Flashback Friday
How to make your home more artful--and more joyful
Back in 2023, I wrote for Plough Quarterly on ways to bring poetry into our homes and daily lives. I listed three action steps, and want to revisit those in greater depth here, as a lot of people have recently been asking me about this.
The whole piece is linked here. For today’s Flashback Friday, we’ll go deeper into the first and second “action steps” I discuss in the piece. I want to expand the discussion here, though, beyond poetry to art more generally. I also want to offer a little more guidance for how parents can teach their children how to experience art. This is structured especially for families with young children, but I think families with older children might enjoy, and even adults who want to learn how to appreciate art more.
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From “Poetry at Home”
Small children, in my experience, love poetry.
My own children, aged five and three, love little songs with clear rhythms and stark rhymes. They both “discovered” rhymes fairly early, and my son (the older of the two) quickly made up lots of little games involving rhymes. He has carefully taught his sister about rhymes, and I will often hear them exchanging rhymes back and forth, one or the other occasionally rejecting a rhyme for being “not so good.” I love overhearing these games because they are experiencing language in one of its most basic ways: as play.
[We] can do to bring poetry into our homes by reading it aloud. There are many excellent collections of poetry specifically for children; recently we’ve been enjoying The Barefoot Book of Classic Poems, a mix of children’s poems (“The Jabberwock” and “The Tale of Custard the Dragon”) and poems with cross-generational appeal (from Marianne Moore’s “The Fish” to Shakespeare’s “All the World’s a Stage”). Julian Peters’s Poems to See By is a gorgeous comic-book-style rendering of classic poems, though parents should enjoy this book with their children rather than just handing it to them to read on their own – some of the poems deal with mature subjects, like war and death.
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Everything I say here about poetry applies to other art forms as well: music, paintings, sculpture, architecture, dance. Children love art. They love to look at things, to listen to things. They love to experiment with making things. They build towers, draw endless pictures, and create rhythms by banging on things (everything, it seems!).
However, something I did *not* have time to get into in the original essay is the idea of starting early with criticism. Now, this does not mean that we slap our children down when they have an incorrect meter in a poem they’re making up. Rather, it means that we can help our children, from a very young age (as young as 2), learn to discern good art from bad. We can help them develop a critical eye, grounded in a real sense of how good poetry and art should look, sound, and feel.
Children, I’ve noticed, generally have an aptitude for good criticism (often more so than adults). This is because they don’t know yet what they are supposed to like and not like. They are more able to notice their own actual responses, without having to sort through what they’ve read on social media or in art reviews.
Now, don’t take this as meaning that children have innately good taste. They don’t. I have a whole post coming up in next week’s Flashback Friday about the importance of cultivating taste in children. Young children should not be allowed to give their attention to whatever they want—that way lies madness (and Cocomelon-induced overstimulation tantrums). More on that next week!
What I mean when I say that children have an aptitude for criticism is this: children are very present in their own bodies (they haven’t learned to abstract like adults have), and they’re less aware of other people’s ideas and opinions. So it is easier for a child to learn to pay attention to how a piece of art affects him—not how it fits into a broader social project or how it might play on Instagram, but actually how it hits him as a sensory experience. That is, after all, what art begins as: a sensory experience.
Children love questions. They love answering them and they love asking them. And really good criticism is really just thoughtful questions. So if you are with me so far, and you’ve decided to start reading poetry with your children, or looking at good paintings, or listening to an operetta or oratio or Dolly Parton album, try to get into the habit of asking really good questions about the experience.
Here are some examples of good questions:
“What is one thing you noticed about the art?” (This is a great starting question because appreciating art is all about paying really close attention. The best critics pay the closest attention, like when Christopher Ricks finds anagrams hidden all over English Renaissance poetry!). With this question, encourage your child to be as specific as possible. “It was cool,” or “I liked it,” isn’t specific enough. A child who can form a complete sentence should be able to get to some specific element they liked. Maybe that’s as simple as “It was red!” for Franz Marc’s Animals in a Landscape, or “Bouncy bouncy!” for “I am the very model of a model major general” from Pirates of Penzance. What you’re doing here is helping your child do the first human activity: name the world around him.
Now, for slightly older kids (3+, once they’re forming sentences confidently): “How does the art make you feel?” This may seem like a touchy-feely question, especially coming from someone as hard-nosed about criticism as I am, but it’s actually a really important question. Art, after all, always wants to make you feel. It wants to move you. At least, art should—if you’re regularly spending time with art that doesn’t aspire to move you, stop! That’s weird art! So it’s important to pay attention to that. How does a piece of art move you? Does it move you, or does it leave you cold?
From here, you get to do the fun part of criticism. Your child has noticed two things: one objective (a color, a rhythm, a word) and one subjective (how the art makes them feel). Now, you get to help them connect the dots! What is it about the way the artist used the objective thing that leads to the subjective thing? What is it about the use of red in Animals in a Landscape that makes you feel agitated, or excited, or scared? What is it about the speed and bounce of “Model major general” that makes you feel happy and giggly?
The last question is, and this is for kids around 4/5: Do you think the objective thing (the red, the bounce) works? Does it do its job in the painting, the music, the poem? This is pretty open-ended, and this is where you can start having great conversations about other elements of the work.
Congratulations! You just criticized a piece of art with your child! And from here, you’re prepped to ask a key question that some art critics never even get to: is this piece of art telling us something true about the world, or is it not? That question makes a lot more sense when it’s tied to a concrete discussion of the actual elements of a piece of art, instead of merely an abstract idea about the art.
I love having these conversations with my kids. I’m consistently amazing at what they notice—and it’s a frequent reminder to me that I have a very important job in curating the things they come into contact with. Obviously I can’t control everything they see and hear (and I wouldn’t want to!). But by having these conversations about art I’ve picked for them (a beautiful book, or painting, or children’s show, or song), we get into the habit of discussing the things they notice… which is super helpful when we get to next week’s Flashback Friday on cultivating taste!