Poetry & Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary

Few could deny that the contemporary is the chronic blind spot in most liberal arts curricula. Many 'twentieth century lit.' courses still don't cover much after the mid-fifties; other disciplines in the humanities don't acknowledge poetry at all as part of the study of the contemporary. The essays collected here suggestively address the possibilities, pleasures, and risks of teaching from the multiplicity of poetries that have proliferated since the sixties. They discuss how to create a lively, investigative poetry classroom and suggest ways to work with cultural implications of poetry in society. The aim is to invite students to experience and make meaning of the poetics of our contemporary world, one that is blatantly 'multi'-multi-cultural, lingual, racial, and ethnic.