Teaching Poetry

Who’s Afraid of Teaching Poetry?

by Nick Richardson

I recently contacted forty or so English adjunct friends—all composition and rhetoric instructors—for tips on teaching poetry. About half responded that, while they do teach a poem or two in their classes, they were too uncertain about their methods to share any pedagogical tricks or assignments in a public sphere. The rest were quiet as chrysanthemums.

In an effort to break the ice, what follows is my own experience teaching poetry in a first-year composition class.

It was my first semester teaching, and my students had just finished the second drafts of their final research papers. About half were desert dry; the rest: talk-radio screeds. The peer-review hadn’t gone very well, either. The problem: I’d assumed that everyone knew what a good research paper looked like, but it was clear from the drafts that I’d highlighted the one-two punch importance of good research and a strong thesis…and glossed over form. I cleared our schedule for the next class once I realized what was going on, canceling all readings and asking everyone to please take a break from their papers.

The next class period I came in with photocopies of Allen Ginsberg’s two page polemic: “Poetry, Violence, and the Trembling Lambs”—a selection from Deliberate Prose, his book of essays. I had the students read silently, and then we talked about how his argument worked and failed (mostly failed) rhetorically. Continue reading “Who’s Afraid of Teaching Poetry?”

Interview with Rattapallax Editor and Filmmaker, Ram Devineni

Ram Devineni is the founder and editor of Rattapallax magazine, a literary journal dedicated to publishing poetry from around the world. Devineni, also a filmmaker, co-founded the film school Academia Internacional de Cinema in São Paulo and recently co-produced Amir Naderi’s Vegas: Based on a True Story, which premiered at the 2008 Venice Film Festival and showed in competition in the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival. For the 2009 PEN World Voices Literary Festival, Devineni curated a panel on literary short films and documentaries.

The Teaching Poetry blog asked Ram a few questions about his work with poetry and film.

Teaching Poetry: Tell us about your documentary on Ginsberg.

Ram Devineni: Ginsberg’s Karma is a thirty-minute documentary about the American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. It follows his mythical journey to India in the early 1960s that transformed his perspective on life and his work. Poet Bob Holman, director of the Bowery Poetry Club in New York, traces the two years Ginsberg spent in India by visiting the places where he stayed and talking with the people he met and influenced, as well as intimate interviews with Beat poets and friends. Bob and I make appearances in it, too. Continue reading “Interview with Rattapallax Editor and Filmmaker, Ram Devineni”

In Defense of Recitation

by Nick Richardson

While I love poetry, there are only a few poems from which I can casually quote: “This Be The Verse” by Philip Larkin, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot, and “Kubla Khan” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. These were the three poems I was forced to recite as a student of the New Orleans Public School System (although, to be fair, “This Be The Verse” wasn’t actually assigned—it was recited as an act of defiance).

“Kubla Khan” was the first, a long poem I chose for the line: “A savage place! as holy and enchanted / As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted / By woman wailing for her demon-lover!” This particular recitation remains memorable for the way my eighth-grade teacher, Blake Bailey—the now celebrated Yates and Cheever biographer—attempted (and failed) to bite back laughter at my shifts between stumbling forgetfulness and high drama: “by…like…woman wailing !”

Some students have more luck with these mnemonic exercises than I did:

“High School Student Shawntay Henry Wins $20,000 First Prize in National Poetry Competition” (Poetry Out Loud – National Recitation Contest)

Recitation need not be tortuous (in fact, it can be lucrative). The mere act of reading poems aloud, or hearing them read, can be galvanizing, and can help push an assignment from a collection of words on a page to a transformative emotional experience. Take, for example, the following recording of W. B. Yeats reading “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”:

For discussion:

1. I chose to share this version of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” because it includes Yeats’s own commentary on writing and recitation: “It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble to get into the verse the poems I am going to read, and that is why I will not read them as if they were prose.” Does Yeats’s reading seem strange to you (as he thinks it will)? And is this hyper-poetic enunciation effective?

2. Take a moment to read the “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and then listen to Yeats’s reading again. Does his articulation enhance your understanding of the poem?

3. How would you read “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” aloud to best impart your particular interpretation of the poem?

More free video and audio resources can be found here:

Penn Sound
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/

Poets.org – Audio and Video
http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/361

Poems Out Loud
http://poemsoutloud.net/about/

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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.

Can Film Serve Poetry?

In this week’s edition of New York Magazine, actor James Franco (Milk, Spider Man) shows that he knows a thing or two about poetry. Even more interesting is that as a student he made films inspired by the poetry of Anthony Hecht and Frank Bidart.

New York Magazine writes, “At a Gucci-hosted cocktail party for an art film called Erased James Franco, Franco said he discovered Bidart while studying poetry at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. ‘This teacher brought it into class, and everybody was kinda shocked. It’s very dark and it’s about this guy. He’s a murderer, a necrophiliac, and it’s in a poem, right?’ said Franco. ‘What struck me is that it’s a kind of a confessional poem, or a dramatic monologue. It’s as if the poet is using this crazy man as a mask to express certain feelings and go to an extreme place where those feelings could be felt.’ ”

Franco, who has literary aspirations, will star as Allen Ginsberg in the soon-to-be-released movie, Howl, named after Ginsberg’s break-out poem.

Still the question remains, can a film inspired by a poem effectively serve that poem? After all, the visuals in the readers’ mind are very personal. Can a film do justice to that experience? Here’s a YouTube movie of Langston Hughes’s “Weary Blues.” Decide for yourself by watching the movie below, and answering the questions that follow. Continue reading “Can Film Serve Poetry?”

Poetry Exercise: The Cut-up

This assignment was submitted by Frances Richard, a poet and art writer who teaches at Barnard College in New York.

Here’s a poetry exercise that basically guarantees a lively in-class writing session and also helps students to disrupt habitual writing patterns, get away from cliché, and expand their imaginative use of language.

You’ll need to do a bit of hunting and gathering (or have your students bring supplies for themselves). Needed are:
* A pair of scissors for each person in class
* Blank paper
* Glue sticks
* An assortment of printed matter—the weirder and more motley the better. My best score was a stack of economic-development journals being deaccessioned by the Barnard Library. The recycling bin beside a copy machine is a good source too. Continue reading “Poetry Exercise: The Cut-up”

Praise Song for the Day: Elizabeth Alexander’s Inaugural Poem

Elizabeth Alexander was the fourth poet to be invited to read an inaugural poem at the swearing-in of a new American president (the others were Robert Frost at JFK’s ceremony [1961]; and Maya Angelou [1993] and Miller Williams [1997] at each of Bill Clinton’s ceremonies). It’s notoriously difficult, as reported by NPR’s Melissa Block and Salon’s blogger Jim Fisher, to write an ‘occasional poem’—a poem for a specific event. The best poets in this genre might be English poets of yore, such as John Milton, Samuel Johnson, and Andrew Marvell, whose livelihood sometimes relied on writing and performing such poems for a benefactor. Sandwiched between Barack Obama’s powerful speech, and Joseph Lowery’s spirited benediction, Alexander’s poem was challenged to live up to its potential as a nuanced, invigorating, and relevant form of expression. According to LA Times critic David L. Ulin, Salon writer Alex Koppelman and Poetry Foundation Commentators, she had mixed success. Do you think Alexander’s poem “Praise Song for the Day” rose to the occasion? Take our poll at the end of this post. Continue reading “Praise Song for the Day: Elizabeth Alexander’s Inaugural Poem”

Welcome to the Teaching Poetry blog, where you will find teaching tips and amusing—if not downright helpful—stories from poetry teachers across North America. Links on the right will take you to popular teaching materials including Bedford/St. Martin’s books, instructors’ blogs, and other useful resources. Teacher spotlights will give you a more in-depth look at people’s favorite approaches to poetry from east to west, north to south.

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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.