Two Good Things!

We had a big poetry reading last night, the main rule of which was that the poem/passage not be in Modern English.

So, I read a passage, and had a prop, and I got a big laugh reading about a beheading.  I also had audience participation (thwack, thud, splat, and ewww were the audience participation parts).

It seems wrong to get a big laugh about a beheading, but it was the prop.  (I balled up a green jacket, put a hat on it, taped on two blue circles for eyes, and used red ribbon for blood, and had a colleague roll it out at the appropriate moment.)

I've gotten several congratulatory comments today about the reading.  So, that's good.

***

I have a review coming up next year, a big one for me, but I'm on sabbatical, so I arranged with a colleague to do a class visit this semester, so that there's a fresh report available.  Today was the only day that really worked in the past couple of weeks.

My colleague came to my seminar class, where we did final revision work on their seminar papers.  It can't have been especially exciting, but it was good.  First, every single student was really engaged in working on their papers.  And they had useful, good questions that showed their engagement.  And, at the end, most every student said the session had been really useful to them.

We basically worked through the sorts of things one should work through to fine tune an essay: thesis, intro, topic sentences, organization, checked citations, definitions, and so forth.  The thing is, most students are busy and won't make themselves double check this stuff (because they think they've already checked it by writing the paper), but it's really useful to do.

My colleague had a great suggestion to make it even better, and was overall very complimentary about the session.  I was a little nervous in that way one is sometimes, so I'm glad and relieved it went well.

It's one of the things I really wanted to take care of this semester for fall.  Check.

***

Just over one week of classes left!  I have a bad case of spring fever and sabbaticalitus, but I'm done with grading until next week, at least.  I do have to work on my Kalamazoo paper a lot more, but that's do-able, I think.

Kwame Alexander and Li-Young Lee

I'm teaching two amazing poems today.  First, Kwame Alexander's "LIfe" and second, Li-Young Lee's "The Gift."

Days like this, I have a really, really good job.

Teaching Sonnets

When I teach sonnets in a poetry course or in Shakespeare, it's pretty easy to spend a fair bit of time, and that means I can tease out how English Sonnets and Italian Sonnets work, slightly differently.  (I don't usually teach Spenserian sonnets.)

But in my intro to lit course, I'm not teaching a lot of sonnets, and the one I really love to teach for this course is Countee Cullen's "Yet Do I Marvel."

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!


The thing is, if you work out the rhyme and big punctuation, here's what you get:

ababcdcd.eeff.g:g

(I put the big punctuation, periods, colons, semi-colons in, because they help you get a really quick sense of how the sentences work.)

Punctuation-wise, it first looks like a variation on an Italian sonnet.

And the change in rhyme scheme sort of supports that.

But the rhyme scheme also feels more like an English sonnet, and the volta to me comes more with the couplet.

If I were taking several days to look at sonnets, then I'd play with some obvious Italian and English sonnets, and then use Cullen (though even Shakespeare does the mix thing in terms of playing with the volta placement), and my students would get a better sense of how darned amazing Cullen is.

The question of the day is: how do you get all that across with just Cullen?

Milton Lost and Milton Regained

For some reason, over break, I had the desire to reread Lycidas.  It's been a long, long time since I've read it, since, probably, I was preparing for my GREs.  At that time, I was reading in a study group, four of us at a city-located state university that (rumor had it) hadn't been able to buy new books for the library for some years.  We were all in the MA program, and all wanted to go on for a PhD.  So we got together and studied the Norton's, English, American, and World.  We met a couple times a week for most of a summer (all while working, too), and at the end of the summer, we took the GREs.

We worked really well together, each of us pretty much caring about an area, and having taken courses in that area more than the others.  So I helped a lot with the medieval and earlier early modern, and Eve did modern British, and Joy did modern American.  And there was a man whose name I don't remember right now, but he loved Romantics, and so he helped with the Romantics.  He made "Tintern Abbey" work for me, and it wouldn't have without him.

But none of us knew much about what we then called the "long 18th century" and so, well, that was my weakest area. 

And yes, Lycidas was there; I know we read it, and I know I didn't appreciate it.  And over this break, I was thinking, maybe I would get it now?

So when I got back from visiting family, I looked in my school office, and couldn't find my copy of Merritt Hughes.  I think pretty much everyone who studied earlier lit in my era had a Merritt Hughes, right alongside our Riverside Chaucer and our Witherspoon and Warnke.

Anyway, I looked in my school office, where I found an edition of Paradise Lost I used last time I taught it.  And I looked at my home office, where I came up empty.  And when I was at school, I looked again.  And at home, I looked again.  I'm pretty organized about my books.  At school, I have three big shelving units.  Top left shelves are Shakespeare editions.  Middle Left and bottom left is for books I'm using, reference books, oversize books, and some storage.

Middle is criticism, alphabetically by author.  All the way.

Upper right is modern plays.  Then medieval and early modern texts excluding Shakespeare.  Then a few novels and modern poetry and such.

And then reference series (MLA Approaches to Teaching, Cambridge Companions, the sorts of books that I'm likely not to remember the author, but to remember the series.). 

Then there are school stuff: advising manuals, catalogs and such.

At home, in the office, two big shelves: Left is criticism, alphabetically by author.  Right is Shakespeare, then early modern lit by author, then some reference stuff (dictionaries, etc).

Novels are in another room, as are birding books and such.

So, I should have been able to put my hands on Milton right away; he should be there, right after Middleton and before Rowley.  But no.

And this evening, for some reason, I looked again in my home office, and I noticed a thick book in the criticism section with a brown paper bag cover, the sort of cover I put on books that are worn but worth taking care of.  And yes, it was my Merritt Hughes Milton.  What it was doing there, I don't know.

But now I get to reread Lycidas, and I'm hoping I get more out of it than I did the first time.

Reading Papers

I was going to start by saying it's the grading jail time of the semester.  But really, other than the first week or so, it always feels like the grading jail time of the semester.  (I tend to give small, low stakes writing assignments spread across the semester, so it's my own fault.  But I think these assignments are valuable to students.)

I'm reading poetry papers right now.  I gave them three topics to choose from, and many are writing about the poetry book we read (whose author skyped with our class), and mostly, these are really good.

Yes, some could use a stronger thesis, and many could do better if they embedded quotations to give them context. 

But their writing really shows that they're reading these poems as poems, and thinking about them well.  And that's very good.

One of the things that strikes me about these papers is that they tend to read grief as "depressing" rather than as "grieving" or "deeply emotional."  For me, "depressing" is more existential, more a matter of despair and hopelessness, while grieving, even deep grieving, is less hopeless and more just dealing with loss.  I think.  I'm not sure how to express this.

Is Lear depressing?  Or deeply emotional?  or something else?

Does grief feel depressing to you folks?

Teaching a Friend's Poetry

In my Intro to Poetry course, I'm using a book of poetry by a friend; my colleagues and I tend to use one more recent book of poetry when we teach the course in order to help students get a feel for how to read a book of poetry as a collection.

This book is fantastic, and the students seem to be enjoying it.  They have lots to say, and what they say suggests they're reading pretty carefully.

That said, sometimes they're a bit off. 

In one of the poems, for example, the speaker talks about being at a funeral with her child.  At one point well into the poem, she hands the child to her husband so she can throw dirt onto the grave.

But several of my students missed that, and from the way the poem uses direct address, decided that the speaker must be a new widow, burying her husband.  So I've pointed them to the part where she says that she hands the child to her husband.

I'm pretty careful only to use evidence from within the poem.

When I started studying English, I took a course in theory and criticism.  In the course, we focused primarily on a book of poems by George Oppen and sort of on hermeneutics.  Sounds interesting, doesn't it?  Except it was pretty miserable because often, when someone would point to something in a poem and say, "this says X," the professor would say, basically, no, it isn't X, because I know George and that didn't happen.  And it always seemed to me very unfair to ask us to try to read poems if they only make sense if you know the writer. 

(Retrospectively, I realize that we were probably all pretty naïve readers, but the principle holds.)

And then, of course, I try to be careful to separate the speaker of a poem from the writer, even though with a lot of more confessional contemporary poetry, that separation feels difficult.

(The other thing that made the course miserable was the professor's unwillingness to define or explain "hermeneutics" except to say that "hermeneutics isn't [this]," or "hermeneutics isn't [that]."  As I said at the time, my car wasn't either of those things, either, but I was pretty sure it wasn't hermeneutics.  (This was in the days before the internet, or even email, and my dictionary didn't provide much help.  I SHOULD have gone to the library and asked a librarian for help, but I wasn't that sophisticated a student at that point.)

I've never understood why he didn't just take half an hour and give us a nice introduction to hermeneutics and interpretation; I hope he had a good pedagogical reason for spiraling around it instead, but I've never figured it out.


Anyway, my friend is skyping into my class from afar today, and I'm excited for them to get to talk to her!

Planning Classes - Poetry Time!

I'm teaching our intro to poetry course for the first time in ages (6 or 7 years).  I think most of my colleagues and I teach it as a skills course, rather than as a survey of poetry across time, or great poetry, or whatever.  So we focus on how to read poetry, how to approach it.  And it's fun, really fun.

The difficult thing is that the course is geared towards two very different audiences: the general ed crowd, often first year students, and the creative writing crowd, for whom it's one of three or four courses they choose from to complete a "genre" requirement.

The upshot is that you get first year students with no experience in poetry, taking the course because it was open at a time that worked for them and will fulfill a GE type requirement, and you get senior creative writing majors, some of whom really, really want to be poets.  (I don't know why they put off the genre courses, but they often do.)  And everything in between.

How do you set up a course for that diverse an audience?

What sorts of assignments help the first years while not boring the seniors, or letting them get lazy?

How do you challenge the seniors to learn new stuff without overwhelming the first years?

I have 35 Students enrolled, so a biggish class for my department, but not at all for many departments.  What sorts of assignments do you give? 

(I'll post about what I've got going later.)

Independent Studies and/vs Sexual Harassment

Last week, The Little Professor wrote in "In Which I Declare Independence" that she disagreed with Rebecca Schuman's Slate article suggesting that universities ban independent studies.

In her beautifully calm way, The Little Professor explains why independent studies are beneficial to students in her program, and not rife with sexual harassment problems, though she does note that most faculty aren't paid for the extra work involved.

Like The Little Professor, I also think independent studies have their place, especially for graduate students.  And like The Little Professor, I don't think independent studies are where most sexual harassment or inappropriate behavior are taking place.  That's not to say no one has been sexually harassed during an independent study, of course.  Rather, most independent studies are times when students can get extra help, delve more deeply into an area of interest, or have a chance to complete their degrees in a more timely way (especially in this era of budget constraints and cancelled courses).

Let me say this:  I probably wouldn't have made it through graduate school if it weren't for the kindness of a professor who was willing to do an independent study with me in my second term. 

During my first term, I'd taken a course on "The Renaissance" during which the instructor assigned an explication.  I'd never done an explication, never heard of one, even.  So, like a good little graduate student, I went to office hours.  Unfortunately, this one faculty member didn't think it was worth his time to explain what an explication was, and basically told me so.  He said, just explain how the verse is doing what it's doing, or something similar.

You should know, about this time in the story, that our program's qualifying exam included an explication which was reputed to be graded rather harshly.  And I was supposed to take this exam in the fall of my second year (I think that's the timing).

I asked other grad students, the ones from places where "explication" was a thing, including the one already deemed our crown prince by our Renaissance instructor.  But, of course, they were beginning grad students, and even if they could do an explication, they weren't inclined to teach me, or didn't know how.  So I muddled through, and didn't do very well on the assignment.

Before the next one was due, I went to another faculty member, one I'd felt comfortable with during my interviews the spring before, and talked to him.  And in an hour, he taught me the basics.  And on that one, I did much, much better.

And the next term, he agreed to do an independent study with me on reading poetry.  Each week, he'd set me a poem, and I'd work it up, and then we'd talk about it together. 

I credit that independent study with teaching me how to read poetry, how to explicate, and perhaps most important, how to teach others to read poetry.

So, while I now recognize how much of an imposition my request was on a junior faculty member, I remain eternally grateful for his help, his brilliant teaching, his kindness, and his willingness to take on a rather dim student.

But what about the other side, the sexual harassment?  The biggest sexual harassers in my graduate department didn't need independent studies.  One was the grad director of our program.  So he had power and the ability to call students into his office and wield that power or not (he didn't always, of course).

At mixed social events, the big sexual harassers would start drinking and park themselves at the drink table, and any woman who approached alone was pretty much assured that she'd be harassed.  The other male faculty who were hanging about didn't seem to think this was a problem.

Female students complained about both behaviors to other female students and to female faculty, but at the time, only two or three female faculty had tenure, and none was willing to stand up to the male faculty (for all the reasons you could imagine; the same reasons no female student went to the chair or beyond).  So the female students got the word out to other female students: no female grad student went to the drink table alone; we went in pairs.  And eventually he wasn't grad director any more.

I guess what I'm saying is that sexual harassers don't need independent studies to harass.  What they do tend to need is complicity from other faculty members, especially senior faculty folks.  I hope my old grad program has changed in that respect.  I know there are more senior female faculty.

But some students, people like me, perhaps, really do need some extra help to do well in grad school and beyond.

Now, even as I write this, I have to admit that I've said no to more requests for independent studies than not, especially in recent years.  That has to do with the increases in class size, in assessment paperwork, and so on that really force us to stretch our time in all sorts of ways.

Poetry - Peach Question

Okay, poetry folks.  You all know the moment in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" where he asks "Do I dare to eat a peach?"

What the heck is that about?  I've always wondered.  People nod knowingly, and I just don't get it.

What's daring about eating a peach?

Heading into Break!

I gave a midterm today in one course (students seemed to be feeling good about it as they left, which gives me hope that they showed how much they learned and it's a lot).  The other class I cancelled.

Only about half the people showed up for the Thursday meeting, and about half of those who were there said they weren't coming today.  And I just don't see the point of trying to do a ton of pre-writing stuff for a project with only a handful of the people who need it.

I'm continually surprised by how many people around here (students, neighbors) go on big trips for spring break, taking their kids out of school, missing classes at NWU, whatever.  I don't remember anyone much doing that when I was in college.  And then there's the opposite effect, of course, the students whose big plan is to work extra hours, or the campus coffee shop workers who have an enforced and unpaid "break" that makes paying the bills difficult.

***

I was supposed to turn in book orders on Monday.  I did most of them today.  I emailed the department colleague who's chairing the committee that's responsible for guest speakers and stuff asking who's coming next fall.  He had no idea, but suggested I ask one of the community folks who works with the community group that puts on a lit festival.  The community person said they'd lined up two people already.

Here's the thing: I'm teaching an intro to poetry course, and would like to use a book by a contemporary poet in addition to the anthology.  And as long as I'm thinking that, it would be good to use one by someone who's going to read in the area, because that would be great to offer students as an activity.

But.  The two people lined up for the community thing both write poetry that sounds pretty alike: yay rural life and the northwoods!  It's a romantic, uncritical approach, the sort of approach that's popular up here.  It's also all free verse all the time.  Both are good as far as what they do, it seems.  I read some poems by each this afternoon, and was uninspired.  Why can't John Donne be local and alive?  Or how about Amelia Lanyer?  Or Edna St. Vincent Millay?

I'm thinking instead of ordering a friend's book, which is really good, and thoughtful, and smart.  And my friend is still alive.  And maybe, just maybe, I could get her to skype with us?  (Off to email my friend about that!)

Wrapping Up

I gave my two finals yesterday, and by the end of the second day, I'd graded the easy "half" (essay) of each.  I still have the passages and short answer parts, but I feel suddenly totally less stressed about grading.

My goal for the essay part of exams is that students will put what they've learned over the semester together somewhat, that they'll be able to work with what they've learned in a somewhat fuller way.

To that end, I start a couple weeks out with brainstorming, and have them make a list of topics that might be good on the exam, and give them the parameters (works from across the term, theory/critical works if an upper level course).  They take that list, and then do some work (either individually or in groups, or both) to try crafting some essay questions.  Then I take their essay question and work them into a list of questions, shaping them a bit. 

At that point, I bring those questions back to the class and they narrow the choices.  Then, if need be, I narrow the choices, until I have five, which I work into real essay questions, so that I think each of them could be used to write a really good exam essay.

And then, about a week before the exam, I take those to the students, and they choose the final three.  Of those three, two will appear on the final exam, and they'll write about one of them.  They can use books and notes on that part of the final.

So, they have a week to prepare to write about two of the questions, and can do whatever level of preparation they wish.  (I do warn them about the dangers of not preparing and thinking they can just look at notes or whatever during the exam.)  A lot of students do two essay outlines, and then mark things in their texts or notes to bring in.  A few write the actual essays and then copy them out during the exam.  (That seems overkill to me, but oh well.)

The thing is, they have time to spend really thinking about the essay questions, so by and large, they tend to write good exam essays, and some of them really bring things together in super ways.

In my intro course, which I blogged about re the calendar, and the initial challenge, back in May, and choosing the longer works here, students brought up race/racism, family, social class/wealth, and other good stuff in their initial brainstorming, and when I gave them the final, with a question about how the literature represented race/racism and a question about how the lit represented families, about half chose the race/racism question, and overall, everyone did a good job.  A few of them really wrote well (or else they wrote well about what they thought I wanted them to write about.  Is there a difference?).

More than one or two of the race/racism essays talked about being a white person, and not having experienced racism, and so reading about it made them think about their own experiences in different ways.

A few of the family essays were insightful and thoughtful, too.  (Most intro writing course essays were intro writing course essays.  They did the job as such, and did it just fine.)

Overall, then, I'm feeling pretty good about that course, the literature I taught, and what students learned.

My favorite piece from the semester is Kwame Alexander's "Life" (which is still under copyright, so I guess you have to go look in a library!).  I showed students pictures of termites, and talked about what it means to be a "liberal" and why that might not be enough, and what it means to use "termite" as a metaphor for white folks, and how that makes me think, and so forth.  So I felt a bit vulnerable teaching it, but it made me think and rethink!

***

I taught Timon of Athens in the Green Shakespeare course (and it worked pretty well, and I liked it a whole lot more on rereading than I had before).  As I'd blogged about here, Timon was the last play I hadn't yet taught.  And now I've taught it, so I've finally achieved one of my weird goals from when I first started teaching.

All in all, a challenging semester with lots of new stuff to teach, and all in all, I think a good semester.  Next semester, new challenges!  But for now, a massage and then some more grading.

Sherman Alexie on the Best American Poetry of 2015

I ran across an interesting article (Thanks to Mike the Mad Biologist's link list) by Sherman Alexie.  I think it struck me especially strongly because of my Intro to Lit project this semester.  But, at any rate, it's worth reading, and I'm guessing Alexie's edition of the best poetry will be compelling and interesting!

Here's a link to Alexie's essay.

And here's an article in the Washington Post about the poet Alexie's talking about.

Thank Dog for Poetry

We're into the second week of classes now.  My ecocriticism/Shakespeare class was rough today because most of the students didn't have context to read the article well, and didn't bother to look up the stuff mentioned to get that context.  What happened in 1789, and why might that be important?

Yeah.  (It's going to get us to Shakespeare, really, but they need to get there with some work.)

My writing class was better, but still tiring.

And then there was Intro to Lit, where we talked about Cullen's "Yet Do I Marvel" and it was so, so very good.  First, it's a stellar poem, just great for discussion.  And second, the students were ready to discuss it.  Thank dog!

Now to grade some small stuff and prep for tomorrow.

The Verse Moment

I was teaching "The Clerk's Tale" the other day, and wanted to talk a bit about how the rhyme royal stanza works as a stanza.  And then I realized that my mostly English major students have no idea how to talk about verse as verse; they have no idea because we aren't teaching them in our lit courses.

So, I tried on the fly, and I don't think I did terribly well.  (I used "Adam Scriveyn" to try, and I should have gone with something different, probably.  But there it is.)  We did get to talking about how meter feels in the mouth, how repetitions work in the mouth and ears, and so forth, and a little to how the stanza builds.  Let's just face it: it wasn't my best teaching moment.

So the question of the day:  where/how do your English majors learn to read verse as verse, if they do?

And how do you teach students to read verse as verse, if you do?

What strategies do you use?  What examples?

Which Poem?

A special poem!

Happy last day of classes, folks. (And if you're already done, shush! And if you're not, my condolences.)

Edit: Here's Billy Collins reading "The Lanyard"

Poetry, Please!

There's a poetry reading thing, not of our own poetry, but of bits of famous or other poetry, and I've been asked to read some Middle English poetry. We are asked to read up to maybe 40 lines. (Shorter is better!)

So, I need suggestions, please!

If you were asked to read UP TO 40 lines of Middle English verse, what would you read?

***

Okay, folks, I obviously wasn't clear. I'm wondering exactly which 40 lines.

So far, I'm thinking of the description of Chaunticleer and Pertolet from the NPT, or maybe a description of spring; there's a nice one in the Parliament of Fowles. I also thought about the entry in Gawain, or part of the ax swinging part.

I enjoy the sexy stuff plenty, but I don't want to read some leering, sexist stuff as most people's sole experience with Middle English literature. Nor, to be honest, do I have a lot of interest in reading something overtly Christian in a way that sounds pious. (I did consider a bit of the annunciation stuff from the N-Town plays, because it blows me away that the fate of the world waits on Mary.) Nor, do I have time to contextualize a fart joke about Christianity.

I know that limits things.

I know this reveals the depths of my fakery about medieval stuff, but I don't actually own an ME edition of Piers Plowman. And I also must admit that I never really got into it.

I'm also not sure I can pull off Gawain well, since what poor ME I do have tends to have been learned via Chaucer stuff. So I don't think I get the dialect at all, really. And I don't want to make more of a fool of myself than necessary in front of colleagues (the regular folks might not know the difference, but a few colleagues will).

Great Moments in Literary History, #1

Guess what poem I taught today...

Double points if you can name the poem I taught with it!

Another Poem Quiz

Here goes: What poem am I teaching today?

Explications

Since Sisyphus was kind enough to ask, here's the handout I give when I start teaching explications. (And I can always use help making this better, please!)

An explication is an unfolding of a passage, a thesis-driven essay that makes an argument about how a passage works by focusing on aspects such as diction, form, metaphor, imagery, and so forth. While an explication may include a short paraphrase of the passage, the main focus is on how the passage makes its meaning, rather than what it means.


How to write an explication:

Explications are HARD to write well, but are great at developing skills in really careful, attentive reading. They do take a good deal of work, though, so give yourself time, and don’t plan on doing them at one sitting.

Here are the steps I use (and I use explication when I work on understanding a text to teach it or write about it). I do freewriting and draw in my pre-writing brainstorming because it’s important to me to have notes to work from when I start writing the essay or working on class/essay notes.

1) Read the passage. Look up words. Figure out what the passage means at a basic level.

2) Look up more words. Think about what alternatives or other words might have been used. Think about the connotations of different words and how you react to them.

3) Read the passage aloud (more than once or twice), and think about how it feels in your mouth and how it sounds. In the case of verse, you want to think about enjambment and end-stopping, rhyme and how strong it is, rhythm, aspects such as alliteration, and so forth. Are there places where the verse makes you slow down? Why? What’s the effect? Conversely, are there places where you speed up? There's no singel answer for what a technique such as alliteration "does." On the most basic level, these things make you pay closer attention, draw words together in your mind, and so forth.

4) Draw or work out imagery in some way. This is especially important for literature that describes art (ekphrasis) because there’s often a sense that talking about how graphic art works also gives us a sense of how textual art works. That is, literature about art is often also literature about literature.

5) What do you think the passage is doing? How is it doing that? Is it effective? Ineffective?

Okay, now you have your working thesis (how the passage is doing what it’s doing). Outline or rough out your argument, quoting from the passage when it helps you make your point. Develop your point with examples. You may need to reference other works (the OED, or a work on poetic techniques, if you want to talk about how metaphor works or something).

Once you’ve got your draft written, think of a title that has something to do with your argument. Don’t use “Explication” because it doesn’t help your reader get a sense of your argument.

Final notes: You probably don’t need to talk about the verse being iambic pentameter unless there’s a moment that makes that interesting. Just noting that in and of itself isn’t that useful, mostly.