Blog/Counterblog: The Arrangement of Intro. Poetry

A word of introduction before I dive into the substance: This next semester I'll be teaching an introduction to poetry class, as will my colleague at OSU, Trey Conatser. Trey and I will both conclude our classes with Scalar projects. But between a common beginning and a common end, our classes will diverge a great deal. Trey has graciously agreed to write a few words on this blog about our different visions for intro. poetry. For our first blog/counterblog, we've agreed to discuss the (historical, thematic, pedagogical)  arrangement of our classes.

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My class is designed to have a two-part structure. In the first part, I introduce my students to one (canonical) tradition of English poetry; in the second, I ask my students to respond critically to that poetic tradition.

1.     The first part covers what I call the "Miltonic" tradition from the classical epics through the Renaissance, into the Romantic period and ending with Eliot. And because my students won't read Latin or Greek, I'm introducing them to the classics through Christopher Logue's War Music (above), which should provide an accessible entry, raises questions of translation, and also connect the beginning (classics) with the end (modernism) of the first part.

2.     The second part covers whatever the students find is lacking or distorted in the Miltonic tradition. Here, I will encourage students to research and present upon poets who have been underrepresented in the first part due to their

• gender, 
• race, 
• sexuality, 
• class, 
• religion, or even their 
• poetic mode. 

Students might research hip-hop, or South African opera, or Maori polemic, and make an argument about why its tradition should be considered alongside the Miltonic tradition.

The key difference that I see between Trey's arrangement and mine is that my class will emphasize narrative history as an organizing principle of comparison and contrast. For starters, there's a bunch of facts to know about poetry; narratives help students organize them. And students don't only approach poetry for knowledge, but also for affect and for ethics. I value those affective and ethical engagements, because I think that's where the important differences lie. I think values undergird the detached analytical claims of literary interpretation. Therefore, I'll present students with an organizing narrative so that they can accept, reject, or amend the Miltonic tradition.

In that spirit, I'd like to pose some topics for Trey to consider in his counter-post on "arrangement." Trey, what's the organizing principle of your arrangement? How does your arrangement direct students to engage with the texts? And how does your arrangement anticipate students' responses?