Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary [Hardcover]

Joan Retallack (Editor), Juliana Spahr (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 19, 2006 | ISBN-10: 1403969124 | ISBN-13: 978-1403969125 | Edition: First Edition

Few could deny that the contemporary is the chronic blind spot in most liberal arts curricula. Many "twentieth century lit." courses still don't cover much after the mid-fifties; other disciplines in the humanities don't acknowledge poetry at all as part of the study of the contemporary. The essays collected here suggestively address the possibilities, pleasures, and risks of teaching from the multiplicity of poetries that have proliferated since the sixties. They discuss how to create a lively, investigative poetry classroom and suggest ways to work with cultural implications of poetry in society. The aim is to invite students to experience and make meaning of the poetics of our contemporary world, one that is blatantly "multi"--multi-cultural, lingual, racial, and ethnic.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Spahr, author of Response and This Connection of Everybody with Lungs, among other books, is one the leading poets of her generation. She teams here with Retallack (Memnoir, etc.) to collect 22 essays that, from differing perspectives, tackle a problem that has been around at least as long as modernism: how to make a place for "difficult" poetry in the classroom, and in the culture at large. Charles Bernstein's approach is refreshingly literal: he has devised a "Poem Profiler"-a set of 10 major categories with 125 "features" with which one might start to get a handle on a seemingly opaque work. Lytle Shaw (Cable Factory 20) looks to "didactic literature" for a critique of models of pedagogical authority by way of Goethe. Harryette Mullen (Sleeping with the Dictionary), borrowing her title, looks "Between Jihad and McWorld" for "A Place for Poetry." Coming out of a seminar held at the Bard College (where Retallack is professor of humanities), this collection can serve as a theoretical (and sometimes practical) rudder for any reader who feels at sea in contemporary verse.
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About the Author

Joan Retallack is John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities at Bard College where she teaches poetry and poetics. She has been Visiting Butler Professor of Poetry in the Poetics Program at SUNY at Buffalo and poet in residence at Brown University. Retallack is the author of The Poethical Wager (University of California Press, 2003). Her poetry includes Memnoir (2004), How To Do Things With Words (1998), Afterrimages (1995), and Errata 5uite (1994). She received a Lannan Foundation Fellowship in 1998 and the America Award in Belles-Lettres for Musicage: John Cage in Conversation with Joan Retallack in 1996.

Juliana Spahr is a poet, teacher, and scholar. She is the author of This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (University of California Press, 2005), Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You (Wesleyan University Press, 2001), Everybody's Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (University of Alabama Press, 2001), and Response (Sun & Moon Press, 1996). She co-edits the journal Chain with Jena Osman.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 328 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan; First Edition edition (January 19, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1403969124
• ISBN-13: 978-1403969125
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #652,276 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Teaching difficult contemporary poetry, September 15, 2008

By 

Paul A. Baker "communicator" (Madison, Wis., US) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary (Hardcover)

You teach literature and you want to include more contemporary and experimental poetry in your next syllabus. How can you inspire delight and enjoyment in your students as they confront difficult and apparently impermeable writing? These 22 essays explore how teachers can help their students enjoy the process of reading and understanding innovative and challenging work.

The first chapters address specific poetries and their implications for teaching. The second group of chapters discuss strategies for teaching new poetries in today's classroom. These essays offer a spectrum of possibilities adaptable to a range of classrooms and institutions.
For example, Michigan State U's Jim Keller discusses a set of classroom exercises that let students write themselves into a poem, short-circuiting their attempts to interpret it, "and instead leaving the poem happily ever open to our interactive involvement." Much of today's avant-garde writing, he says, "comes into its own through group renderings, like the workshop methods mentioned above, rather than silent, isolated reading."

Some of the best, and most challenging poetry today rarely reaches more than a handful of readers. One way to bring "difficult" poetry into wider discussion and appreciation is by teaching it in the classroom, and this book provides many ways to begin.