poetry

Online Archives and the Poetry Anthology

Photo of poetry anthologies on a bookshelf overlaid with the words I Hate You More Each Time I Move

The bottom shelf of my bookcase is dedicated almost entirely to anthologies.  I’ve lugged them around with me for almost 15 years, through four cities and nine houses, and every time I move I think about tossing them.  Like the set of Collier’s encyclopedias I ditched in 2001 or the Field Guides I donated in 2009, the anthologies may have outlived their usefulness. 

Digital Romantics: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and "Radiant Textuality" in the classroom

Caspar David Friedrich's painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog with Internet logos in the distance

I’m teaching E 314L: “Reading Poetry” this semester, with a fantastic set of students of all levels of proficiency who really like to dig into the big issues motivating our poems.  Early in the semester when we read Donne and other metaphysical poets, our classroom discussions often coalesced around two or three centers of gravity for each poem.  Though opinions and readings about what the poems are up to might be divergent, we could normally, as a class, agree on a few choice passages as the cruxes for making meaning.

Poetry in Images

Photo of pile of word magnets

Students often have difficulty reading and interpreting poetry. It's an alien skill, it seems, for most of them. The challenge is even greater when there's a significant language barrier, such as trying to read Chaucer in Middle English. In my Banned Books course this semester, therefore, I had students collaboratively annotate passages from The Canterbury Tales with relevant images. This exercise would work, however, for any poem.

Experimenting with Democracy/Anarchy and Experiencing Poetry Publicly

Set of multicolored poker chips in case

For as long as I can remember, I've been disturbed by the autocratic necessity of the classroom, and perhaps more so as I began noticing the mystifications attempted to obscure this component--the circular "learning" tables, the walls removed from classrooms (this was in elementary), the countless "cooperative" activities.

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