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Week Four: Sharing
the Wealth: Pleasure and Performance
Twelve years ago, in the Atlantic Monthly, Dana Gioia called
for a radical shift in poetry pedagogy: a return to the focus
that such teaching had before the arrival of New Criticism
in the 1940s. “Poetry’s teachers, especially at
the high-school and undergraduate levels, should spend less
time on analysis and more on performance,” the poet—now
head of the NEA—declared. With help from “Poetry
Out Loud,” the National Recitation Contest sponsored
by the NEA and Poetry Foundation, this shift in emphasis has
begun. The final week of this seminar will address performance
as, itself, a mode of analysis: one that particularly tends
to “share the wealth” where pleasure is concerned.
Although the oral performance of poetry long antedates poetry
as a written art, we will begin somewhat closer to home. On
Monday of this final week, we will study the recent history
of poetry readings and “performance poetry,” not
least by listening to recordings of poets from Whitman, Tennyson
and Browning—all captured, in their old age, on Edison
cylinders—through the modern period, the Beats, the
Black Arts poets, and the rise of Poetry Slams in the 1980s.
On Tuesday and Wednesday our seminar will be led by master
teacher Eileen Murphy, a participant in the original 2003
“Say Something Wonderful” seminar who has gone
on to focus her teaching and research on teaching poetry through
performance. She will first walk teachers through the process
of adapting a longer poem for the stage: in her case, Canto
V of Byron’s Don Juan, a poem that students discover
to be filled with quite current questions about gender, power,
and encounters between Islam and the West. (Murphy first worked
on this project in collaboration with Jonathan Gross, who
had brought it to several other area schools; his project
website can be found here.)
Eileen will return to lead us through the texts and methods
of “Poetry Out Loud,” the national competition
in which high school students recite work by established poets
from an anthology put together by the Poetry Foundation. At
Walter Payton College Prep and, more recently, Niles West
High School, Murphy has sponsored and directed Poetry Out
Loud teams; her most recent effort, just this month, drew
more than 400 students to participate in the opening round.
In a hands-on workshop, she will show how recitation—with
or without prizes—can be used to teach close reading
skills in elementary, middle, and high school contexts, and
with them, the pleasures of a lifetime engagement with poetry.
We will spend the final Thursday and Friday on the poems that
participants have chosen and practiced for performance, using
Eileen’s approaches and evaluation tools, and we will
discuss the experience of preparing and performing these poems
for one another. We will conclude with a celebratory lunch
at the DePaul University Humanities Center, here in Lincoln
Park.
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