Poetry – Lit Bits

Kill the Kitten: Helping Students Skirt Sentimentality

Early on in my introductory poetry workshop, we discuss the difference between sentiment (emotion) and sentimentality (mawkishness, Hallmark cards, Lifetime holiday movies). First we talk about the ways in which sentimentality undercuts our ability to imbue our poems with real sentiment—it leads us toward cliché, it looks for the easy or more palatable way into an experience, it doesn’t require the level of intellectual and creative engagement we expect from good poems.

Then we start making fun of poets.

Okay, I say, imagine that you’re writing a parody of a poem and you want to make it wonderfully bad—full of clichés and cringe-worthy sentimentality. What are some key words you might use? “Heart,” someone always offers. We look for a little more specificity. “What should a heart not do in a poem?” I ask. “Skip a beat,” says one student. “Break,” says another. “End up in your throat,” offers someone else. Once we exhaust the heart possibilities, we move on, looking for the big offenders. What are some other words or tropes that might lead to sentimentality? I can usually get someone to come up with “soul,” which affords me an opportunity to write the word “soul” on the board, then draw a giant X through it—something I always like leaving on the board for the next class to see and fret over what sorts of things are being taught in creative writing classrooms. Usually someone mentions roses. Someone mentions the single tear. All of these go on the board (and I always offer the disclaimer that none of these rules is absolute—certainly, fantastic poems can be written using any number of potentially problematic words or images, provided the poet is savvy about how he or she uses them). Finally we move on to animals—butterflies as symbols of innocence, a bird as a vision of freedom. And, of course, there’s cuteness to be reckoned with—puppies, kittens, any three-legged quadruped. Sometimes I tell my students that they can only use a kitten in a poem if the kitten is dead. Continue reading “Kill the Kitten: Helping Students Skirt Sentimentality”

What I Want My Students to Find When They Google “How to Comment on a Poem”

I teach a lot of poetry workshops; this summer I’m teaching one at Harvard Summer School. Today was the first day of class and students developed ideas and assignments for their first poems. On Wednesday, we’ll discuss those poems and have our first workshop.

This means it’s time to talk to the students about how to comment on their classmates’ poems. I want this conversation to give the first workshop a useful structure and I want the students to take away a model for how to comment on classmates’ poems outside of workshop.

I do this differently every semester — different groups of students have different levels of comfort and anxiety with one another. This group seems particularly thoughtful and charming. But invariably someone will worry that they aren’t qualified to comment on someone else’s poem, so I like to start with the basics. I’m going to give my students this handout on Wednesday:

9 Things to Consider When You Comment on a Classmate’s Poem: A Checklist

(click here for a PDF version of the checklist!)

Continue reading “What I Want My Students to Find When They Google “How to Comment on a Poem””

Reviving Patmore’s Angel in the House

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 What Is It Then Between Us? Traditions of Love in American Poetry (Cornell UP, 1998) and the co-editor of several books, including Jewish American Poetry: Poems, Commentary, and Reflections (UPNE / Brandeis, 2000) and Ronald Johnson: Life and Works (National Poetry Foundation, 2008); his essays and reviews have appeared in many journals, notably Parnassus: Poetry in Review. He has written lesson plans and pedagogical materials for Poetry Out Loud, the Poetry Foundation, and WGBH-Boston, and has been awarded five grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities to lead summer seminars and school-year workshops on “teaching the pleasures of poetry.”

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? Continue reading “Reviving Patmore’s Angel in the House”

Change of Style, Change of Subject: A Reading Strategy

“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. Continue reading “Change of Style, Change of Subject: A Reading Strategy”

Student Poets: Advice for Reading Aloud

Today’s guest blogger is Adrian Arancibia, an author and critic based in San Diego, California. He is a founder of the seminal Chicano/Latino performance poetry collective Taco Shop Poets. Born in Iquique, Chile (1971), Arancibia is the co-editor of the Taco Shop Poets Anthology: Chorizo Tonguefire and author of the collection Atacama Poems. He is a Ph.D. candidate in literature at the University of California at San Diego and an associate professor of English at Miramar Community College. Arancibia’s creative work depicts and comments on the lives of immigrants; his critical work focuses on literature and its relation to social spaces.

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. Continue reading “Student Poets: Advice for Reading Aloud”

Writing a Poem by Not Writing a Poem

Today’s guest blogger is Catherine Pierce, the author of two books of poetry, Famous Last Words (Saturnalia 2008) and The Girls of Peculiar (forthcoming from Saturnalia in 2012), as well as of a chapbook, Animals of Habit. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Best American Poetry 2011, Slate, Ploughshares, Boston Review, FIELD, and elsewhere. She co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University.

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:

Continue reading “Writing a Poem by Not Writing a Poem”

Riding the Metro Haiku

The undergraduate classroom might seem like the last place to introduce students to archival materials. We have so many other commitments—to coverage of historical periods, to literary interpretation and theory, to improving student writing—that it might seem like an extra activity that might simply take up too much class time. However, students can and should learn about the cultural conventions that affect the transmission of texts, and I would argue that their close readings of these texts is actually central to their understanding of what poems, plays, and short stories are and how they work. Reading various versions of a text can actually get undergraduates—and teachers—to work toward a clearer and more effective definition of close reading. The results of my students’ research consistently demonstrate that textual studies can actually inspire close reading and help students generate the questions that they can use in a variety of literature courses.

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.

Continue reading “Riding the Metro Haiku”

The Icky and the Weird: 2 Assignments

Earlier, I wrote about the value of students tapping into their own areas of expertise as the basis for their writing. Yet I also mentioned that I often steer students away from writing slightly fictionalized accounts of their own lives. Here are two exercises, one each in poetry and fiction, that require students to look beyond their own lives and communities.

Poetry: The “Weird News” poem. There are many sources of “weird news.” Simply Google “weird news,” and marvel at the results. The assignment is to find a recent news article that A) is weird, and B) the writer feels some connection to, and then to write a poem that builds on the article in some way. The poem should tap into the article’s deeper implications, or spin off in some entirely new direction—anything, really, as long as the poem goes beyond the facts presented in the article. The “weird news” poem can also be combined with a formal assignment, so that the student would be writing a “weird news” sonnet, sestina, etc.

One student of mine wrote a terrific poem based on the story of a Japanese clothing designer who, in response to increased street violence against women in Tokyo, created a woman’s dress that allowed the woman to disguise herself as a vending machine. If she were ever in a situation where she was being followed, she could simply pull up the dress and camouflage herself amid the urban landscape. The student’s poem explored the strangeness of protecting oneself by becoming a commodity, and in one stanza addressed the clothing designer directly. It was the sort of wonderfully idiosyncratic poem that the student wouldn’t have written in the absence of an assignment that had her looking beyond her own life and community. Continue reading “The Icky and the Weird: 2 Assignments”

Using Literature to Teach Argument and Academic Writing

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.

The Shakespeare Sonnet Slam

Poetry is an oral as well as written tradition, and we are only doing half the work—and having half the fun— if we silently read a poem on the page. Unfortunately, I don’t always have the chance to emphasize this enough in the classroom. As I struggle for both depth and breadth in my courses, I often run out of time before I can focus on the performance of poetry.

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:

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.
Continue reading “The Shakespeare Sonnet Slam”