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.

For this week’s post, we have gathered a collection of great posts on poetry, using technology and culture to engage students, and writing as a social action.

Holly Pappas, Gen Ed Poetry: Finding a Real Toad or Two

http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/literature/gen-ed-poetry-finding-a-real-toad-or-two/archived/

Holly Pappas offers an assignment that will help engage students who are overwhelmed by or bored with poetry, and explains to her students that they don’t need perfect understanding to appreciate what is happening in a poem.

Joelle Hahn, Poetry, Proliferating

http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/uncategorized/poetry-proliferating/archived/

Technology has made an undeniable impact on the written word, and Joelle presents a variety of online resources for navigating online poetry.

Traci Gardner, Using Pop Culture to Hook Students on Poetry

http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/teaching-with-technology/using-pop-culture-to-hook-students-on-poetry/tgardner/

Song lyrics, commercial jingles, and Dr. Seuss all play a role in Traci Gardner’s plan to entice students into loving poetry.

Andrea Lunsford/Jeanne Law Bohannon, Multimodal Mondays: Day in the Life: A DIY Assignment Using Immediate Media, Archives, and Animation to Engage Student-Scholars in Digital, Public Writing

http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/uncategorized/multimodal-mondays-day-in-the-life-a-diy-assignment-using-immediate-media-archives-and-animation-to-engage-student-scholars-in-digital-public-writing/alunsford/

An explanation of how Twitter, Storify, and Go Animate bring digital learning and literacy to the classroom.

Traci Gardner, A List of Ten Inspired by Literary Starbucks

http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/assignment-idea-2/a-list-of-ten-inspired-by-literary-starbucks/tgardner/

Traci Gardner uses Literary Starbucks as a model, creating an assignment that allows students to playfully explore the minds and characters of great literary figures.

Michael Michaud, Writing is a Public Act: Take One

http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/authors-2/michael-michaud/writing-is-a-public-act-take-one/archived/

In this exploration of how the private writing of the college classroom differs from the public writing of the internet, Michael Michaud discusses his efforts to bring student writing into the public sphere and generate discussion about the impact that writing can have.

Andrea Lunsford, Writing to Make Something Happen in the World

http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/authors-2/andrea-lunsford/writing-to-make-something-happen-in-the-world/alunsford/

Andrea Lunsford discusses “good writing” in the context of words that serve a performative – even a transformative – purpose in the world, sharing and causing waves of social justice and change.

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!”

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.

Wordsworth (April 7, 1770 –April 23, 1850) is one of the most important English Romantic poets. Critics consider Lyrical Ballads (1798), a collection by Wordsworth and fellow poet Samuel Coleridge, to be the publication that began the Romantic era in poetry.

Wordsworth and his Romantic contemporaries valued emotional experience over logic and reason, breaking with the values of the English Enlightenment. Poems like “The Daffodils” and “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” have become classics because of their eloquent expression of the author’s personal experiences, close observation of nature, and evocative emotional content.

Wordsworth defined good poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” and though these spontaneous feelings inspired many of his works, the quality of his poems shows that they were written with care. He began writing an epic poem about his life at age 28, and worked on it for the rest of his life. It was published as The Prelude after his death in 1850, and was dedicated to his contemporary and collaborator, Samuel Coleridge.

In the Classroom:

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Cecilia Seiter is an associate editor at Bedford/St. Martin’s.

It’s April.

This means that not only is it the cruellest month, but that it’s time to celebrate National Poetry Month in America.

As in many things poetry related, the American Academy of Poets sets the gold standard: here, on their Web site, you can find information about everything National Poetry Month.

They host a detailed FAQ about poetry month and its origins, a national map showing events that are occurring across the U.S., a poetry app for the iPhone, an overview of new poetry books, and resources for teachers, booksellers, and librarians. Sign up to receive a poem every day for the month of April.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, famed publisher of numerous esteemed poets, has a yearly blog for poetry month, Best Words in Their Best Order, which should feature some neat pieces, especially on younger and international poets. FSG publisher Jonathan Galassi, who is also a poet and translator, kicks off the month with a discussion of poetry in translation. They are also running a poem-a-day e-mail, which you can sign up for here.

Probably the best way to get involved with National Poetry Month, though, is to check out what your local library has planned for April–many libraries across the country have poetry events over the next four weeks.

In New York City, for instance, the New York Public Library is running a poetry film series and sponsoring a reading. (If you are in Chicago, the Poetry Foundation has a list of events for the coming month.)  Check your local library’s Web site for what’s going on near you.

In the Classroom:

Poetry month can be a good reason to dig deeper into the standard curriculum. Here are three ideas for taking advantage of April’s offerings:

1. Have students research a particular poet (one you assign, or one they pick) and present their findings.

2. Give credit for attending a local reading and sharing their impressions with the class.

3. Host your own reading and invite family and/or the community: you could use student work or have the class memorize favorite poems.

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Andrew Flynn is an editorial assistant at Bedford/St. Martin’s. He graduated from Columbia in 2008, with a BA in history and philosophy. Before working at Bedford he interned at the Paris Review.

A sort of audio version of Project Gutenberg, LibriVox aims to put online audio recordings of all public domain books. This includes the novels of Dickens, Austen, Eliot, most of Conrad, and the bulk of Joyce.  (Membership in the canon is not a prerequisite, however; the database also includes selections such as “Selections From General Instructions For The Guidance Of Post Office Inspectors In The Dominion Of Canada”.)

There’s a lot of great  poetry in the public domain (by Yeats, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Hopkins, and many others), making Librivox a good resource for recordings of teachable poems. Additionally, LibriVox provides 84 mixed collections of short poetry,  perfect for loading on your iPod if you like to prep for class while jogging or commuting.

Volunteers, rather than actors, read the selections included in the LibriVox database, but the quality is generally high. (Even the best recordings of John Donne’s poetry couldn’t match the Richard Burton versions, though.)

If you find yourself intrigued by the project, you may want to volunteer yourself–or your students. (Instructions are found here.) It’s easy to get involved. Readers of this blog may be especially interested in recording a poem for the collections of short poetry.

In the Classroom

• Start class by playing a recording of a poem before students read the poem.

• Craft a short unit on the principles of reading poetry aloud.  Discuss poetry’s beginning in oral traditions. (LibriVox, of course, has recordings of the great, originally oral epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey.) Split students into groups, and have them listen to several recordings and then make a list of what helps and/or hinders their ability to understand and enjoy the poem when they listen rather than read it.

• Once students understand what makes for a good reading, have them choose a poem they’re drawn to and add it to the LibriVox canon.  They could even memorize it, participating in the oral tradition.  (See our post on the virtues of memorization.)

Related Posts

Poetry Speaks!

Memorization and Its Discontents

In Defense of Recitation

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Andrew Flynn is an editorial assistant at Bedford/St. Martin’s. He graduated from Columbia in 2008, with a BA in history and philosophy. Before working at Bedford he interned at the Paris Review.

In case you think Twitter is a passing trend, consider this: Twitterature: The World’s Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less, the work of two University of Chicago undergraduates, was published by Penguin in December 2009. It delivers works by Dante, Shakespeare, Stendhal, and Joyce in a series of bite size morsels. Poets & Writers magazine online writes about it.

Similarly, in 2009 Soft Skull Press bought a 480,000 character novel written entirely on Twitter.

Since we anticipate Twitter sticking around for a while, we thought we’d figure out the nature of the 140-character micromessage. We’ve had our first taste of what poets, publishers, and bookstores are doing in Twitterland. Here’s a sample:

Some people are composing poems, tweet by tweet, like Scott Reid @apwpoet. Others use Twitter to advertise the day’s poems posted to their blogs, such as Yiching Lin @yichinglin.

The haiku—or twaiku—is popular on Twitter, naturally, since its small form doesn’t overrun Twitter’s character boundaries. There’s even a trend called haiku-throw-down in which fast-typing tweeters riff on each other’s tweets, creating new three-line poems every minute or less.

The Geraldine Dodge Poetry Festival is on Twitter, preparing for National Poetry Month in April.

Poets & Writers, “the primary source of information, support, and guidance for creative writers” is here, as well as the outstanding resource Poets.org, from the Academy of American poets. Poets House gives updated on events at their library, literary center, and hot-seat of poetic inspiration.

You can find news from publishers large and small such as Red Hen Press, organizations such as Poetry Speaks, and bookstores such as Powell’s and McNally Jackson (or McNally Robinson, if you’re in Canada).

All in all, Twitter threatens to unite poets, poetry-lovers, buyers, sellers, and performers of poetry. For those used to poetic solitude, this connectivity might just break all taboos and conventions. Can we stand it?!

Tell Us

Who are your favorite poets on Twitter? How do you use Twitter in your classroom? How do students use it? How do you think social media can be useful in poetry classroom activities? Send us your thoughts.

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Joelle Hann is a senior editor at Bedford/St.Martin’s who worked on the third edition of Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, Poetry, and originally created the Teaching Poetry blog in 2009.

Perhaps the most interesting development in free online culture is the advent of course materials—from lecture notes to full videos of lectures—from classes at top universities. Much of this material is collected online at the Open Courseware Consortium, where those eager for some mental exercise can check out the offerings from universities like MIT, Berkeley, Notre Dame, and Michigan.

Maybe the most interesting for readers of Teaching Poetry is Yale Open Courses which features no less than three full courses—these are real Yale courses, every lecture available for home viewing—devoted to poetry. Langdon Hammer’s course “Modern Poetry” is a nice way to get up to speed on poetry in the English world since 1900. It covers all of the greats: Frost, Yeats, Eliot, Crane, Hughes, Williams, Moore, Stevens, Auden, and Bishop.

Those interested in going in the other direction won’t be disappointed either. The English Department features an overview course on Milton taught by John Rogers. And Italian Language and Literature features “Dante in Translation” with Giuseppe Mazzotta, which covers the Divine Comedy.

In a different vein, anyone inclined to apply systematic analysis of poetry or literature of any kind, has a treat in store with Paul Fry’s course “Introduction to the Theory of Literature.” Fry’s course is a clear, comprehensive introduction to literary theory which runs the gamut of twentieth century thought from Russian formalism to neo-pragmatism. The course is mostly taught from Bedford’s own The Critical Tradition and is great for anyone interested in figuring out what academics are doing when they use incomprehensible language.

Happy learning!

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Andrew Flynn is an editorial assistant at Bedford/St. Martin’s. He graduated from Columbia in 2008, with a BA in history and philosophy. Before coming to Bedford he interned at the Paris Review.

Whether there are actually as many published poets as Alpaugh claims and whether we as a culture lose something when a brilliant poet goes unrecognized is up for debate (as the article’s comments section shows). But there’s no denying that poetry, like journalism, prose fiction, music, visual art, and most other media is easier to publish than ever. And poets of all ages and skill levels are rising to the challenge. Whether you like this development or not, it does make it harder to find new, good poetry outside of a few traditional venues like Poetry or The New Yorker.

With that in mind, we’re going to start a new feature here at Teaching Poetry where we round up some of the best poetry journals, magazines, and blogs out there. We’ll have a theme for each round-up, and we’ll try to find the best online examples of different types of poetry journals.

Hopefully this will help you navigate online poetry, and maybe find a new favorite poet. (As of right now, we have no affiliation with any of the blogs we’re going to mention. If we ever do mention an affiliated blog, we’ll disclose it.)

For our inaugural round-up we offer you one site that has the content and power of a thousand: Web del Sol. David Alpaugh mentions WDS at the beginning of his Chronicle article, and for good reason—the home page is teeming with literary content. Founded in 1994 by Michael Neff, and only the second organization to put a poetry journal online, WDS now calls itself the literary locus of the Web. It’s a collaborative cultural effort that includes several journals, reviews, and zines, as well as links to hundreds of other literary sites.

Feeling overwhelmed by the WDS home page? Click on eSCENE to narrow down your options a bit. eSCENE is a digest of highlights from fiction, poetry, and new media journals. They publish the editor’s selections at least six times a year—which should be enough to keep you  reading all year round.

Of course, please let us know of your current favorite poetry sources in the comments below—we’ll be sure to mention you if your recommendation winds up in a post.

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Joelle Hann is a senior editor at Bedford/St.Martin’s who worked on the third edition of Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, Poetry, and originally created the Teaching Poetry blog in 2009.