On Teaching Poems in Novels
How do we read poems embedded in novels? If you teach fiction, you may very well have experience assigning novels that have a poem or two thrown in.
Students are likely to (at best) skim or (at worst) skip a poem entirely when it interrupts the prose of their assigned novel. This reading malpractice is not without consequences! So, how do we convince students that this generic navigation is labor worth undertaking?
“‘I hear it now’; or, Teaching Students to Read Poems in Novels”
In this chapter in Teaching Poetry Now, released this month by SUNY Press, my co-author Annelise Chick and I offer strategies for teaching students how to engage more actively with versiprose (a prose text, like a novel, that contains various poetic explanations or interruptions).
For nineteenth-century literature enthusiasts, our case study centers Bianca, or, the Spanish Maiden, the posthumous novel of Bengali poet and novelist Toru Dutt that was serialized in the Bengal Magazine in 1878.
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.
Reviews
"The achievement of this volume is nothing less than a new approach to literary criticism. Hopeful and necessary, Teaching Poetry Now takes seriously that poetry pedagogy is important and needs reshaping. Contributors report from the front lines of a range of institutions, giving a whole and accurate picture of the stakes of humanities teaching today. Sure to be widely circulated and shared, the thirty-one essays are original, sparkling, and easy to follow, as well as profound scholarly interventions in their own right. Teaching Poetry Now will help not only first-time instructors but also seasoned educators improve and revamp their poetry teaching across time periods." — Meredith Martin, author of Poetry's Data: Digital Humanities and the History of Prosody
"Timely and compelling, this book provides a critical reminder: poetry matters, and teaching poetry now is transformative. The title alone can be read as a demand and an urgent call to action. Teaching Poetry Now is like a mixtape featuring artists who have their own style, genre, and rhythm but who all participate as equals. I cannot wait to implement some of these approaches in my own courses on poetry, social justice education, and hip-hop studies." — Crystal Leigh Endsley, author of The Fifth Element: Social Justice Pedagogy Through Spoken Word Poetry
