Poetry And Pedagogy

Few could deny that the contemporary is the chronic blind spot in most liberal arts curricula. Many “twentieth century lit.” courses still don’t cover much after the mid-fifties; other disciplines in the humanities don’t acknowledge poetry at all as part of the study of the contemporary. The essays collected here suggestively address the possibilities, pleasures, and risks of teaching from the multiplicity of poetries that have proliferated since the sixties. They discuss how to create a lively, investigative poetry classroom and suggest ways to work with cultural implications of poetry in society. The aim is to invite students to experience and make meaning of the poetics of our contemporary world, one that is blatantly “multi”—multi-cultural, lingual, racial, and ethnic.

Joan Retallack is John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities at Bard College where she teaches poetry and poetics. She has been Visiting Butler Professor of Poetry in the Poetics Program at SUNY at Buffalo and poet in residence at Brown University. Retallack is the author of The Poethical Wager (University of California Press, 2003). Her poetry includes Memnoir (2004), How To Do Things With Words (1998), Afterrimages (1995), and Errata 5uite (1994). She received a Lannan Foundation Fellowship in 1998 and the America Award in Belles-Lettres for Musicage: John Cage in Conversation with Joan Retallack in 1996.

Juliana Spahr is a poet, teacher, and scholar. She is the author of This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (University of California Press, 2005), Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You (Wesleyan University Press, 2001), Everybody's Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (University of Alabama Press, 2001), and Response (Sun & Moon Press, 1996). She co-edits the journal Chain with Jena Osman.