Blogging Pedagogy - poetry

Online Archives and the Poetry Anthology

Delacroix — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 07:56:22 +0000

Author:

Julia Delacroix

Image Credit:

Julia Delacroix

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.

Yes, I might have to hit up the library if I wanted to reread that excerpt from “A Key to the Language of America,” but when would I need just an excerpt these days anyway? And when it comes to teaching poetry surveys, most of the poems I’d want to teach are already online. I’ll almost certainly keep my Nortons because I’m sentimental and I’ve kept them this long and I haven’t yet mastered the concept of “sunk costs.” But I assume that my students all sell back their anthologies, and if I were an undergrad I’m pretty sure I’d do the same.

This semester I’m teaching Introduction to Rhetoric and Writing, and with my students I’m reading Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble. One of the more interesting arguments we discussed last week was the idea that the Internet has unbound the news, that most readers now get their news from articles that have been completely removed from their original context. My students and I discussed the ramifications of such decontextualization as it applies to news and civic engagement, but I’ve been wondering how it might apply to poetry as well. The Internet is packed with poems these days, and not just contemporary work. Right here at UT, professors and graduate students have built and continue to work on resources like the audiobook of the 1855 Song of Myself and The Walt Whitman Archive.¹ The Poetry Foundation maintains an impressive online collection, as does Poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets. When students access poems through these sites, they are provided with an entirely different experience than when they read poems in the chronologically-arranged Norton.

The Poets.org page featuring Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” for example, directs readers to “Related Poems” by John Ashbery and Nicky Finney that engage the tone of Bishop’s villanelle. Scrolling down the sidebar, readers find a predictably long list of “Poems about Breakup and Divorce,” and a similarly long list of “Poems About Difficult Love” before they reach a list of “Other Villanelles.” Search for “We Real Cool” on the website of the Poetry Foundation (maintained by Poetry Magazine), and you’ll find not only a recording of Brooks reading the poem (required listening for any intro. student – the “we”s that end each line getting softer and softer until, by the last stanza, they’ve disappeared entirely) but also a picture of the cover of the 1959 issue of Poetry in which the poem first appeared, along with links to other poems published in the same issue. The interesting thing is not just that these sites recontextualize individual poems, but that they do so in several ways at once. Students can find the work in different forms: draft, magazine publication, book publication, audio recording. They can see the context of first publication, or easily access critical or poetic responses to a given poem. These sites provide a useful introduction to historical, cultural, and formal criticism by encouraging students to think about the myriad ways of contextualizing poems.

My favorite aspect of the contextualization offered by these websites is that instead of locating poems on the tissue-paper thin pages of an anthology, they place them in the context of a vibrant, contemporary poetry community. Yes, you can see the cover of the June 1915 issue of Poetry that contained “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” but you can also see this month’s issue, and read Laura Kashiske’s “You’ve Come Back to Me.” You can absolutely read “To My Dear and Loving Husband” at Poets.org, but to get there you have to pass an interview with Mary Jo Bang about use of poetry in American culture, and once you do get to Bradstreet you find at the top of the screen a menu bar that with one click will locate poetry events near you.

Pariser makes a convincing case that the unbinding of news is a bad thing. Even if we flip past the front page to get to sports, we still get a quick flash of what’s going on in the world. When we read about Lance Armstrong’s doping charges on Facebook, we miss out on that. But the unbinding of the anthology might actually result in a better understanding of the world – or at least the poetry world – around us. I’ll admit that I’m not quite ready to get rid of my Nortons yet – not the ones in my house or the ones on my syllabus. They’re reliable, and they include the big names I need for a survey, and I can always supplement anyway. They’re stable, and they don’t present the same problems of access that (outside of a computer-enabled classroom) would attend a syllabus that drew its texts from the Internet. And in part it’s because, when it comes to poetry, I fall somewhere between cheeseball and luddite and I want my students to be able to read outside without adjusting their screen tint. But it is worth considering how my students will find these poems if they don't hang on to their anthologies, and how my own syllabus and individual lessons might be informed by the way these websites juxtapose poems, encouraging conversations about and between poems and poets that the chronological arrangement of the anthology keeps firmly apart.

¹I'd be remiss if I didn't also mention the amazing Paradise Lost Audiobook.

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

Ptacek — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 19:38:20 +0000

Author:

Jake Ptacek

Image Credit:

Andrew @ epicdoesn'tbegintodescribe

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.

For the past few weeks, however, coinciding with our reading of Coleridge and Wordsworth, our discussions have been full of wildly divergent readings, where even coming to a consensus about where the poem’s center of gravity is up for (often exhilarating) debate. Part of this, of course, is my students’ increased confidence in utilizing their close-reading skills and navigating emergent classroom relationships, as well as our focus on some longer texts. But sometimes it seems that they’re not even reading the same texts. And with good reason—they’re not.

I’ve tried assigning “works” (that is, novels, plays or poems) without assigning “texts” (specific editions) before, to mixed success, but this semester’s adventure into something close to Jerome McGann’s radiant textuality was the result of a few happy accidents. The first is that I ordered for the course, sight unseen, a version of Lyrical Ballads that combined a reputable academic publisher with the siren-song of affordability. But when the text arrived it rapidly became apparent to me that this particular version of the text didn’t work for my classroom needs, reprinting only the 1798 poems in their unrevised state, providing little introductory material, no bibliography, and no annotation to help curious students. A fine book for a graduate course, but for an introductory class it simply didn’t suit our needs.

The second happy accident was our good fortune to be using a DWRL classroom equipped with state-of-the-art technology, which meant that I could encourage students to ditch this text while easily disseminating pdfs through our class website. But a funny thing happened to those pdfs—while some students diligently printed out their packets and came to class with the traditional underlined and marked-up text, other students showed up with just laptops, iPads, even Kindles. It quickly became apparent, too, that not everyone was reading from the pdfs I’d posted: some students were simply grabbing the text online from a variety of resources. While this at first made my somewhat-compulsive inner bibliographer cringe at first, in the spirit of adventure I decided to play along, and even to encourage students to look at digital versions or editions of the poems. Overall I think the experience has been salutary, though not without a few pixelated pitfalls. What follows, then, is an initial report on the pleasures and pains of digital reading in the Romantic classroom.

Though McGann confidently argues in Radiant Textuality that physical archives are quickly being replaced by digital ones, in reality the process has been slower and less unilateral than theorists of the 1990s imagined. While there are great hypertext editions of poems here and here (largely overseen by McGann himself), most authors still haven’t received any kind of extended bibliographic treatment as digital texts, despite the obvious power of the internet to assist Anglo-American, and especially genetic and social-text editing. This means of course that caution has to be exercised about the accidentals—misspellings or misprints that creep in through transcription or by utilizing “faulty” editions. The Victorian Web’s “Tinteren Abbey,” for example, is a place unmarked on any map. But more than that, the web—or at least this iteration of browsers—levels out the distinctions between the various iterations of a text, as our class discovered when we read Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Coleridge’s poem, of course, exists in at least two quite different forms: the archaic ballad of 1798 and the much-revised poem published in 1834’s Sibylline Leaves. Over the course of 36 years Coleridge modernized the diction, added and removed a subtitle and argument, pruned the poem of some overt gothic material (the hand-of-glory sequence), and added those famous, inscrutable glosses. Online texts aren’t always particularly good at identifying which version one is reading—and the glosses pose a particular problem in a digital layout. For our class a serious downside to reading Ancient Mariner digitally was just this lack of identification, as students would read out line or point to passages that were missing, altered, or renumbered in other versions of the text. At the same time this pandemonium of texts allowed us to talk about revision and problems of “authorial intent” in concrete and specific ways.

But what about relatively stable texts, like “Tintern Abbey”? Our classroom discussion of the poem helped bring home to me the importance of context in constructing meaning. A student confronted with the version presented in the very fine The Penguin Book of Romantic Poetry, replete with headnotes, author biography, and sound annotation confronts the poem in a very different context than a reader who finds it on, say, the Victorian Web. Even apart from the lamentable (if pardonable) misprint in the poem’s title, by encountering the poem on a website devoted to Victorian literature one gets a very different perspective on the poem’s content and influence. One sequences the poem next to its temporal contemporaries in the useful but arbitrary back-construction of “romanticism,” while the other puts the poem into a constellation that includes Sterne, Tennyson and Hardy—a no less arbitrary placement, but one that reveals different facets of the poem’s meaning and influence. Similarly, a reader who comes across Rime of the Ancient Mariner here can see the poem in dialogue not only with other poems by Coleridge (as in our in-class reading) but with contemporary poets across a wide range of categories.

In all, I’ve been pleased with our attempts to pursue poetry on both a physical and digital front. Though using unspecified digital texts of canonical poetry can cause a bit of confusion that takes precious class time to straighten out, at the same time it can help to break down the monolithic appearance of the canonical text by providing multiple avenues of access and context. Perusing the text online, or in a variety of formats, can help bring back the strangeness and the newness of great works of literature, helping students see them not as dusty urns on a shelf but a vital and living part of our culture, and making students new readers.

Poetry in Images

Mike Widner — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:30:12 +0000

Author:

Mike Widner

Image Credit:

Steve A. Johnson

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.

We began with a wiki page that had the introductory passage from the "General Prologue" in place. Students then searched for images that would annotate an individual line or phrase. For example, the famous first line ("Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote") received an image of flowers in the rain to illustrate April showers. The image at the top of this page remarks upon the Miller's portrait, in which Chaucer regularly compares him to a hog.

Once students annotated most of the lines, a visual narrative arose that gave the students an easier entry into the meaning of the lines. The prevalence of nature imagery and ideas of generation and rebirth in the first 18 lines of the General Prologue came through clearly. By making these themes visible, we were then able to return to a discussion of the text while also increasing student confidence in their ability to navigate the difficulties of the poem. We also were able to discuss how the images did not always match the precise meaning of the words, thereby re-emphasizing the textual specifics.

Because this exercise was done with a class-restricted wiki, we did not need to worry about making sure the images used were licensed appropriately. Only students in the course could see it. For a different method of interpreting poetry via images, see Elizabeth Frye's lesson plan "Teaching Poetry with Image Databases."

Experimenting with Democracy/Anarchy and Experiencing Poetry Publicly

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:21:36 +0000

Author:

Bo Jacks

Image Credit:

Psychofox

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. As I began teaching six years ago at UT, this problem became even more personal: how does one talk about democracy or any kind of radical politics while standing at the front of a mass of students dictating what is expected--what they must do to earn some grade, or make themselves a better person/citizen/subject, or do something for the greater good? Even now, I don't have an answer that is comforting but I am trying different pedagogical tactics to, at the very least, bring this problem to the level of visibility for students, while also recognizing and confessing to them that their instructor is ultimately the sovereign, or the one who decides on their grade and the exceptions.

This semester I had another pedagogical problematic that I hoped to tackle in tandem with the teacher/student or sovereign/multitude problem: poetry memorization. Whenever it was that pedagogy turned from the rote memorization of facts in favor of concepts, some elements of knowledge building were thrown out necessarily--one of them being the mass recitation of poetry in front of an audience. While I find this practice vital to preserving poetic practice and interest in prosody, I didn't want to revert to the older model where students were compelled to memorize Casabianca or Hamlet's soliloquy. Thus, I decided to structure a reward system where memorizing and reciting a poem in class would be done initially for the extra grade bump and later to impress their peers.

The lesson plan is a semester-wide project that asks students to help guide the direction of the course voluntarily and to create content as we proceed. From the first day, I stated that anybody who would come into class and recite a memorized poem or 7lines of a long poem would receive a poker chip worth 1/2, 1, or 2pts toward their final grade. Significant conceptual contributions as well as particularly insightful commentaries on the website forum would be treated similarly. This project was explained to them as a way of bringing poetry back into a public space without making it entirely compulsory. The caveat, however, was that as instructor I ultimately make the decision about what is worth a chip and that cannot be questioned.

Thus far the experiment has led to some very lively discussion and some sweet moments where students shared an outside poem that they otherwise would have kept to themselves. At moments, these recitations have given us the opportunity to reconsider how prosody and thought in general work through different technologies, whether we watched that machine of the brain take in a poem and retool it, used eComma to collectively comment on a poem, or watched the social machine compete for attention in a limited public.

The problem still remains of how to broaden the decisions outward into the classroom, but this small attempt at pulling back from dictation/indoctrination has been helpful in clearing some of the mystification away in this semester of English 314L Reading Poetry.

Here is a link to the lesson plan:

Public Poetry and Democracy in the Classroom

And one cool moment in this experiment where a student spontaneously brought in his guitar to sing/recite a poem not on the syllabus, but related to the previous class: