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.

I’ve found that letting students poke fun at hypothetical poems before writing their own helps them to a) stay attuned to the siren song of schlock so that they can better resist it and b) maintain a sense of humor about the whole thing so that when someone does write a poem featuring that single tear or an alarmingly mobile heart, we can talk about it without the writer feeling defensive. After all, the battle against sentimentality is one we’re all fighting.

Oh—and the dead kitten thing? A grad student took on that challenge, and wrote a beautiful, spare, weird poem that opened with a dead kitten in a shoebox. The poem surprised at every turn and was just accepted for publication. Of course a dead kitten could be even more sentimental than a live one, depending on how it’s rendered—the moral here, I think, is that if we as poets choose our words and our images with an eye toward circumventing the expected, we stand a much better chance of writing poems that are resonant, moving, and completely inappropriate for Hallmark.

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!)

1. Read the poem to yourself out loud; this will help you understand it, catch rough spots, and hear where it should be praised for its sound.
2. Summarize what the poem is “about” for you, in a couple words or a sentence, considering content and form. Comments like: “Realistic free verse love poem!” “Mysterious pastoral sonnet!” or “This looks like a list poem that becomes a narrative about writing” can let the poet know your impression of the poem.
3. Underline and comment on elements you like for their sound.
4. Underline and comment on elements you like for their content.
5. If the poem is using a form, point out places where it’s successful and places where it seems forced.
6. There shouldn’t be any typos, any mistakes, in a poem: your poems should be too short and too carefully polished to contain errors. If you spot some, correct them quickly and kindly, like you would let someone know there is spinach in his teeth or her socks don’t match.
7. You already know not to be a jerk; of course, keep your comments respectful and useful. If there is a place that doesn’t make sense to you, underline it and ask a clarifying question.    You can do this by talking about specific parts of the poem, rather than addressing the poet in more general terms. If line seven is “butterscotch eyeballs drenched in lye,” you might say “This image isn’t clear to me: are these eyeballs that are butterscotch colored? Are they dissolving?” This is more helpful to the poet than saying “Geez, Simon, you need to work on writing clearer images.”
8. Think about the order of the poem. Could it be improved? Say so. If not, say so.
9. If you are just writing “Good job!” you are not doing a good job.

I’ll read this checklist out loud to students and talk about each point using published poems we’ve already discussed in class to illustrate my examples. I think having a checklist like this can be comforting to students faced with trying to give good criticism to their peers — it gives them permission to speak up and reminds them to be thorough. But, like I say, I do it differently with every class.

So I’m hoping that my first blog post is a useful way for us to talk about things you would add to such a list — as teachers, what’s the best way to help students be effective critics of each other’s work? If any students stumble upon this when they Google “How to comment on a poem,” they will get the full benefit of our collective wisdom.

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.

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.

Fiction: The “Advice Column” story. You’ll find them in many newspapers and, of course, online. What do all advice columns have in common? The letters people write are rooted in conflict, and not just any conflict: sticky, icky, urgent conflict, the kind that makes you glad it isn’t you in that person’s situation…which happens to be the exact sort of conflict we like in fiction. So the exercise (which works for students at all levels) is this: Find a letter written to an advice columnist, either in a newspaper or online, that you feel would make a good piece of fiction, and then write a story with that conflict at the center of the story. The advice columnist’s answer isn’t important. The question—the predicament—is the important part. Start with that core predicament, then fictionalize a story around it, coming up with original characters, setting, etc. Do that, and you’ll know that your story is rooted in conflict.

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.