From an interview of famous/influential/important American poet Adrienne Rich:

Q: Why do people say, “I just don’t get it. I don’t understand poetry”?

Rich: It’s something people say in reaction to feeling, “I don’t know much about it. I haven’t been exposed to a lot of it.” It may also be a defense against what Muriel Rukeyser calls “the fear of poetry” – which she calls a disease of our schools.

From an article by a high school teacher:

Just the mention of poetry to my sophomores brings about various comments: “Poetry sucks!,” “I don’t understand poetry.,” “Do we hafta?,” and other negative comments. Many students, however, don’t acknowledge the fact that their music is poetic in nature, or that poetry is abundant in the world around them, and that aspects of poetry are present in the literature they read.

A post I’m reprinting in its entirety so you don’t even have to click to “I Don’t Understand Poetry” by author Kathryn Good-Schiff:

I’ve been thinking about people who say they don’t understand poetry. That’s like saying you don’t understand music. It’s such a diverse genre, there is no one definition for it, and besides, you don’t have to understand it in order to have an experience. The mystery itself is something to love, and in living the questions, surprises can occur.

I want to tell people, when you’re reading a poem and you come across something you don’t “get,” stay with that feeling and see what it tells you about your experience of the poem. Don’t interpret obscurity as a “Do not enter sign,” but rather as an invitation to let go of control and step into something larger than you.

Poetry makes sense the way dreams and symbols make sense… or don’t. The willing suspension of disbelief is essential. Be aware that you are entering a fun house and expect to be disoriented. After a while, you will see that the poem makes its own sense.

Poems don’t require the same kind of linear reading as novels or stories that have plot. To read a poem, you must first soften—not sharpen—your mind. Reading a poem is less like waking and more like falling asleep.

When I questioned him further, the man who recently told me he can’t understand poetry revised his statement. “Actually, what I mean is, there are certain poems that I love, but I don’t know how to critique them intelligently.” Start with a poem you love. Love will teach you more than any book or lecture. Love is more enjoyable, more sensual, more essential. If you follow your love of the poem into its depths, you will begin to “understand” in a way that you can apply to other poems.

A poem is not a locked box waiting for you to pry off its lid. It’s a city where you can learn the language if you stick around long enough.

I’m not even asking you to delve into formal criticism, because I’m not teaching you those elements (see the first paragraph of this post. The upshot of this is that if your response to poetry is to shut down and complain, it would be akin to refuse to count past 20 because you’re out of fingers and toes. Your choice, but if you’re an English major and you do this, you’re trading ethos for petulance. Don’t be That Person.

The Giaour will be on the mid-term.

That is all.

Today’s class began with two fact sheets (Wordsworth and Blake) and then launched into as much poetry as we could stuff in the remaining minutes. In this class, like I said, I’m not so much concerned with meter and rhyme and memorization of same, except in the instances in which meter and rhyme (or lack thereof) are so incredibly important that they must be discussed above all else. That is not to say these things aren’t important. But in a survey course of this nature, the detour into the mechanics of poetry isn’t a detour I want to make room for taking. But if you are interested in the formal aspects of poetry, I recommend Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook, which you can pick up for $10 or so or read most of via Google Books.

As for the glimpse into Romanticism, remember these general aspects (you’ll also find this on the blog assignment for this week: against Neoclassicism; against scientific rationalization of nature; “literature depicting emotional matter in an imaginative form”; focus on: imagination, emotion, individualism, spontaneity, freedom, the solitary life, imagination superior to reason; devotion to beauty, worship of nature, fascination with the past (myths and mysticism); emotion as authentic source of the aesthetic experience; horror, terror, awe when experiencing the sublimity of nature; Wordworth’s famous “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility” line.

Yes, the blog assignment for this week is available now; remember to comment on blogs in your group. If your name is not on the blogroll on this site, I don’t have the URL to your blog, haven’t read any posts, nor have your classmates. Some of you also seemed confused when I said that I’ve commented on everything that I’ve read—it’s true, unless the post was very late. In those cases, I read and evaluate but don’t comment. I comment as “JM” in case that is also confusing.

Thursday: a few short poems and a really long one, plus three fact sheets.

Good job everyone who was in class for making it to the new room: WST 231. I hope that those of you who weren’t in class didn’t think we abandoned you—I wrote a note on the board. But yes, from yesterday onward, we’ll be in 231. It’s the room that’s like 7 steps from the old classroom, next to the room with the computers.

Now that’s out of the way, good job on the Edgar Huntly talk. I thought you all did swell, and look forward to reading your blog posts and comments that are due tonight.

VERY excited about Tuesday, in which we will begin our week-long discussion of British Romanticism. We will have two fact sheet presentations: one by Misty on Wordsworth, and one by Tanner on Blake.

NOTE that for Thursday you have to read more poems, including Byron’s The Giaour. However, The Giaour is 1334 lines long. It’s not some little 8 line Blake ditty. Plan accordingly!

First, I scored the good classroom, so from now on we can meet in TWST 231. Hooray for whiteboards!

Next, I’m just going to jump right in to talking about the Fact Sheet assignment, using Heather’s as a starting point.

With regards to biography, you’ll want to bring in a decent set of bullet points that help us gain context for the author’s life and work. Spend some time on those in your talk—enough so that we have a clear picture of who we’re talking about. Heather did a good job of putting information on the sheet, and spent more time talking about the common threads between novels than on CBB himself. That’s ok, but in some instances the actual biography of the author in questions will be more important. Try to strike a balance.

The Fact Sheet assignment says that the purpose is to develop connections and associations that the text prompts for you, and to identify a concrete example and work with it. What Heather did was to highlight several elements related to terror or mystery, and talk through them. That’s ok, because there were a bunch, and also because we haven’t finished the novel. What you might find works best in most works is to identify a passage, and work entirely with it, identifying stylistic or symbolic or other meaningful or related elements. Also, when you’re up there, remember that you’re the expert: present it to us as the Truth, the end. Now, that Truth may be debated after your presentation, but when you’re up there, the floor is yours.

The next Fact Sheet presentation will be on Tuesday, 01/26. Misty will present on Wordsworth, and can choose to focus on his poems “London, 1802″ or “Tintern Abbey” (or both).

ALSO, I’ve posted the blog assignment due this Friday.

First, some administrative things: I have URLs for all but 2 of your blogs. Those 2 of you who haven’t sent me a URL, please do so. It is likely you know who you are, but if not, just check the sidebar of this blog. If your name does not appear, then I have not received your blog URL. The first full-points blog response is due today (Friday); here’s the assignment if you’ve lost your wee slip of paper.

Become familiar with the folks in your blogging group, as commenting on group members’ blog posts will be part of the assignments starting with the second one. But just because it’s not part of the assignment now doesn’t mean you can’t comment—there’s a lot of interesting stuff out there already, including lots of good responses to the first assignment.

Thursday’s class wasn’t exactly like how class will always go, because there was more talking by me than there usually will be. The vast majority of the class will be discussion about elements of the text, and is likely to be generative rather than firmly structured. On Tuesday we’ll start with Heather’s fact sheet on Charles Brockden Brown, then proceed to discuss the first 15 chapters of the novel. I’ll fill in more about Brown, the American Gothic, and historical details if necessary, as we discuss the text.

One other note: a student from my class last semester, Stephanie A. (whom many of you know), is on the fence about dropping her anthropology class and joining ours. I think that’s a spectacular idea. Drop by her blog post on the subject and leave a comment in support of her course change!

And now one final note: Tanner very rightly and intelligently asked, “So, what’s up with leaving Edgar Allan Poe off the syllabus, you idiot?” Ok, so I embellished the quote a little bit. Rest assured that Poe has a place in the class, but I have not put him on the syllabus specifically.

Today was a very exciting first day, in which we went over the syllabus and the first week’s assignments. The major thing to do is to get your blog up and running. Free accounts at Blogger.com or WordPress.com are the way to go. Both are quite simple, although I believe Blogger to be a bit more simple and non-overwhelming than WordPress for the first-time blogger.

After setting up your blog, be sure to send me the URL and write your first (introductory) post. There is a “real” blog assignment due Friday, based in some part on the reading for Thursday but mostly on the content found in the assignment prompt itself with regard to the different between terror and horror.

I said I would link to examples of “4 point” (highest possible grade for content) blog posts. These are in no particular order—they are all super. Also, you could look at any of the blog posts on these blogs and consider them to be 3 or 4 point posts.

• example 1
• example 2
• example 3
• example 4
• example 5

I added the Fact Sheets to the online schedule—in other words, you can see who will be doing a Fact Sheet on a particular day. Debra and Nick still have to sign up for two slots each, out of the remaining five: Jan 26 (Barbauld), Jan 26 (Coleridge), Jan 28 (Shelley), Jan 28 (Keats), Feb 25 (Muir). First come, first served, but remember you can’t do two on the same day. [Strike that: just Nick now. Still open: Barbauld, Coleridge, Shelley.]

Hello everyone! Throughout the course, I will be using this blog to write up some of my own comments after class, and to make comments in general about things I see you talking about on your blogs.

In the column on the right you will soon find a list of all of the blogs in the class, randomly placed into groups. I picked the names of the groups from some of the authors in the nineteenth century who didn’t make the cut—not because they aren’t great, but because the nineteenth century is chock full of stuff and so is the syllabus. Yes, I did that on purpose.