English teachers’ conference in England in the mid-80s, stated that poetry was ‘rarely popular with pupils’ (332). Richard Andrews’s book published in 1991 was tellingly called The Problem with Poetry. In his recent book on the development of the English novel, the critic Terry Eagleton comments on the declining position of poetry in the public literary space: