eMedia & Ancillaries
The free DVD included with the book features a video introduction by Robert Pinsky and 27 of the acclaimed Favorite Poem Project segments as seen on PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.
www.favoritepoem.org
www.favoritepoem.org, an award-winning website, features an interactive gallery for viewing the Favorite Poem videos, advice on events, and the opportunity to contribute to the Favorite Poem database, a valuable cultural record and resource.
The Classroom Guide for Instructors
The Classroom Guide for Instructors, by Robert Pinsky, Maggie Dietz, Todd Hearon, and Jill McDonough, provides practical guidance—teaching strategies, activities, and assignments—for 65 poems, as well as general lessons for instructors on using the DVD and, among other topics, reading poems aloud and talking about poems. The Classroom Guide draws on materials from the Favorite Poem Project Summer Institutes for educators, hosted by Boston University.
Sample from the Classroom Guide for Instructors
Talking About Poetry
This lesson, with the goal of establishing a common vocabulary for the discussion of poetry in class, should help make students more at ease talking about poems, and will familiarize them with fundamental elements of the poetic tradition. It doesn’t mean to encourage students to be pretentious or verbose, or to set up an expectation that class discussion be rigid or artificial; it means simply to review or introduce the terms for some of the tools poets use.
One aspect of poetry is that it is an art of naming; also, an art of precision: it seeks to utter the very essence of an experience or feeling or moment, and to get it exactly right. The poet’s impulse is connected to the human desire to know what a thing is called.
One of the pleasures of acquiring language is the way a thing can be illuminated by its name. We like to know that clouds are “cumulus,” that the device for recording an earthquake is a “seismograph,” that the thing on top of that building is a “cupola.” Part of this pleasure is in discovering words with interesting sounds or textures, but, almost paradoxically, another part is in satisfying an appetite for simplicity or economy; knowing the difference between a chickadee and a titmouse, for example, means not having to say: “No, not the round little bird with the black cap and white cheeks, but the gray-feathered bird with a black beak and crest.”
A patient doesn’t need to know he suffers from “arteriosclerosis” if he’s having chest pain—the pain can be expressed without that word (or any, for that matter); but a diagnosis will allow the patient to communicate more effectively with doctors in the future.
The directness and clarity a specialized vocabulary supplies can also enhance appreciation; this is true for the mechanic, the sports fan, the gardener, and the student of poetry. But jargon is as jargon does, and a label only goes so far. Identifying a “head gasket” is not the same as fixing one; knowing the word for “chickweed” won’t do you much good unless you also yank it out of the ground. And words like “polysyndeton” and “litotes” on their own will not do much for a poem.
Nonetheless, a term or label can be a place to begin. And precise language can help students articulate more clearly how a poem is working and what it’s doing; this will lead, of course, to more penetrating reading and richer discussion.
The plan for the lesson is simple: the teacher will assign each student a poetic term to teach to the rest of the class. The lesson may be more effective, the terms more memorable, if in each class just a few students present their assigned terms.
Students should be encouraged to explain the terms in their own words. So, where the Oxford English Dictionary defines onomatopoeia: “The formation of a word from a sound associated with the thing or action being named,” a student might tell the class that “it sounds like what it says,” and then illustrate the definition with two or three examples from poems in An Invitation to Poetry. (This will also get students reading around in the text.)
The list below is by no means exhaustive, and some teachers will want to add to it or emphasize certain elements in assigning terms to students. What we’ve done here is gather some of the specific things that come up in Section Two of this guide.
- abstract/concrete
- alliteration
- allusion
- anaphora
- anecdote
- aphorism
- assonance
- blank verse
- cadence
- consance
- elegy
- end-rhyme
- evocation/exposition
- diction
- dramatic poetry
- figurative language
- free verse
- homonym
- idiom
- image
- internal rhyme
- line breaks
- end-stopped lines
- enjambed lines
- lyric poetry
- metaphor
- meter
- mood
- narrative poetry
- ode
- off-rhyme
- onomatopoeia
- repetition
- rhyme scheme
- sensory detail
- setting
- sibilance
- simile
- sonnet
- stanza (different stanza forms)
- syntax
- tone
Copyright © 2005, W. W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved.
XHTML, CSS, 508