Teaching Poetry Quotes

I teach a lecture course on American poetry to as many as 150 students. For a lot of them, it's their only elective, so this is their one shot. They'll take the Russian Novel or American Poetry, so I want to give them the high points, the inescapable poets.

Poetry is as vital as ever. The teaching of poetry reading, however, is sluggish and, often, slovenly. It needs to be expanded in the school curriculum and be more a feature of society at large. The newspapers should all be carrying a daily poem. It should be as natural as reading a novel.

The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic.

I would not recommend poetry as a career. In the first place, it's impossible in this time and place - in this culture - to make poetry a career. The writing of poetry is one thing. It's an obsession, the scratching of a divine itch, and has nothing to do with money. You can, however, make a career out of being a poet by teaching, traveling around, and giving lectures. It's a thin living at best.

And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.

People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover.

Well you can't teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.

Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early.

When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can't teach poetry. This is ridiculous.

Poetry is the most mistaught subject in any school because we teach poetry by form and not by content.

I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.

Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.

I thought it was irrelevant to talk about what a wonderful thing poetry was if you didn't teach people to read.