In what follows, I’ll focus on how reading for specific parts of speech, such as nouns and verbs, can alert students to the preoccupations of the poet. Of course, one could begin class by asking students what each sentence of the poem “means,” and that could yield a great discussion. But if you focus first on parts of speech—especially nouns and verbs, which are the most powerful parts of any phrase or sentence—you’ll find that your most reticent students are able to form opinions on the poem even before they’ve fully analyzed it.

For my example, I’ve chosen Stanley Kunitz’s “The Portrait”—certainly his most recognizable and frequently anthologized poem. Here’s the poem in its entirety, with an audio file of Kunitz reading the work. If you play the audio so that students can hear Kunitz’s brilliant, deeply moving delivery, they’ll understand the poem’s narrative right away: the speaker’s father has killed himself; the speaker’s mother cannot forgive him for doing this; and instead of telling her son what happened, she hits him when he tries to learn about who his father was. The poem is an incredible testament to the toll that such a trauma can take on a family.

First, ask your students to circle or highlight Kunitz’s nouns. The result should look like this:

Even before we’ve read the poem for its narrative, we can see that the poem’s first line features the mother and father; we know that the house plays a large role in the poem, with a focus on the attic (which is in fact the literal attic of the speaker’s childhood) and a reference to a cabinet (which is a metaphor for the mother’s heart); we see that Kunitz is attending to the time of year (spring) and time as a concept; and we can also see that Kunitz is concerned with the body—hand, moustache, eyes, cheek. From this reading of just the nouns, one can already sense that the story of the father’s suicide has deep, lasting effects that are attached to the memories of the house. We can also see that the child who wants to know something about his father learns that knowledge through the body—through the recognition of his father’s face and the slap on his own face that lingers in his mind for decades.

Next, ask your students to isolate the poem’s verbs:

By isolating the verbs, we can see the gothic terror at the heart of Kunitz’s poem. In this reading, Kunitz’s concern with forgiveness—his mother’s refusal to forgive the father—becomes the poem’s first action and tension. One sees, too, that the verbs are incredibly violent: killing, thumping, ripped, slapped, burning. Of course, there are three agents of action in the poem—mother, father, and son—and each of them performs one or more of these actions. In this reading, the poem is reduced to the physicality of its actions, and is already quite exciting. Kunitz wants this to be a hot poem, one that leaves us feeling singed by that “burning” in the final line. Memory, then, is not a cerebral or abstract entity, but one that is visceral, a mark that stays with us forever.

Not every poet will use such verbs of violence and assault; not every poet will use nouns that allude to the time of year or body parts. But that’s precisely the point of the exercise. By charting a poet’s obsessions with language, and with parts of speech specifically, students will be able to think more critically about how and why poets have stylistic differences that are deliberate, unique, and transformative.

Now, thanks to the WRP’s online “Listening Booth,” anyone can listen to a selection of these poems from anywhere on the planet. This digitized collection includes over 5,000 audio recordings of great American poets from the past one hundred years, including T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, as well as newer voices such as Terrance Hayes, Julianna Spahr, Jeffrey Yang, and Jen Bervin. The WPR offers these recordings as part of a huge initiative to preserve their entire collection, which is a kind of scrapbook of all the great poets who have read their poems at Harvard over the years.

Elsewhere on this blog, I’ve emphasized the importance of recitation to students as they learn to appreciate poetry’s provocations. The Woodberry Poetry Room’s Listening Booth can be used in a variety of ways in the classroom. Here are a couple of examples:

1. In a literature course, the students might discuss how to read Ezra Pound’s wonderfully Anglo-Saxon inflected lines in “The Seafarer.” Once students have considered Pound’s cues—his lineation, the stresses in his lines, his diction, the dramatic situation of the speaker, and so on—you might share his reading of the poem from the WPR, which is full of the song-like inflections of many poets from the early twenty-first century. Students will be surprised by Pound’s gradual crescendo, and even the way he raises the pitch of his voice, which might spur an interesting discussion.
2. In a poetry workshop, have students listen to a more contemporary poet read his or her work. Students might be surprised to hear Sharon Olds read “The Woman: First Night” in a low-key, matter-of-fact tone. Students might discuss the juxtaposition between Olds’s visceral imagery and this quiet delivery of the lines, and why she uses that strategy.

These conversations reinforce poetry’s value as a spoken as well as written art, and they energize students to listen more actively to the hills and dales of any given poetic line. Who knows? Maybe they’ll enjoy the WPR enough to wile away a few afternoons of their own on this wonderful site.

You can follow the WPR on Twitter at @WPRHarvard to get updates on additions to the Listening Booth and related news.

Today’s guest blogger is Eric Selinger, Associate Professor of English at DePaul University, where he teaches courses on poetry, pedagogy, and popular culture.  He received his B.A. from Harvard University and his Ph.D. from UCLA, and is the author of

This morning, William Blake’s “The Tyger” is running through my mind—and through my shoulders. Four beats per line, four lines per stanza:  that’s sixteen push-ups every quatrain.  I’m gunning for a hundred, but I’m not there yet.  Poetry helps.

I started this poetry/fitness kick last summer, when my wife introduced me to Steve Speirs’ book 7 Weeks to 100 Push-Ups.  The first week or two went fine, but as the numbers in the final sets grew longer, I could only hit the target if I found something to focus on other than the aches in my delts and triceps.  Metrical poems did the trick.  Line by line, beat by beat, they held my attention, even as they let me calculate how far I’d gotten.

I started with “The Tyger,” not least because it’s a poem about power and energy.  All those bits about wings and hands, shoulders and sinews, seemed to fit the task at hand, and when the Tyger’s “heart began to beat,” mine did too, quite audibly sometimes.  I paced myself with one push-up per trochee or iamb, although in reality, like most tetrameter poems, “The Tyger” isn’t really written in feet. It does have a joke about them, though (“What dread feet,” indeed!).  Rather, the poem’s falling rhythm spills forward across the printed line breaks, as in that amazing penultimate stanza, also known as push-ups #65-80:

When the / stars threw / down their / spears,

And wa / tered hea / ven with / their tears,

Did he / smile his / work to / see?

Did he / who made / the Lamb / make thee?

In practice, huffing and puffing away, those lines really read like this:

When the / stars threw / down their / spears, And /

watered / heaven / with their / tears, [gasp]

Did he / smile his / work to / see?  Did /

He who / made the / Lamb / make thee? [gasp]

Every now and then, for variety—which helps to keep my mind off the pain—I’ve tried other poems, basically working with texts I’d already memorized.  Some worked better than others:  Yeats’s “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” for example, makes a great bedtime poem or lullaby, but it’s too lulling to get you pumped for that final set.  Oddly enough, though, his elegiac love poem “When You Are Old” worked just fine, as did most of the Shakespeare sonnets I tried, and Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” although it felt a little odd to stand up, winded and exultant, with “though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster” still ringing in my inward ear.

We often tell our students about the uses of poetry:  the access it will give them to pleasure, to wisdom, to focused attention, to imaginative freedom.  This term, though, I plan to mention this down-to-earth, practical use for the art as well.

Come to think of it, this could have all kinds of uses.  “No homework to turn in?  Drop and give me ‘Birches,’ son!”

Today’s guest blogger is Eric Selinger, Associate Professor of English at DePaul University, where he teaches courses on poetry, pedagogy, and popular culture.  He received his B.A. from Harvard University and his Ph.D. from UCLA, and is the author of

Years ago at my grandmother’s house, I stumbled on a little Victorian quatrain titled “Constancy Rewarded,” by Coventry Patmore.  It’s a tiny piece of Patmore’s book The Angel in the House, which was something of a bestseller back in the days when books of poetry could actually be bestsellers.  I loved the quatrain at sight, and teach it often.

We hear of Patmore’s volume now mostly thanks to Virginia Woolf, who noted as late as 1931 that “Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.”  The book itself, however, is long, self-divided, and much more interesting than the caricature that Woolf killed off. The quatrain from Canto XI Book II isn’t stuffy, repressive, or patriarchal.  Quite the contrary; it’s positively frisky, if you read it right.

Here’s the poem:

I vow’d unvarying faith, and she,
To whom in full I pay that vow,
Rewards me with variety
Which men who change can never know.

Four lines, one sentence: how do you bring it to life?

One way is to teach the poem through dictation, using a model that Baron Wormser and David Cappella talk about in A Surge of Language: Teaching Poetry Day by Day.  As I read out each line, I make sure to note the punctuation throughout and the elision in line one, not least in order to get students in the habit of noticing such things themselves.  As Wormser and Cappella write, “they aren’t used to paying minute attention” to a text. Bringing that fact to students’ attention, gently but repeatedly, is one thing that makes dictating poems worthwhile.

To spark discussion, you can take the poem line by line, asking open-ended questions about each before you go on.  For example, you may ask: is there anything that puzzles you about this line or anything we need to look up?  (The elision in “vow’d” might come up here.)  What’s the most interesting word?  Is it connected to other words, by sound or meaning?  What do you think the next line will do, or be about?

Then move on and add questions about the relationships between the lines to the mix.  (Comparison and contrast are your friends and they’re tools your students have used for many years.)

Another approach is to get the whole poem dictated and then ask students about the central contrast of the poem, which is the one between “unvarying faith” and “variety.”  This is a fun topic to discuss at the level of idea—the paradoxes of love and sex always catch my students’ attention—but there’s plenty of play between sameness and change in the language of the poem as well, and students enjoy learning to spot what stays “unvarying” here and where the “variety” lives, whether in part of speech (“vow’d” to “vow”), word-length (monosyllable vs. polysyllable), or in meaning and connotation (“pay” vs. “reward”).

The point here is to slow students down, and by the time they’re done, what seems like a dull piece of Victorian piety turns out to be lively, subtle, and memorable.

Today’s guest blogger is Eric Selinger, Associate Professor of English at DePaul University, where he teaches courses on poetry, pedagogy, and popular culture.  He received his B.A. from Harvard University and his Ph.D. from UCLA, and is the author of

“A change of style,” says Wallace Stevens, “is a change of subject.”

I quote that line to students all the time because it sums up one of the keys to saying interesting things about almost any poem.  Teach this concept—really teach it, so that it becomes “truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole, / reflex action,” as Robert Hayden says—and you’ve given your students a powerful way to attend to any piece of writing.

As Stevens reminds us, whenever a poem’s mood or idea changes, so will its style, with some kind of shift, no matter how slight, in its rhythm, diction, phrasing, sound, or ratio of sentence to line.  By extension, anywhere you spot a change of style, you’ve spotted a shift in substance, even if the ideas seem, at first glance, the same.

To introduce this reading strategy, I like to use Langston Hughes’s “Theme for English B.”  The poem’s scenario is familiar, and spelled out clearly enough to be accessible even to wary readers:

The instructor said,

Go home and write

a page tonight.

And let that page come out of you—

Then, it will be true.

There’s something ham-fisted, even condescending, about the assignment, and Hughes lets you hear that in the instructor’s short-lined, simplistically rhyming, clumsily metrical style.

“I wonder if it’s that simple?” the poem’s speaker responds, and each of the three responses he then gives has its own distinctive style.  First comes a pre-writing thought experiment marked by unmistakably “simple” grammar and ideas.  (That’s the “I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem” stanza.)  Then there’s the first piece of actual writing, which is jazzier and more complex in idea and sentence structure.  (“It’s not easy to know what is true for you or me / at twenty-two, my age,” that stanza begins.)  Another question (“Me—who?”) prompts an answer that returns to simple sentence structure, but with a new key verb:

Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.

I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.

I like a pipe for a Christmas present,

or records—Bessie, bop, or Bach.

In other words, what’s “true” isn’t what I am by race or age or geography, but what I like, and like to do—a different subject, captured in a slightly different style.

To answer the poem’s final question, “So will my page be colored that I write?” Hughes’s speaker picks up and echoes the instructor’s rhyme-words (“write” and “you” and “true”), even as his conclusion refuses the pat, complacent quality of the initial assignment.  It’s as though he needs to pitch things simply, using the instructor’s words, to reach his none-too-savvy audience.  That’s a handy lesson in rhetorical analysis and performance—and it gives you a way to connect your own lesson in style and substance to things that your students have already heard in composition classes, their own sections (in effect) of English B.

Each semester, I trek to the A/V department, check out a small PA system with a microphone and stand, and bring the equipment to my creative writing class.  I tell my students that poems are meant be heard—so they need to learn to read their own works aloud.  They need to speak them.  In public. For the world to hear.  Through this experience, they find that the pieces they’ve cobbled together over the course of the semester take on new meaning.

First, I lay my ground rules. I repeat the rules I learned some 25 years ago, when I performed in a choir.   Yes, I was a “Gleek” before there was Glee on Fox television.  The lessons I learned from our director, Mr. Bolles, have helped me in my own public readings and still make sense for reading pieces aloud. And yes, most of my students will read their poems aloud in community readings at one point or another in their lives.

Rule 1: Don’t lock your knees; no one wants to see you pass out due to lack of circulation

Rule 2: Don’t be afraid of the mic. Bring it close.  Enunciate. Slow down when you read.

Rule 3: Don’t make nervous gestures with your hands and feet.  These are distracting. Minimize your movements to those that are nearly imperceptible.

Rule 4: Don’t give long introductions that apologize for or explain your poem.   Give the title and read. The audience will thank you.

Rule 5: Things never change. That is, no matter how well or how poorly you read, the things that matter stay the same. The poem you were proud of is still the poem you were proud of.

Then, having laid out these ground rules, I call on the shy girl in my class and force her to slow down. I force the student who wants to mumble to enunciate. And, I find little surprises that make me realize why I love teaching students. Like today, one student, I’ll call him Byron, began to read in a monotone voice. He continued this way until, eventually, he found the cadences and beats of his poem. Once he’d heard the rhythm, he rode it to the end.  When he finished, the class applauded and remarked that he had read the best.  I took a pause to appreciate the moment. Byron had learned to listen to himself; he’d found confidence in his writing and carried the rest of the class along with him.

Thanks, Mr. Bolles. I promise to continue teaching the rules to my students next semester.

In the introductory creative writing course I teach, we spend the first half of the semester reading and writing fiction, and turn to poetry for the second half. This transition often provokes some anxiety. Many of my students have never written poetry before, and some have read very little—they come to the course with the assumption that poetry is highbrow and intimidating, and are cowed by the expectation that they will soon be writing their own.

I do several things to demystify poetry—insofar as it can and should be demystified!—early on. We read lots of contemporary poems, so that students can hear voices that echo their own with regard to syntax and diction. We talk about the lessons covered in the fiction unit that carry over into poetry, and into all creative writing, things they already know to do, and do well—striving for detail, imagery, and nuance, avoiding the heavy-handed ending, establishing a compelling voice, etc.  And we do daily writing exercises to keep the writing brain limber and to alleviate that initial fear that can come with staring at a blank page and knowing you’ve got to, somehow, put a poem on it. If we do small bits of writing every day, then that blank page becomes familiar—a friend, or at least an only-moderately-irritating acquaintance.

I kick off the poetry unit with one of my favorite exercises—it’s simple, but its simplicity is its key. I tell students that they’re going to be going outside for the next ten minutes. (I do this regardless of weather; some classes luck out with a 75 degree sun-filled day, but this fall found my students grumbling out into a chilly, heavy mist. I told them that great poems have been written about hardship.) While out there, they’re to do two tasks. First, I ask them to make note of three things they think no one else will notice—a line of ants streaming from a trashcan, a mismatched hubcap on a Honda in the nearby lot. And I ask them to write down the following beginnings of sentences:

The sky looks like:

The air feels like:

The day smells like:

Your task, I tell them, is to complete these sentences with something utterly true. Do not worry about being “poetic.” You’re not writing a poem; you’re just observing. Maybe the sky looks like a bag of dirty cotton balls. Not pretty, but accurate, and accuracy is your goal. Pay close attention and report back. Don’t be afraid to get a little weird—often the truest things are a little weird.

When the students come back in, I ask everyone to share what they’ve observed, and to read what they’ve written. The results are wonderfully specific and intriguing: I saw where a dog had left a paw print in wet cement. I saw a girl roll her eyes while talking on her phone. The air feels like a wet fur coat. The day smells like cigarettes and gingko berries. By being consciously observant, and by removing the pressure to Write a Poem, students hook into sharp details that are original and evocative. The exercise also helps students to let go of the urge to explain or editorialize their observations. Because the assignment is simply to notice and report, not to write a poem, no one is tempted to dilute a great image with commentary.

This exercise then leads us into a discussion of what subjects and words are suitable for poetry, how a strong image can usually stand on its own, and how cigarettes and asphalt and the leaf-clogged gutter—these specific, sensory, evocative, wonderfully common things—can be the most compelling parts of the world. The lesson I want them to take from the exercise and subsequent discussion is this: Don’t let the idea of writing a poem get in the way of writing a poem.

Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” is one of the most famous poems of the twentieth century. It also provides us with a short, easy way into discussing archival materials. This is how the poem appears in most literature:

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

Immediately, students are engaged with the poem. The title locates us in Paris in the early 1900s, when the Metro system was still a wonderful and terrifying new symbol of modernity. The students are haunted by the “apparition” of the faces, stuck underground like the ghosts of the dead. And they like the surprising comparison between these ghostly faces and the petals on a bough. They see the commentary on the alienation of the modern metropolis. Formally, they can recognize Ezra Pound’s debt to the Japanese haiku tradition (and, as Ezra Pound wrote in his essay titled “Vorticism,” this poem is indebted to the haiku tradition), and the poems mathematical precision: the equation between faces and petals, the loose iambic pentameter of each line.

In fact, this poem is so accessible—or at least it seems to be—that it’s easy to forget that it is the result of a variety of editorial decisions, and that the transmission of the text across time actually transformed the poem. This is how the poem looked when it was first published in 1913, in Poetry magazine (To see the original 1913 publication of Pound’s poem, you can go to this link on the Poetry Foundation website: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse/2/1#20569747):

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

The apparition       of these faces       in the crowd  :

Petals       on a wet, black    bough  .

Ezra Pound

In this version, the title is boldly announced in all caps, the poet’s name appears just beneath the text, and the poem itself seems to be deeply concerned with innovations in typography and design. In this context, the words are transformed by the use of white space between them; and by the change from a semicolon to a colon. With a semicolon, Pound joins two independent ideas, but with this use of the colon, Pound suggests that the second line is an appositive, or description, of the first.

In class, we discuss the tiny differences between these two versions, and I ask students which version they like best—not which is best—and I don’t tell them which version has actually become the standard version that appears in literature anthologies until the very end of the class period. As they work through each version, they have to pay attention to the tiny, seemingly superficial choices in layout and punctuation that they might overlook in a reading of just one version in our anthology. In doing so, they are engaging in a critical discussion, even if they don’t know it yet. In recent years, bibliographical scholars have shown how such “accidentals” as punctuation, capitalization, spelling, and overall typographical design contribute to meaning in significant ways. In this example from Ezra Pound, students see that these choices in appearance are indeed substantive, even emotional.

Today’s guest blogger is John Schilb (PhD, State University of New York—Binghamton), a professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he holds the Culbertson Chair in Writing. He has coedited Contending with Words: Composition and Rhetoric in a Postmodern Age, and with John Clifford, Writing Theory and Critical Theory. He is author of Between the Lines: Relating Composition Theory and Literary Theory and Rhetorical Refusals: Defying Audiences’ Expectations. Schilb is also the co-author of several literature texts for Bedford/St. Martin’s.

John Schilb teaches argument and academic writing—working with literature as the core texts for his course.  “When you argue,” Schilb says, “you attempt to persuade an audience to accept your claims regarding an issue by presenting evidence and relying on warrants.”  Literature is chock full of issues—but how can we get students (of our composition and introduction to literature courses) to identify and argue about them?  Get some tips from Schilb’s recent webinar discussion to see how, working with William Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper,” he helps students move from an obvious thesis to identifying issues in the text and developing a solid argument. Listen to the recording, view his slides, enjoy, and discuss.

At least a few times during the semester, though, I create opportunities for students to engage with the performance of written texts. This might seem like an optional activity that doesn’t have the substance of a lecture or in-depth discussion, but I would disagree. In fact, in-class recitations can generate real excitement among students, in part because memorization requires a slow, attentive reading that we wish for every time we assign a new text.

With this in mind, I recommend the Shakespeare Sonnet Slam as a classroom activity. In an English literature survey we spend a couple of classes reading sonnets by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, but because these sonnets represent one small unit out of many in a survey course, that’s about all the time we have for The Bard’s sequence. Even so, the memorization requires students to read their poem with a quality of attention that they wouldn’t ordinarily have. Even if our activity means that we get to spend less time discussing other poets, students quickly understand the power of a poetic sequence, and how it can convey a variety of emotional and intellectual struggles in innovative ways.

Here’s how it works:

1. First, I ask students to memorize one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. If students are anxious about the process of memorizing a poem, I offer them several strategies: they can write the poem, longhand, several times until they get a sense of how the lines fit together; they can photocopy the poem and carry it with them, memorizing it throughout the week; or they can memorize the poem by reciting it once through, then hiding the final word of the poem and reading it through, then hiding the final two words of the poem and reading it through, and so on until they’re reciting the poem with no words exposed.
2. Once students have memorized their poem, the next task is understanding. In order for them to deliver Shakespeare’s lines with emotional accuracy, they have to attend to his sonnet logic: the turn that occurs, usually in the final couplet; the if/then structure that Shakespeare relies on to create tension in many of his poems; and the rhetorical strategies of his poems, whether they be blazons, anti-blazons, complaints, or poems of praise. I remind students that they have to make the language come alive so that anyone who listens will be deeply moved. With as many as twenty-five students in a class or discussion section, this can be quite challenging, but I’ve found that my students are so engaged with this challenge that they’re willing to extend the slam over two class meetings. I also recommend that they go to Poetry Out Loud for some advice on reciting well.
3. When students recite their poems in class, they must also be prepared to talk about what they learned as a result of the process. They can talk about the narrative situation of the poem, the way Shakespeare relies on inherited wisdom from Erasmus, the Bible, or his contemporaries, or anything else that they think could be valuable to our understanding of the poem as a whole.

Each student takes about 3-4 minutes for their total performance. In the past, I’ve sometimes asked colleagues to be the “judge” for the slam; other times, I’ve relied on students as the judges. The judges are allowed to award two prizes: one for exceptional recitation, and one for exceptional explication. Of course, one student could potentially receive both prizes. If you’re looking for a way to engage your students, try this exercise; if you already do something similar in your survey courses, please respond to this blog entry.