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Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary

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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.