There Are 36,000 Students in My Poetry Class

Stadium at The University of Southern Mississippi

How would you do in a poetry class that had 36,000 students? That class size would just fill all the seats in "The Rock" stadium at Southern Miss.

In my college teaching, I have been exploring the massive open online courses (MOOCs) that have been a big part of higher education in 2012. These courses are being sponsored by some of the top universities and by new independent companies and non-profits exploring new ways to address learning.

As the name says, these courses are massive (anywhere from a few hundred learners to well over 100,000 students), open (generally free and open to anyone in the world with computer access; often age is not considered), and online (all activities are generally online and students are at a distance).

In an essay,"One Class, 36,000 Students" by Elliott Holt  on The Poetry Foundation website, she talks about her experience being in a poetry MOOC.

...through Twitter, I heard about a free, online modern American poetry class; friends raved about the professor, University of Pennsylvania’s Al Filreis, so I signed up. I wasn’t alone. By the time the class started in September, 33,000 people had joined in—from South Africa to California—including Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin. (Two months later, enrollment had reached more than 36,000.)

The Washington Post called MOOCs "elite education for the masses,” and The New York Times said 2012 was "the year of the MOOC."  With universities like Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton offering free classes, it just had to garner some attention. Coursera (a for-profit company) offered the poetry class that Elliott tried. Coursera says that they have 1.7+ million students.

Some of these courses offer "certificates of completion" but they do not count towards a degree from these schools. Of course, part of the appeal is that you can get some Ivy League education for nothing. Maybe.

I have been teaching online since 2001 in a more traditional university degree program. But Elliott had what I would consider a typical first online course experience in her first week.

My inbox began to fill with notifications from Modern Poetry, but, distracted by other writing assignments, I paid little attention. It’s easy to ignore a class when you don’t have to face the professor in person. When I finally logged in to the site, two weeks after the course began, I realized how much I’d already missed. I had flashbacks to my college days, when I was often playing catch-up in a caffeinated panic. Gnawed by stress, I was tempted to bag the whole thing. But then I clicked on the first video discussion, about Emily Dickinson’s “I dwell in Possibility.”

Time management is a major requirement in online courses - and a major downfall for many students. I will admit that in the MOOC I am currently a student in on creativity offered by Stanford, I fell victim to my own distracted life to the point where I had to change my status in the class to "auditing."

Still, I am fine with that as I was not interested in getting any type of certificate for the course. I was as interested in how the course was being taught and presented online, as I was with the course subject - and I get to see both of those things by auditing.

Most groups that offer these courses expect high dropout rates. That is also a factor of the free nature of the course - if I was paying $250, I would have taken the work more seriously.

I’m relieved to receive an email that says the course materials will be available online until next September. I’ll have a full year to catch up on the video discussions I missed and to reread the poems closely. (Confession: In the 10th week of the course, I’m still working my way through the material from the seventh week.) When I missed a class in college, there was no way to catch up on the lectures or discussion. I’m not sure MOOCs can replace traditional university education, but they can certainly complement it.

If you think that poetry is not the right subject for a MOOC, think about other poetry offerings online. Writing courses using the old correspondence model (snail mail) have been around for at least 50 years.

I remember ads with Bennett Cerf, Rod Serling and others in magazines for The Famous Writers School back in the 1960s.

And many colleges began offering courses using lectures on VHS tapes in the 1980s, moved to CDs, then DVDs and then finally online.

There are a good number of online and low-residency (requiring occasional face-to-face visits to a campus) writing programs for undergraduates and full MFA writing programs. From the people I know who teach in these programs and from students who have taken the classes, writing works better than many subjects in this format.

Although Poets Online is not a MOOC (yet!) or even an online workshop, it has some elements of those formats.

So, how would you feel in a poetry class with 36,000 students? Would reading poetry rather than writing poetry work better for you? If you have been in a MOOC, what was the experience like for you?  I welcome your comments here.

Elliott Holt    Photo: Rebecca Zeller

Elliott Holt's first novel You Are One of Them will be published in 2013 and her short fiction has appeared in The Pushcart Prize XXXV  among other places. Follow her on twitter @elliottholt.

Share This

You may have noticed the ShareThis logo appearing at the bottom of my posts here. If you click on that, it allows you to share this post (and blog) with others via your accounts on Delicious, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Digg or many others, or your own blog or that old standby, email.

The folks at ShareThis were nice enough to notice that Poets Online users were clicking and sharing, and so hey featured this blog on their own blog this month on their Roll Call 7.9.08

We definitely appreciate all of you spreading the word about the blog and the Poets Online site with friends you think would enjoy our collected efforts.

A Poets Online For Kids

Recently, I reconnected with Laura Shovan who had been teaching and writing poetry in New Jersey and was an early contributor to Poets Online.

She moved to Maryland some years ago and we only seemed to connect every other year at the Dodge Poetry Festival. She still checks in on the the site and was coincidentally working on a series of poems in response to the Stafford poems in “The Darkness Around Us is Deep.” Hopefully, one of those will fit this month's prompt and find its way onto Poets Online.

Laura has made poetry her vocation these days with workshops and readings. She read last weekend with Lucille Clifton as part of the Columbia Festival of the Arts along with a group of contributors to a local literary magazine called the “Little Patuxent Review.”

Her new project is creating her Mrs. Poems site which is still under construction, but will have a poetry prompt for kids with the ability to submit poems. Laura says that it is, "Modeled after your site, of course! Let me know what you think – I’d love your comments and suggestions."

Poets Online has always had an audience with teachers and contributions from students, though many of the prompts are not really appropriate to kids, so I find a site that offers prompts and a chance to publish online for kids to be really exciting. Give Laura's project a look, and let her know your thoughts about poetry prompts and children's poetry.

Into 2008

Things have been quiet this month on the blog and at our main site.

It's not just the holidays. You can add in some computer problems and those pesky day jobs that pay the bills. But, there will be new poems posted at the end of the month and a new prompt for the new year. Keep the ink from freezing.

Didactic, rhyming, list poems. Tall order.

This month I chose the poem "How to Live" by Charles Harper Webb as our model poem.

Charles Harper Webb was a rock guitarist for fifteen years. He's a licensed psychotherapist. He's a professor at California State University. He has written five books of poetry. He uses three names because there are so many Charles Webbs in the world. (Full disclosure: I first looked at his poems a few years ago because I thought he was the guy who wrote The Graduate.)

I stumbled upon his poem "Bombs Over Everywhere" on the Huffington Post blog and I got excited because I thought he might be a blogging poet (he's not).

I suggested that because his poem begins with an epigraph that is a line from a poem by Sharon Olds: "I don't know how to live," we can read the poem as a response to her. Advice on how to live.

It's also a list poem, a form that has often been used. It's a form that I believe many readers and writers dismiss as too easy or less "poetic." It's a form teachers use with students to get them into writing poetry because it is easy.

Then, what makes a list go beyond list to poem? It's worth noting that Webb has a book of prose poems, Hot Popsicles, and that form deals with the same question. If you read other poems by Webb, you know that it's not a question about his ability to write poetry.

The poem has a structure of 5 line stanzas, but the stanza breaks seem arbitrary. Even the line breaks seem to be controlled more by the physical length of the line than by a meter or syllabication. Do you find it full of figurative language? I don't.

There are literary moments in his advice - "Read Dostoyevsky, Whitman, Kafka, Shakespeare, Twain." - followed by "Collect Uncle Scrooge comics." One theme that does run through the advice is contrast - "Don't think TV characters talk to you; that's crazy. Don't be too sane." and "Work hard. Loaf easily."

I have long been a believer in the ars poetica all-poems-are-about-poetry school of reading. Can we look at this poem as not only advice for living but as advice to poets? Should poets try forms that go against their own sense of what is poetry?

At Poets Online, we have gone down the advice path before: advice to poets, and advice to poets in a poetic form, good advice gone bad, so we don't need to try that again.

To make it more challenging, we want it to be didactic poetry, and put in that pesky rhyme in the way of several poetic games. Ever heard of bouts-rimes (boo-REEM - literally "end rhymes") which is an 18th century parlor game. Partygoers get a list of rhyming words and then have to make a poem from the list keeping the rhymes in their original order. There's also crambo where one player gives a word or line which is matched in rhyme by the other players.

Didactic poetry gives instruction (often moral instruction), so your poem should instruct.

An example often used is Alexander Pope's "An Essay on Criticism."

Here's the opening stanza:

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
Fired at first sight with what the Muse imparts,
In fearless youth we tempt the heights of arts,
While from the bounded level of our mind,
Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind;
But more advanced, behold with strange surprise
New distant scenes of endless science rise!

And it is a list poem we are writing. Sometimes you hear that called catalog verse - a list of persons, places, things, or abstract ideas which share a common denominator. It's an ancient form.

Your working set of rhymes (in the way of bouts-rimes) is:
surprise/rise, white/bright, mind/behind, rock/lock, head/bed, share/hair, way/day, place/embrace.

I ask that poets use them in any order or scheme. You don't need to use all of them, but it does suggest a line limit of 16 lines (yes, there are ways around that - internal rhyme is one possibility). There are 8 couplets suggested; use 7 and you have a sonnet form.

I feel that that creates a box for your poem, but leaves lots of room for your own decoration.

Check the Poets Online Archive for responses to this prompt and others

I Know You're Out There (I Can Hear You Breathing)

"I Know You're Out There, I Can Hear You Breathing," is one of those old stand up comedian lines to throw out when the audience gets real quiet. Well, in this case it was Poets Online that got quiet.

There hasn't been an update to the site (new poems or prompt) for January or February. The past week I received 5 emails from site regulars asking if everything was OK. There were a few last month too. Mixed concern for the site and for me, which is very thoughtful.

I had a similar situation with a blog I do as part of my job. The server had problems, the blog went offline and suddenly I started getting emails from folks saying, "Hey, your blog is down." More email response than we ever get in comments as a response.

It reminded me of my college days when I had this late night radio show where you suspect that no one is actually listening. No one calls in. No requests. Then the transmitter goes down. And the phone starts ringing. There really were listeners out there.

So, I do know that you're out there. And I do hear you breathing.

The submissions are pretty consistent for the site prompts. There are usually 20-40 per prompt, though a good portion have nothing to do with the prompt.

Interestingly enough, during the past weeks when there was no active prompt, I still received 23 poems.

So where have we been? Well, right here. With the computer still on every day. It's just that work and family have grabbed a tight hold on this one man operation and the part that got squeezed out was the poetry.

But I'm going to give it some time this weekend. Planning to get up a new prompt, the poems from the December 'heroes" prompt and (since January just disappeared) I think I'll put together a page with some of those submissions "unprompted" or sent late or whatever that have come in the past few months as a January page.

I'm hoping the site will return (along with work, family, the weather & life in general) to normal.

Keep those cards and letters coming.

Hero's Journey Hits a Detour

I said on the site that I had been "forced by circumstances lately to think back on my years teaching young adults" and two friends emailed to ask what that meant.

Okay - I'm preparing a new course (graduate level) that I'll start teaching in mid-January, but I have also applied for a job at a high school (though it is not an instructional position). So, when I heard Garrison Keillor read "Kryptonite" by Ron Koertge (see below) from Ron's book Fever, Red Hen Press, 2006) on The Writer's Almanac recently, it did get me thinking about teaching poetry sessions in secondary school.

It's a poem I would use in class and that doesn't mean that it's a poem for kids. If I was using it with my middle school students, I'd get them to talk about fictional heroes - comic book or literature - and we'd talk about what might get boring about being them or being with them. And after we had hacked at Batman (out every night), Harry Potter (enough with the headaches, finish off Voldemort) and the crew, I would probably be the one to bring up some classic (or classical) heroes. Then, we would read this poem and talk about using them for good old-fashioned poetry fun.

I know the sophisticated Poets Online readers will automatically jump right to the loftier fictional heroes, but the prompt is the same idea. Probably best to choose someone admirable, special qualities (powers?) will help, name recognition makes it easier for all of us - then turn that hero upside down. Following our model, you might want to bring another character to mix things up. A chance for your own monomythologizing. Lots of possible topics: Catwoman, King Arthur, Ulysses, Silver Surfer and Bilbo Baggins.

As always, information on submitting your poem are on the site at http://poetsonline.org

Holidays and all mean we get some extra time on this one - January 7, 2007 is the submission deadline.

Best wishes for the new year.

---

About Ron Koertge He grew up in an old mining town in Illinois, on the banks of the Mississippi River. He has lived in California for many years and has been on the faculty of Pasadena City College for more than 35 years. His poetry collections include, Fever, and Making Love to Roget's Wife. He also teaches in the M.F.A. Writing for Children Program at Vermont College and is the author of The Arizona Kid, Where the Missing Never Stops, and Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright, all of which were ALA Best Books for Young Adults.

In his own words... "As a child, I was very ill with rheumatic fever as a child. It is a very dangerous disease, and often left its victims with heart trouble. That isn't true for me, but being all by myself for three months (in bed, no exercise, no stimulation of any kind) made me a broody, look-inside-myself kind of kid. In graduate school, I read a French critic who said poets are made by being ill as children. Lo and behold, I became (and still am) a poet..."
more about Ron by Ron

The Trouble With Poetry and Billy Collins

I first encountered the poetry of Billy Collins in 1990 when I bought THE APPLE THAT ASTONISHED PARIS. Someone had given me a photocopy of "Schoolville" at a workshop (it's a good poem for aging teachers) so I checked out his books in a store - that was the only one. The poems were fresh, enjoyable to read, and it was rare at that point in my life that I actually read a poetry book cover to cover.

I recall being surprised how many poems were about death in the collection (though why not - it's of of the 2 big themes). I liked that in "My Number" he wonders about Death coming by for him, getting the scythe out of the car trunk and thinking about ways to talk your way out of the meeting. ("Did you have any trouble with the directions?" he asks Death at the front door.)

I recall thinking when I reread poems or passed them on to others that there was more going on than I had picked up on the first reading.

That's a reason why I was and still am surprised when someone says that his poems are "funny, but there's nothing to go back to later."

When I was able to spend a week workshopping poems with him at the writer's conference at Long Island University in the summer of 1999, it all came together for me.

In the workshops that week, and even more so in the nightly gatherings with him at a Southhampton pub, I could see that he was the poems and the poems were him. The "voice in the poem" who was chopping parsley & listening to Art Blakey was Billy. And I don't mean that I assume that he actually did chop & listen - anymore than I believe that he actually shoveled snow with the Buddha - but he has chopped, listened to that Blakey, and shoveled snow with the Buddha and a poem in his mind.

One thing he talked about in poems we wrote that week was looking at how many cards were revealed in the poem. Look at your poem as a deck of cards spread on the table for your reader. How many do you turn over, how many do you leave face down for the reader to turn? It's an artful balance. One of the troubles with poetry for me is that some poets have achieved some fame by just not turning over many cards. They are obviously "serious" poets, worthy of study. A few don't even put the cards on the table for the reader to turn. And then some turn over so many cards that the poems are very accessible (once a complimentary term, now a curse - like being a liberal) so that they can be dismissed as lightweight.

When I introduced others to his poems or talked about how much I enjoyed his work, I sometimes found myself defending him/it.

His poems of a world in and around a suburban home - at the kitchen table, or the desk, looking out the window, walking and sitting out back, the dog, dinner, driving on the roads nearby - fit right in to my life. No, nothing about politics or poverty, no confessions or eroticism, obscenities and not much about the natural world. (SIDEBAR: Billy was on a panel at a poetry festival concerned with "Poetry & Nature" and he started off by saying that in his poems nature was pretty much only what he saw out his back window.) This is some of the same real estate that John Updike works in his novels and poems and I believe it has similarly cost him some serious attention (though there are plenty of critical studies of Updike and probably scads of theses written & in revision on both of these writers by now).

Donna Seaman writes in Booklist: "Collins is one of the most popular and most disarming of poets. He draws you close with his swinging lines, twirling metaphors, homey imagery, and coy self-deprecation. But he is as likely to be hiding a cudgel behind his back as a bouquet of flowers."

I'm not sure a Dickensian-sounding cudgel would be my weapon of choice in arming Billy (perhaps a record album, a nice solid book, a pint glass recently drained of its Guinness, and you can actually do some damage with a good shot to the face from a bouquet), but I agree with her - it's certainly not all surface polish.

I'll also say that I appreciate the fact that Collins will do some poems that are playing with all of this. His poem "Paradelle For Susan" was for me on a first reading just a goof on formal poetry. I figured the paradelle was a form I had never encountered. When Billy revealed in class (under our oath of silence - an oath we all broke ASAP) the "truth" of his form-invention and the subsequent responses to it by readers and critics, I realized I had been correct. He was goofing. Of course, in a classroom or workshop, the poem can lead to some great discussions on form and how it can free or trap the poet or the pretensions of formal poetry, or on why no one seems to be writing in form - you know, all those troubles with poetry.

I used that poem as a prompt for the site and tried to write a good paradelle myself (which is work) and you can see all our results at http://poetsonline/archive/archparadelle.html

Of course, it became much easier to be a Collins fan when he was appointed Poet Laureate, and it was very easy when you were talking with people at one of his readings. The best of those is certainly at the biannual Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festivals in New Jersey. He's loved. The autograph line winds round and round. It's the Woodstock of poetry, "poetry heaven" as it has been called.


Well, Billy Collins' new book (released 10/18/05) is THE TROUBLE WITH POETRY. New poems, but some of them are poems I have seen in periodicals or heard him read.

One of those poems is "The Lanyard" which is both a tribute to his mom (yes, yes, ALL our moms, all our parents, all those we can never repay) and a brief study in what we do for and to those we love. The poem is, like his lanyard, "two-tone."

I made a number of those lanyards myself when I was a boy killing time over the summer at the rec program at Orange Park in Irvington, NJ. And I know that I was just like the boy in the poem - convinced that "this useless, worthless thing I wove out of boredom would be enough to make us even."

I'm surprised to see in the poem an allusion like " No cookie nibbled by a French novelist could send one into the past more suddenly" since Collins is generally not much of an allusionist. Sure, it might send a reader to investigate the reference and discover Proust, but it's more likely to just float by a reader. [Writers who visit Poets Online will explore this idea a bit more in the October writing prompt.]

So what is the trouble with poetry? Snobbism? Is it becoming (as Ezra Pound warned) prose with line breaks? Too many allusions? Allusion-less? Too many Collins types of poets or too few? Maybe just too many poets.

Your comments on that are welcome here...


More on Billy Collins http://www.billy-collins.com/