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An inspiring, one-of-a-kind collection of innovative, inclusive approaches to teaching poetry in today's college classrooms.
As any poetry teacher knows, the best ideas about poems are built with students. In Teaching Poetry Now, this seemingly simple premise yields an unprecedented trove of practical strategies for enlivening college-level poetry instruction and making it more inclusive. In thirty-one short, provocative essays, contributors draw on their diverse classroom experiences and research to share innovative approaches to teaching the study and writing of poetry. Helpful discussion of curricula, learning theories, activities, assignments, assessments, and digital tools make this groundbreaking volume an invaluable resource for faculty who teach poetry across language and literature fields—from creative writing to literary studies to rhetoric and composition to cultural studies and beyond. Challenging the dicta, norms, and implicit biases that have dominated poetry pedagogy for decades, Teaching Poetry Now jump-starts a long overdue discussion of the theories, methods, and stakes of teaching poetry today.
"The achievement of this volume is nothing less than a new approach to literary criticism. Hopeful and necessary, Teaching Poetry Now takes seriously that poetry pedagogy is important and needs reshaping. Contributors report from the front lines of a range of institutions, giving a whole and accurate picture of the stakes of humanities teaching today. Sure to be widely circulated and shared, the thirty-one essays are original, sparkling, and easy to follow, as well as profound scholarly interventions in their own right. Teaching Poetry Now will help not only first-time instructors but also seasoned educators improve and revamp their poetry teaching across time periods." — Meredith Martin, author of Poetry's Data: Digital Humanities and the History of Prosody
"Timely and compelling, this book provides a critical reminder: poetry matters, and teaching poetry now is transformative. The title alone can be read as a demand and an urgent call to action. Teaching Poetry Now is like a mixtape featuring artists who have their own style, genre, and rhythm but who all participate as equals. I cannot wait to implement some of these approaches in my own courses on poetry, social justice education, and hip-hop studies." — Crystal Leigh Endsley, author of The Fifth Element: Social Justice Pedagogy Through Spoken Word Poetry
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Preface: Editors' Note on the Now
Introduction
Caroline Gelmi and Lizzy LeRud
Part 1: How We Think About Poems
1. A Conversation on Dinétics
Esther G. Belin and Jake Skeets
2. Post-Craft
Michael Leong
3. Unsettling Modernist Poetry
Erin Kappeler
4. Legacies of Empire in the Western Poetic Line: The Problem of Caesura
Heather H. Yeung
5. Unpacking the Interpretive Toolbox: Historical Poetics in Introductory Courses
Caroline Gelmi
6. "I hear it now"; or, Teaching Students to Read Poems in Novels
Annelise Chick and Gabrielle Stecher
7. Moving "Rooms" Across Borders: Putting Pressure on the Stanza
Reem Abbas and Heather H. Yeung
8. Under the Sonnet's Menace: Helping Students Navigate Race, Constraint, and Rage in the Post-Romantic Sonnet
Anton Vander Zee
9. Rawest Radical Material: Teaching Poetry's Diction
William Fogarty
10. Reading, Misreading, and Rereading "We Real Cool"
Mike Chasar
Part 1 Cluster: Ideas on Teaching Lyric
11. Retheorizing Lyric via the Pedagogy of Eighteenth-Century Antislavery Poetry
Chris Chan
12. Lyric Borders: Reading and Writing with Gloria Anzaldúa's New Mestiza
Leah Huizar
13. Lorenzo Thomas's Griot Lyric: Reading Persona and Race in the Digital Age
Lukas Moe
14. Lyric After Lyricization: Learning and Unlearning the Lyric I in the Activist Classroom
Anastasia Nikolis
Part 2: What We Do With Poems
15. Poetry as Empathetic Praxis: Black Poetics and the Creative Writing Classroom
Monique-Adelle Callahan D.
16. Performing Desire: Collaborating with Sex Worker Poets in the Composition Classroom
Philippa Chun
17. Oral Poetries Are (Not) Lost to Us: Ethnopoetics in the Digital Age
Kenneth Sherwood
18. Against Mastery: Working Through the Desire for Order in Teaching M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong!
Jess A. Goldberg
19. Future-Facing Archives: Phillis Wheatley Peters and the Intertextual Poetic Past
Sarah Nance
20. Cultivating a Culture of Enjoyment in the Poetry Classroom
Rachel B. Griffis
21. Reframing Modernism: Creative Composition and the Analysis of Modernist Poetry at an HBCU
Candis Pizzetta
22. Whose Voice Matters? Reading Aloud Across Language and Ability
Eileen Sperry
23. Reimagining the Poet's Procedure: Imitation as Literary Analysis
Lizzy LeRud
24. From Stifling to Expansive: Reimagining Poetry Teaching and Learning with The South African Poetry Project
Sooriagandhi Naidoo, Toni Gennrich, and Eunice Phiri
25. Transgressive Teaching and Subverting Censorship in the Dual-Credit Classroom
Ronnie K. Stephens
26. The Florence Poetry Collective: Death Row as a Site of Poetic Production and Expressive Sovereignty
Joe Lockard
Part 2 Cluster: Project-Based Learning
27. Engaging Poetry: The Review as Critique and Conversation
Victoria Chang and Dean Rader
28. City, State, and Self: A Collaborative Book Project
James Innis McDougall
29. Experimental Indexes: Quantifying Poetic Patterns and Project-Based Reading
Nick Sturm
30. Teaching Anti-Racist Research Practices Beyond Research Papers: Emma Lazarus, Esther Schor, and My First-Year Composition Students
Mollie Barnes
31. Student Research, Digital Humanities, and Cross-Campus Collaboration: Building Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde
Susan Rosenbaum, Suzanne W. Churchill, Linda A. Kinnahan
List of Contributors