Preface:

This course was an introduction to modern and contemporary U.S. poetry with a special emphasis on poems and extensive poetry resources teachers could use in the classroom. We learned together how most productively and most excitingly to do a collaborative close reading of a poem—many poems but one poem at a time—that seems at first to be “difficult.” The method of our own seminar was cooperative, collaborative, and entirely interactive, and that method served as a model for ideas about teaching poetry to our students. The poems we studied—by Emily Dickinson, Lorine Niedecker, Amiri Baraka, John Ashbery, Tracie Morris and others—were open-ended rather than closed off in the way they present meaning, and thus required us to learn how to participate ourselves in understanding the way they mean what they mean. So the poems themselves were connected to a certain teaching method or pedagogy. In a way, this was a seminar about the pleasure and even the thrill of encountering poetry as an opportunity to become, ourselves, co-creators of significance in the arts. The seminar met in the Kelly Writers House at Penn, which is itself a collaborative arts community. Participants had complete access to all the resources of the Writers House, including the KWH kitchen for our snacks during breaks!