Teaching Poetry / Village of Eight Graves / Battle of the Sexes
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DIARY I’m elbow-deep in preparation for the new teaching semester, trying to work out how much I want to depart from those approaches to poetry teaching I’m familiar with. I’ll also be teaching plays and publishing, but here I’m more content to work within the existing templates I’ve been given (or rather, more ginger about carving out my own path). Where poetry is concerned, I feel some disenchantment with the practice of showing examples of a form or genre to students, discussing the rules with them, and then asking them to construct an imitation. I’d like to teach them to use poetry as an explorative tool – that is, to get them to think of what is beyond the poem and to use the poem as a way of reaching that. Easier said than done. Perhaps this is not so much disenchantment with existing techniques (after all, we teach the use of tools by first asking students to perform simple actions with them) as it is a desire to break down preconceptions as quickly as possible, since so much beginner poetry seems concerned with the idea of being ‘poetic’ (as a stance, as a pose) or with reframing what is already known. I would like students to embark upon writing poetry with the notion that it leads to discovery, that it is like following a trail in a strange land. That way, its practice has uses beyond that of becoming a poet.
Teaching Poetry / Village of Eight Graves / Battle of the Sexes
Teaching Poetry / Village of Eight Graves …
Teaching Poetry / Village of Eight Graves / Battle of the Sexes
DIARY I’m elbow-deep in preparation for the new teaching semester, trying to work out how much I want to depart from those approaches to poetry teaching I’m familiar with. I’ll also be teaching plays and publishing, but here I’m more content to work within the existing templates I’ve been given (or rather, more ginger about carving out my own path). Where poetry is concerned, I feel some disenchantment with the practice of showing examples of a form or genre to students, discussing the rules with them, and then asking them to construct an imitation. I’d like to teach them to use poetry as an explorative tool – that is, to get them to think of what is beyond the poem and to use the poem as a way of reaching that. Easier said than done. Perhaps this is not so much disenchantment with existing techniques (after all, we teach the use of tools by first asking students to perform simple actions with them) as it is a desire to break down preconceptions as quickly as possible, since so much beginner poetry seems concerned with the idea of being ‘poetic’ (as a stance, as a pose) or with reframing what is already known. I would like students to embark upon writing poetry with the notion that it leads to discovery, that it is like following a trail in a strange land. That way, its practice has uses beyond that of becoming a poet.