poetry priming

I’ve been reading through the excellent collection of essays in Poetry and Pedagogy, edited by the equally excellent Joan Retallack and Juliana Spahr. It’s slow going, because the content is so rich, and each piece leads me to many spiralling paths.

Today, I skipped ahead to Charles Bernstein’s piece on Creative Wreading:

Confronted with a poem, many students, indeed many readers, seem to go silent or what they say tends to treat the poem as if it were not a poem at all but a statement of opinion, experience, or sentiment… My response to this chronic poetic aporia (CPA) is to provide intensive poetry immersion courses, something like teaching poetry as a second language. That means I try to immerse the class in a wide yet distinct variety of poetic forms, sounds, dictions, and logics. (274)

This is a very familiar scene and response. One tool he has developed is the “Poetry Profiler“. It provides a range of terms from the various rhetorical features one might encounter in a poem, and also provides a vocabulary to help students consider its social/historical context.

He asks students to first run the profiler on themselves, ranking their preference for each value. This process, he observes, often involves spending a few hours defining the terms.

One of the strengths of the tool is that it serves as a foundation for discussing the difference between personal aesthetic preference and the aesthetic value of a given poem.

As I continue to learn how significantly a reader’s aesthetic expectations shape their experience of a work, I can see that using a similar approach would help my students find their way into a greater variety of texts. They would begin to see their expectations as preferences, not preconditions.

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