poetry | Modernism Modernity

Teaching Modern Poetry

March 1, 2016 By: Emily Setina

Introducing a collection of pedagogy essays in 2008, Helen Sword noted an ironic discrepancy. As teachers of modernism, we spend much of our professional lives engaged in a common and challenging pursuit: guiding students through notoriously difficult texts. Nevertheless, teaching is often what we don’t talk about when we come together to talk about modernism. Listen for mention of the classroom in conference talks or read for it in the pages of literary journals, and you might conclude, with Sword, that the subject is nearly “taboo."

Cannibalizing Modern Poetry in the Americas

March 2, 2016 By: Rachel Galvin

Brazilian Modernist Oswald De Andrade adapts a line from Shakespeare, “Tupi or not Tupi, that is the question,” in his 1928 “Cannibalist Manifesto.” [1] The rest of the manifesto is in Brazilian Portuguese. Is this recycling of Shakespeare part of the search for cultural identity—a sign of the fraught relationship of the indigenous to the nation—or is it just wordplay? I asked this question in my seminar “Law of the Cannibal: Trans-American Poetics” to launch a discussion about poetic origin...

A Poem and the Times: Teaching “Justice Denied in Massachusetts” in Context

March 2, 2016 By: John Timberman Newcomb

In modern poetry courses and American literature surveys, I’ve often used Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Justice Denied in Massachusetts” (1927) to begin a unit on protest poetry focused mostly on the 1930s. [1] Among my central goals in such courses are to explore the richly varied forms of social engagement found in modern American verse, and to establish that every poem has some degree of sociopolitical resonance. Thus I try to avoid segregating protest poems as if they belonged to a different...

Isn’t the Pedagogical Always Avant-Garde?

March 2, 2016 By: Jessica Lewis Luck

Isn’t the avant-garde always pedagogical, she said, I mean altruistically bugbearish —Lyn Hejinian, My Life [1] I’d like to begin this essay with an experimental “deformance” of a literary text, reversing Lyn Hejinian’s terms in the epigraph above to ask “Isn’t the pedagogical always avant-garde?” By posing this question, I certainly don’t mean to imply that all pedagogy is inherently innovative. I agree with Joan Retallack and Juliana Spahr who find that “[c]ontemporary literary pedagogy is...

Unoriginal Genius: Student Poems Made from Tender Buttons

March 2, 2016 By: Logan Esdale

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.

Modernism by Craft: Poetry and Poetics in the Long Twentieth Century

March 2, 2016 By: Erica McAlpine

Let me start with a debatable, if not terribly new, proposition: that we should conceive of and teach modern poetry as a set of texts with origins in the 1850s and aftershocks in the poems of the present day. I advocate inclusivity because I find it difficult to separate poets considered canonically “modern” from earlier or later poets whose breaks with tradition and formal innovations, whose newness and strangeness in their own time, give them as sure a claim to the ideals of modernism as many...

Thinking Outside the Box of Modernist Time

March 2, 2016 By: Patrick Redding

When I started my current position in the fall of 2010, I inherited an upper-level course with a simple title: “American Poetry.” The course description noted that the seminar would “trace the ‘Romantic’ and ‘Modern’ sensibility from Emerson to T. S. Eliot and beyond to living poets of the Americas.” To fulfill this aim, my predecessor had started with Whitman and Dickinson, passed through Frost and Hughes, and concluded with Sharon Olds, Derek Walcott, and Yusef Komunyakaa.