5 Essential Resources for Teaching Poetry in Introductory College Courses
One of my favorite courses to teach is Introduction to Poetry, a general education course that fulfills both Arts & Humanities and Intensive Writing requirements at IU. This is a course where students read and write about poetry, rather than a creative writing course where they pen poetry themselves. Most of the students who enroll in these courses are juniors and seniors knocking out their final GenEd before they graduate. While you might expect a bit of disinterest, resistance, or passivity from this population of students, I find that there is always a great deal of enthusiasm to learn how to engage deeply with poetry. The first time I taught this course, their excitement caught me a bit off guard. I was prepared to go in and plead my case about why poetry matters. But my students were already there. By and large, they were just looking for someone to give them the strategies to better comprehend and respond to what they were reading.
Today, I’m sharing a handful of resources that are worth consulting, whether you are a veteran poetry teacher looking for new ideas or are preparing to teach poetry for the first time.
The Literature Pocket Instructor: 101 Exercises for the College Classroom
Looking for quick lesson planning inspiration? Start here!
As someone who teaches introductory courses in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, this book has become my holy grail of active learning strategies. Two of my favorite activities are Wendy Lee’s “The Blow-Up” and Benjamin Widiss’s “Reverse Entropy.”
What I appreciate about this resource is how it lists at the top, for each activity, the best-suited genre for the activity, course level, student difficulty, teacher preparation, class size, semester time, writing component, close reading, and estimated time.
Reading Poetry with College and University Students
Reading Poetry with College and University Students:
Overcoming Barriers and Deepening Engagement by Thomas Fink is a book I discovered relatively recently, but I think it’s a staple.
What I appreciate about Fink’s work — and you can get a taste of it over at the Bloomsbury blog — is the way he articulates the specific issues students encounter when engaging with poetry. If you find yourself getting impatient with students for whom the poems are not clicking, he provides some necessary perspective.
The Poetry Doorstop
Anyone who seriously studies or teaches poetry should have The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics on their shelf. This book is absolutely massive (and makes for a great computer monitor riser), but it provides a wealth of information you simply won’t find in the slimmer literary terms handbooks. This resource is a great starting point for drafting lecture material, especially if you want to speak to the history of a form or genre.
Like many academic books, this one is an investment. My philosophy? Buy once, cry once!
Open Access & Digital Resources
A resource roundup wouldn’t be complete without some open educational and digital resources. During the first week of class, I have students read through the Poets.org glossary definition of poetry, which lists various definitions of poetry written over centuries by authors ranging from Dante to Emily Dickinson. We then discuss which of these definitions strikes (i.e., interests, surprises, and/or stops you in your tracks) them the most.
One of the other texts I often use to get students comfortable reading poetry in the first week of the semester is the open Introduction to Poetry textbook by Alan Lindsay and Candace Bergstrom. The first couple of chapters do a nice job of unpacking the “Myths That Make Poems Harder to Love” and getting students comfortable with the idea of interpreting poetry.
Bonus: A Sneak Peek atTeaching Poetry Now
I’m thrilled that Teaching Poetry Now, edited by Caroline Gelmi and Lizzy LeRud will be released in February 2026!
My co-authored chapter talks all about how to teach poetry when it appears in novels so students fight the urge to skip over it. I’ll share more about this book closer to its publication.
In the meantime, here’s the description:
An inspiring, one-of-a-kind collection of innovative, inclusive approaches to teaching poetry in today's college classrooms.
As any poetry teacher knows, the best ideas about poems are built with students. In Teaching Poetry Now, this seemingly simple premise yields an unprecedented trove of practical strategies for enlivening college-level poetry instruction and making it more inclusive. In thirty-one short, provocative essays, contributors draw on their diverse classroom experiences and research to share innovative approaches to teaching the study and writing of poetry. Helpful discussion of curricula, learning theories, activities, assignments, assessments, and digital tools make this groundbreaking volume an invaluable resource for faculty who teach poetry across language and literature fields—from creative writing to literary studies to rhetoric and composition to cultural studies and beyond. Challenging the dicta, norms, and implicit biases that have dominated poetry pedagogy for decades, Teaching Poetry Now jump-starts a long overdue discussion of the theories, methods, and stakes of teaching poetry today.
As always, thanks for reading. If you have questions about any of my content or have ideas for collaboration, please contact me at gabrielle@gabriellestecher.com.
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