Fishing for Poetry in the Dark

Book orders are due Monday and I’ve been hemmin’ and hawin’ over which ones to use for my intro to poetry class in the Fall. I don’t normally worry about it all that much, but I’ve neither taken nor taught a poetry course before so I’m venturing into unknown territory. That part of it actually feels familiar. I always feel like I’m working outside of my field of speciality. I started out as a modernist in college, but never took a class on modernism. I wrote grants so I could travel and do research on Woolf and Joyce (separate trips for separate projects) and I sat in on classes that focused on modernist texts, but this was always in addition to my other coursework. In my Master’s program I did the same. Sat in on modernist classes because none were offered while I was working on my degree there. In addition to that, my Master’s advisor was a medievalist and there were no medieval classes to take either (the course offerings kind of sucked at the time, now that I think of it) so I sat in on some of my advisor’s classes and schooled myself on 14th-century contemplative literature. My advisor helped me a lot with my independent reading, but still. I had no one to talk to about my work. Now I’m finally in a program where there are many profs and students in my field, but I still don’t feel like I’ve been able to pay attention to modernist studies in the way that I want to. Poetry has suffered particularly because I’ve become obsessed with women’s autobiographies in the last year. I guess it’s good that I work well independently and am happy doing it, but it’s created this endless cycle of feeling like I’m not studying what I am “supposed” to be studying. Friends have been telling me that I should drop the poetry and make a complete switch to autobiographical studies since I’ve read so much about it and have been writing about it in several different projects. My interest in autobiography is sincere, but I’m mainly attracted to it as a theoretical approach. So, I’m stickin’ to the poetry. And, despite my attempts to get out of it, I’m still reading the Americans.

So, this class…. I think I’m going to focus on women poets (cuz the course description doesn’t say I can’t). I may not title it “women’s poetry or “intro to modern and contemporary women poets” because I may want to teach a few other male poets in there. I’ll have to be clear about this on the syllabus and course description though because otherwise students will complain that I’m a feminist and that I made them read poetry by women. Both of those things will be true actually and I’m beginning to come to a place where it doesn’t bother me to be derogatorily labeled with the f-word (a common response to the word feminism as an f-word; this is not my stance, of course), but I would like them to see feminism differently and to understand why I, or anyone, would want to focus on women poets, as opposed to the usual modernist men.

This all has been a long prelude to my choice of books for the Fall (sorry). I think I’ve settled on the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Plath’s Ariel, and Mary Oliver’s Rules for the Dance. Someone recommended that I use a complete book of poetry so students could get a sense of reading poetry outside of an anthology. I thought this was good advise and strongly considered using Hejinian’s Fatalist because I really like her work and just read this book, but Norton’s anthology already includes a good bit of her work so I decided against that. I wanted someone who would be underrepresented in the anthology, but after tossing around several different ideas/books I decided on Plath’s Ariel because even though parts of it are frequently anthologized I thought it would be good to take a look at that book in its entirety. (That, and I know I’ll need to know it for my exams later. Though an argument could be made for Hejinian. Carla Harryman’s also a possibility; she’s not in the anthology. Maybe I’ll change my mind again by Monday.) Since I haven’t taught this class before I felt like I needed something that would help students learn to read poetry. I’m not crazy about Mary Oliver’s book, but I wanted to keep costs down and it seemed like it would do. In that email exchange between Lyn Hejinian and Billy Joe Harris that I posted on earlier, both Lyn and Billy Joe discuss the usefulness of Padgett’s Handbook of Poetic Forms, which I just ordered. I might use that instead of the Mary Oliver book, but I haven’t had a chance to look at the Padgett book yet so I’m not sure about it. (Though I noticed someone else had it in the bookstore, so maybe I should just go with it). Oliver’s book is “ok” but in the back she has a series of poems — all by dead white men, which just makes me cringe, particularly since my class will focus on women writers who most certainly will not all be white or western. While at the bookstore I picked up a copy of Furniss and Bath’s Reading Poetry: An Introduction. I’m not going to order it for the students (too expensive given that I’m making them buy the 2 volume Norton anthologies), but I may use it as a sourcebook for teaching. Derek Attridge is supposed to have a good one too, but again I wasn’t able to get a hold of it this week. (Alas.) Even as I’m writing about this I think I’ll just go with the Padgett book instead of Oliver. Those dead white men in the back make me want to vomit. I feel compelled, no, scratch that. I feel like it’s my responsibility as a scholar/teacher/human being to consider the political implications of the texts I teach, which is why I’m making a clear break from Eliot and the like.

Ok, this is all the time I’m going to spend thinking about teaching today. I got Prof Awesome’s book order together yesterday so that’s already taken care of. Back to writing about autobiography.

If anyone has other book recommendations — feel free to share them in the comments box! They will be much appreciated!

p.s. I don’t mean to create a hierarchy between my many identities as a scholar/teacher/human being. Though, I realize that I constructed it that way above (probably a reflection of how I’ve internalized the institution’s demands unconsciously). These things exist simultaneously, not as a hierarchy, but I clearly can’t be a scholar or a teacher without being human, so that’s got to come first. The scholars and teachers I value most, in fact, act like and treat others like human beings first and foremost.