How to Make Zh. Hate Poetry 101

There's a poetry club here at Russian Boot Camp. I went to the first meeting and have yet to return. We did the sort of scatter-brained and half-assed analysis of poetry that I despise. We did the type of analysis that had me pulling out my hair during Intro to Can Lit II and drifting into the welcoming arms of the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies. The poems read at Russian Poetry Club, despite g-n N.'s assurances were neither exotic nor rare, nor were they, if done properly, overly difficult. But to stand in front of a bunch of non-native speakers, declaim the poems, and then ask, "What is it about?" is, in my opinion, not the proper way to do justice to a poem. In Russian especially a poem is such a tightly constructed thing that carries a surprisingly heavy load, that to briefly disturb the surface and settle for "it's about love" seems like a waste of time to me, especially when my partially trained non-native brain starts picking out allusions to Mandel'shtam and noticing that something interesting is going on with the rhyme scheme. For example, who could really be content reading Mandel'shtam's "I will not see the famous Phaedra" and saying that it's about a guy who will never get to see a Racine play, when you could add at least some of luggage carried by the poem to any student's understanding of it? "I will not see..." is written in blank verse, which brings to mind a whole series of poems beginning with Pushkin's "...Again I settled" and Zhukovskii's "Castle Rittler" (I've actually forgotten the exact name of the castle. Oops!) that deal with mortality, cultural heritage, and the past. All of the sudden the poem starts resonating with more than the lyric I's disgust and dismay. Then notice the way Mandel'shtam keeps with blank verse by not rhyming, but how his endings rhythmically alternate so that there's the illusion of rhyme. I hear even more overtones now. Admittedly, this sounds difficult, boring, and time-consuming. It doesn't have to be though. Doctor S. is a pro at leading students through any literary work (except drama, I suspect that he sucks at drama) and he has a knack for asking just the right question so that the students, and not him, come up a viable interpretation that is supported by more than the scene of a guy and girl kissing in the park. So I guess then, that it's difficult for the instructor or for the club leader, but I don't understand how anyone, especially an educated Russian with all of that exquisite poetry at his fingertips could not want non-native speakers to know more about it than that there are poems about love, longing, and childhood. Would an educated native-speaker of English feel comfortable reducing Shakespeare to those three topics?

In related new: Russian verse studies, with which I am fascinated because they do what I've until recently always done in my papers and they get away with it. I don't. I am a pro at picking apart things, detailing the hows of a work, but I don't like to think about the whys. They make my head hurt. I am slowly improving, however. (Link via Langour Management)