A Master Class

The "Master Class" is something I associated with acting, but now there are ones on many of the creative arts, especially online. In his MasterClass on "Reading and Writing Poetry," Billy Collins covers some of the basics like subject and form, rhyme and meter. But you can tell (even in this excerpt) that he's more interested in the pleasures of a well-turned poem.

Collins is one of the best-selling contemporary poets in the United States. That works for and against him with critics who sometimes see his persona and humor as almost "too accessible." I think they are wrong.

Besides being called “America’s Favorite Poet” by the Wall Street Journal, he served two terms as U.S. Poet Laureate and is also a former New York State Poet Laureate. He’s been honored with the Mark Twain Prize for Humor in Poetry. He’s taught at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, and for much of his life at Lehman College, and is a distinguished professor at the City University of New York.

The MasterClass syllabus reads:
• Using humor as a serious strategy
• The fundamental elements of poetry
• Billy’s writing process
• Turning a poem
• Exploring subjects
• Rhyme and meter
• Sound pleasures
• Finding your voice
• Using form to engage readers
• The visual distinctions of poetry

There are other MasterClass offerings that might interest poets: Neil Gaiman teaches The Art of Storytelling, Margaret Atwood on Creative Writing, and even David Lynch on Creativity and Film.

Of course, these classes have a cost, but there are lots of free "classes" online too. Just staying in the Collins section of YouTube, you can hear him on the great poets.

Five of Collins' poems were the inspiration for animated films, which might seem like an odd way to look at poetry. Here he talks about the films in a TED Talk.

If you're like me, any good poetry reading is a kind of class. I always find myself inspired and making notes at readings of things that I should try to write about in my own poetry.


Here is a full reading by Billy Collins at the Strand Book Store in 2012 at the time of his collection Horoscopes for the Dead. If you have never had the chance at hearing Collins live, this is a good alternative. I think you may be inspired to write.

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Teaching Poetry

The most recent episode of the Poetry Off the Shelf podcast was a back-to-school episode. The title is what caught my attention: "Teaching Poetry in Times Like These."

Do we change what we teach because of the times we teach in? The podcast doesn't mention President Trump but it surely is alluding to the current administration as part of the turmoil of the times.

Of course, poems change - or our feelings and interpretations change - depending on the time when we read them.

I won't be in a classroom teaching this fall, but I don't know if I would be selecting reading selections based on the politics and news of the day.

What I would heartily agree with that the teacher interviewed in the program says is that teachers need to give their students choice and a voice.

The classroom is where poetry connects with young people and also where they can disconnect from poetry.

Listen to the podcast (14 minutes) online at stitcher.com/podcast/poetry-foundation/poetry-off-the-shelf/

Summer School Poetry Class

You might not have taken an AP (Advanced Placement) English course in high school, but on the website edsitement.neh.gov you can "study" 21 Poems for AP Literature and Composition. These are poems frequently taught in AP English Lit and Composition classes. 

For each of the twenty-one poems, there are resources including audio clips and video, primary source documents and photographs, timelines, and, of course, poems.

For example, Robert Frost's “Mending Wall” is one selection, and the site offers The Poem, About this Poem from the Poetry Foundation, On “Mending Wall” from Modern American Poetry, a lesson "Mending Wall": A Marriage of Poetic Form and Content, and more about Robert Frost from Voices and Visions.

School is closed for the summer, but some AP students are assigned summer reading and might be assigned some of these poems. Well, here is some help from the teacher's file cabinet. And for the rest of us, we can do some summer school and not have to worry about tests, homework, or grades.

The poems:  

Matthew Arnold: “Dover Beach

Elizabeth Bishop: “In the Waiting Room”

Gwendolyn Brooks: “We Real Cool”

Robert Browning: “My Last Duchess”

Emily Dickinson: “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” (124)

John Donne: “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”

T.S. Eliot: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Carolyn Forché: “The Colonel”

Robert Frost: “Mending Wall”

Robert Hayden: “Those Winter Sundays”

Langston Hughes: “Let America Be America Again”

John Keats: “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

Andrew Marvell: “To His Coy Mistress”

Wilfred Owen: “Dulce et Decorum Est”

John Crowe Ransom: “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter”

William Shakespeare: Sonnets

Percy Bysshe Shelley: “Ozymandias”

Wallace Stevens: “Sunday Morning”

Dylan Thomas: “Do not go gentle into that good night”

William Carlos Williams: “Danse Russe”

William Butler Yeats: “The Second Coming”

Did I Miss Anything?

For the past few years, I have used Tom Wayman's poem “Did I Miss Anything?” with students as part of my start to a new semester. It doesn't matter what grade level you teach, the question from the student who missed your class - "Did I miss anything?" -is a painful one. It is not the same as asking "What did I miss?"  It suggests that there is a good possibility that you missed nothing at all.

Tom's poem offers 6 responses.

Did I Miss Anything?

Nothing. When we realized you weren’t here
we sat with our hands folded on our desks
in silence, for the full two hours

Everything. I gave an exam worth
40 per­cent of the grade for this term
and assigned some reading due today
on which I’m about to hand out a quiz
worth 50 percent

Nothing. None of the content of this course
has value or meaning
Take as many days off as you like:
any activities we undertake as a class
I assure you will not matter either to you or me
and are without purpose

Everything. A few minutes after we began last time
a shaft of light suddenly descended and an angel
or other heavenly being appeared
and revealed to us what each woman or man must do
to attain divine wisdom in this life and
the hereafter
This is the last time the class will meet
before we disperse to bring the good news to all people
on earth.

Nothing. When you are not present
how could something significant occur?

Everything. Contained in this classroom
is a microcosm of human experience
assembled for you to query and examine and ponder
This is not the only place such an opportunity has been
gathered

but it was one place

And you weren’t here

The poem is from his Did I Miss Anything?: Selected Poems 1973-1993 (1993, Harbour Publishing)

The poem is also part of Billy Collins' Poetry 180 project with the Library of Congress. A 180-degree turn implies a turning back—in this case, to poetry. For many American teachers, 180 also suggests the 180 day school year and the poem Collins selected for the site and two anthologies are excellent poems to use in the classroom.


     

Learning Poems by Heart

Caroline Kennedy writes that, “If we learn poems by heart, we will always have their wisdom to draw on, and we gain an understanding that no one can take away.”

For the Poems to Learn by Heart collection, Kennedy chose more than 100 poems that can speak to all of us.

The Poetry Foundation has collected a few poems from the book and offers a Poems to Learn Teacher Guide which includes activities aligned to Common Core Standards for grades K-12.

Sample Poems

Grades K-3“Don't Worry if your Job is Small” by Anonymous
“Some Words Inside of Words” by Richard Wilbur

Grades 4-6
“Invitation to Love” by Paul Laurence Dunbar
“A Blessing” by James Wright

Grades 7-12
“Theme for English B” by Langston Hughes
“Bilingual/Bilingüe” by Rhina Espaillat
“If—” by Rudyard Kipling
“Ballad of Birmingham” by Dudley Randall

Glum High School Poetry Teacher

I just read a review of a new movie, World's Greatest Dad, with Robin Williams, and what hit me right away was the line at the top: "Robin Williams stars as a glum high school poetry teacher in this surrealist fable."

I taught secondary school for 25 years and I never met a teacher who could claim to be a high school poetry teacher. I may have to watch the film just to see what kind of high school has an English teacher who only teaches poetry. (All of you high school poetry teachers out there, feel free to post a comment below.)

The "glum" adjective didn't make me flinch. Teachers are a pretty glum lot, English teachers more so and poets are always moody. At least, that's what I have been told. I actually enjoyed teaching and especially enjoyed teaching poetry, but there's no movie script in that story.

I guess Mr. Clayton is partially glum because he's a writer who has never published anything.

That's it for this blog reaction - the rest of my preview is here.


Watch the film's trailer

Teachers Blogging - A Call for Proposals

The New Jersey College English Association (NJCEA) is soliciting panels and papers on literary and composition topics for its Annual Conference on March 21, 2009 at Seton Hall University in New Jersey.

I'm putting together a panel on blogging and would love to connect with some English teachers who use blogging as a teaching tool. I'd like to have papers on students as bloggers, teachers blogging for their students, teachers blogging as educators and the pedagogy of using blogs as readings and as writing platforms. I realize that Poets Online (this blog and the main site) has many teachers reading and using it, and that many of you are far away from New Jersey, USA. Still, perhaps there are a few of you that are blogging and would like to present a paper at the conference.

There are also panels planned on poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction and other topics. You can contact me or any panel's convener via the email addresses on the site.

Full and part-time college instructors, graduate students, and other professionals within the field of English are invited to send panel proposals and 250-word paper abstracts on any topic related to college English. Email submissions should include your name, e-mail address, affiliation, and mailing address.

NJCEA brings together those interested in language, literature, pedagogy, and other aspects of the teaching and study of literature and writing. Paper proposals are now being accepted for a variety of panels.

originally posted as Blogging in the English Classroom on Serendipity35

Escape to the Library

I'm passing this information from my colleague and friend, Dana Maloney, who is coordinating this year's NJ Council of Teachers of English 2008 High School Writing Contest. She would like to reach as many teachers and students in New Jersey as possible, so I offered to post about it on several of my blogs.

It's a NJcentric contest, but the rest of you may be curious about the personal essay prompt and our model. It sent me back to a childhood memory that may be one you share.

The contest categories are: poetry, short story, and personal essay. More contest details at the end of this post. The personal essay submissions must respond to this year’s prompt.

Where do you live? Use descriptive language to give the reader a virtual experience of your world. As you do this, let us hear your voice. Share the thoughts, feelings, questions and concerns that arise out of your view of the world around you. Bring your space – your town, your school, your home, your room, your web - to life for your reader. Where you live can be interpreted in many ways, including both literal and metaphorical ways, and we encourage you to take liberty with interpretation.

Of course, you could use that for poetry too. As a model of a personal essay, Dana suggested an essay by another friend, teacher and poet BJ Ward. You might want to read his essay about his youthful home-away-from-home at his local library - it is available online. Escaping to books is probably something that many readers of this post can admit to from their youth.

"During the internet-less, video-game-less, and seemingly endless summers of my childhood, I could ride my bike to the Washington Borough Public Library and within one minute be transported to the world of Dr. Doolittle; The Hardy Boys; and Babe Ruth, All-American Hero. Each book was a planet with a spine. The librarian was an organizing star, keeping all those spheres in their places for future explorers to discover. The library itself was a universe—a macrocosm between paint-chipped walls, below a roof paid for by bake sales, sandwiched between a tattoo parlor and halfway house. It was the most fecund place I knew—a greenhouse for my imagination, where fluorescence had to do with my mind’s branches spreading. O the joyful fire in the astronaut’s skull when divination led to apprehension. "

I was one of those people who had a corner of the children's section of my public library that I considered to be mine. A big, fat, old leather chair in a corner with a dirty window and a wall of books for protection. When they built the new town library - a bigger, brighter, glass-walled
version - I never found a special place there. (The modern chairs discouraged getting comfortable anyway.) Of course, by then I was out of the children's section which almost always is the more inviting part of a library anyway.

I had ventured a few times to the "big library" in my part of New Jersey - the Newark Public Library. It was impressive. Too impressive. I felt lost. Too many echoes in the halls, though I did like seeing in pop up in books like in Phillip Roth's Goodbye Columbus that I was reading. (My own hometown, Irvington, had shown up in some stories and in Portnoy's Complaint and I rode that same bus as

Perhaps, some student will write an essay for the contest about some private place of escape in their world. Do kids still escape to the library? My office is within a college library and it seems to be the place to study and use computers, but escape...?

BJ Ward's poem "Filling in the New Address Book" was featured on National Public Radio’s The Writer’s Almanac. (listen to Garrison Keillor reading it). His latest collection of poetry is Gravedigger's Birthday. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Warren County Community College in New Jersey.

CONTEST DETAILS

• Each participating teacher may submit up to 10 entries in each category. Submissions must be accompanied by a signed entry form.
• Entrants must submit four paper copies and one electronic copy of each submission.
• Download the entry form which contains information on where to submit the entry.
• The student’s name must not appear on the submission itself – only on the entry form.
• Postmark and Electronic Submission Deadline: December 15, 2008
• At least one student from every participating school will receive an award. Award categories are “Outstanding,” “Prize-worthy” or “Certificate of Merit.” Students in grades 10, 11 or 12 who are named “Outstanding” winners may be eligible for a New Jersey Governor’s Award in Arts Education.
• Winners will be announced by April 15, 2009.