Tag: analysis of poetry

Ars Poetica: For Students Who Wonder What the Point Is, Anyway

by Nick Richardson

When your students are living in the real world, with oral exams and essays and GRE prep—not to mention dates, soccer practice, rush, the classes they “care about,” and their crummy part-time jobs—it’s easy for them to fall into the trap of thinking of poetry as frivolous. Or as unapproachable solipsism. Or both. Largely irrelevant, in any case.

It doesn’t help that poetry is already a traditionally marginalized artistic medium. Take the floor plan of your local Barnes & Nobel. If space assignation is accepted as indicative of general cultural importance—and I think, on some level, it has to be—the “poetry alcove” squarely places the form as sequestered curio, hidden from all except those expressly searching for it. And even then!

The general feeling, famously articulated by the poet Eamon Grennan, that more people write than read poetry doesn’t help matters. The precepts of supply and demand are latent in the American subconscious; when there’s too much of a good thing it turns bad, and we’d frankly rather not waste our time.

This depressing little idea is the seed of “The End of Verse?”, a 2009 Newsweek article based on recent findings by the National Endowment for the Arts:

Almost as an afterthought, the report also noted that the number of adults reading poetry had continued to decline, bringing poetry’s readership to its lowest point in at least 16 years. Continue reading “Ars Poetica: For Students Who Wonder What the Point Is, Anyway”

Poetry: Ownership & Understanding

by Nick Richardson

Farrar, Straus and Giroux put a lot of energy into their poetry blog, The Best Words in their Best Order, this past April—it’s worth checking out. Their interview with Publisher’s Weekly poetry editor Craig Teicher specifically caught my attention:

Excerpt

FSG: You teach Creative Writing at Pratt and Columbia. I did my time in an MFA program, where I taught a few undergraduate courses in poetry. In my experience it seems fairly easy to get students excited about sharing their own work, but not so easy to get them excited about critiquing their colleagues and published works of poetry. Do you have this problem when you teach?

CT: I teach mostly undergrads with whom, I’m grateful to say, I don’t have that problem. Though I will say I’m a big believer in the notion that, for a poet, anything one does is done to enrich or broaden one’s own poems, so when I teach published poetry to my students, and even when I’m leading a workshop, I’m always urging my students to pretend they had written whatever is on the table, to try to read it as if they were spontaneously thinking the work under consideration at that moment.

What do you think about temporarily claiming ownership of a poem under analysis? I can certainly see how it’d be an interesting thought experiment…a sort of literary method acting to help students get into the poem. I’m also hesitant, though; the poet in me feels like it may be an overly aggressive pedagogical tactic.

Be sure to check out the whole interview at The Best Words in their Best Order!

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Nick Richardson is an associate editor at Bedford/St.Martin’s. He holds an MA in Literary and Cultural Theory from Boston College and has published three books (two poetry, one prose)…exhibiting what poet Andrei Codrescu has called “a fresh sort of daring in the overstrained broth of contemporary American poetry.” He is also the publisher of A Mutual Respect Books and Music, an underground chapbook press operating out of Brooklyn, NY.