The 2019 TCNJ Summer Institute for English Language Arts Educators- Day 2

In this workshop, we’ll dive headlong into what we often, as educators, avoid: the dreaded moment, teaching a difficult or opaque poem, when a student says, yes, that’s all very well but what does it mean? and we don’t know the answer. Contemporary poetry embraces and sometimes courts indeterminacy. Let’s find a way to teach so-called “difficult” poems, to plunge into the unknown alongside our students.  Poems use techniques such as paradox, fragmentation, simultaneity, dissonance, sudden jumps in place and time, interruption, fractured or multiple voices and languages on the page, collage, erasure, and chance.  These techniques, tried and true methods in 20^thand 21^stcentury poetry, can frustrate the most careful and well prepared reader–often, they are intended to do so.  Together, we’ll look at some of the purposes these techniques can serve in fostering close-reading skills and engaged discussion in the classroom, we’ll challenge ourselves to dive into unfamiliar territory as readers and thinkers, and we’ll grapple with poems. We’ll practice together – approaching and starting over, looking for ways in, getting stuck and unstuck, and we will also try out a few creative reading exercises for the classroom. We’ll read exclusively contemporary poems for this workshop, including poems “hot off the press” featured in The New Yorker and Poetry Magazine, poems by John Ashbery, Layli Long Soldier, M. NourbeSe Philip, Hoa Nguyen, Solmaz Sharif, Laynie Brown, Terrance Hayes, Danez Smith, and others TBD.