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Week Three: Knowledge
is Pleasure
The third week of “Say Something Wonderful” is
based on the fact that certain poetic pleasures can only be
found when you know where to look for them. (In this, of course,
poetry is no different from baseball or soccer, wine tasting
or some kinds of music.) This week we will explore three of
these pleasures: formal pleasures, which depend on knowing
the conventions of meter and metrical variation; pleasures
of genre, which depend on a lively, conversant sense of how
the conventions of various sorts of poetry have been adopted,
adapted, and transformed; and pleasures of context.
Formal pleasures are notoriously hard to teach, not least
because it is so hard to make students care enough to notice
prosody and take any pleasure in it. In class, we will go
over the basic tasks we ask of students when it comes to discussing
meter: to recognize metrical patterning; to link such patterns
to historical and thematic meanings, and to spot an assortment
of local expressive effects. In order to teach these—especially
to teach them as pleasures—we teachers must be confident
in our metrical sense and historical knowledge. We also need
tricks up our sleeve: notably ear training exercises and more-or-less
lighthearted assignments in writing and performing metrical
verse. We will therefore go over our own “best practices”
in this regard, sharing what works, doing one another’s
exercises, and thrashing out how much prosodic terminology
our students really need to know.
To investigate pleasures of genre participants will use the
capacious anthology An Exaltation of Forms to choose the forms
and poems of most use to them to research and present to the
seminar. Their choices might stay close to home—epigrams,
litanies, sonnets, sestinas, villanelles—or range more
adventurously to take in sapphics, haiku, pantoums, or ghazals.
In either case, they will explore how individual poems come
to life in new ways when you see their deployment or transformation
of a form’s traditions. (In previous seminars, for example,
teachers have explored how recent odes draw on and revise
Pindaric or Romantic conventions, including poems that might
not at first seem like odes at all. Quincy Troupe’s
“Take it to the Hoop, Magic Johnson,” now published
as a children’s book, prompted a particularly memorable
discussion.)
The final days of this week will be devoted to pleasures
of context. We will begin with an exploration of Latino American
poetry: an overlapping set of traditions that runs from 16th
century Spanish epics to such disparate recent work as the
litany of Luis Urrea’s Vatos, the hip-hop décimas
of Urayoán Noel, and the tejana erotica of Houston
police officer Sarah Cortez. Our guide will be María
Meléndez, a rising Latina poet who draws equally on
Anglo-American and Latino literary traditions, and who worked
for several years with K-12 teachers in California’s
Poets in the Schools program. We will then turn to the contexts
of literary celebrity and the “aura” of poetry
itself. Many readers fall in love with the idea of poetry
long before they learn to engage in detail with actual poems;
how, we will discuss, can the celebrity of a Plath or Ginsberg
lead students to the more lasting pleasures of their (or others’)
work, and how can we use it to discuss the shifting meanings
of “being a poet” in various contexts? DePaul
professors Jonathan Gross, a Byron scholar, and Melissa Brandshaw,
who studies the modern “poet as diva,” will help
us to explore the ways that such impure, extra-literary pleasures
may be enjoyed by students and exploited by teachers without
allowing them to displace the texts themselves.
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