Logan Esdale

Bio

Logan Esdale has edited a workshop edition of Gertrude Stein’s Ida A Novel (Yale UP, 2012) and is currently co-editing, with Deborah Mix, Approaches to Teaching the Works of Gertrude Stein (MLA, 2016). He has published articles on the letters of Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore, and an article on the reception of Walt Whitman’s 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass is in Whitman Among the Bohemians (University of Iowa, 2014). He teaches creative writing, poetry and American literature at Chapman University.

Contributions

Unoriginal Genius: Student Poems Made from Tender Buttons

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In teaching Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914) to undergraduates in a course on modern poetry, I have asked them to think about these prose poems through the act of making a poem in response. While this is a literature and not a creative-writing course, the strategy of assigning a creative-writing exercise is effective in Stein’s case because through making a poem the students prove to themselves that what might at first appear nonsensical can be, if one reads—and then writes—word by word, startlingly lucid.

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poetry pedagogy