|
recent thought / activity
See the full list at LibraryThing
audio
|
As I've mentioned here before, I'm teaching an Intro to Lit course this semester. This is the first time I've taught Intro to Lit, and it's been an interesting experience so far. The really interesting thing (for me) has been that this course marks the first time I've attempted to teach poetry. I read a decent amount of poetry, and I have a rudimentary set of thoughts about what makes a poem "good," but I've never before been faced with the need to formalize those opinions into something that can be understood by a room full of teenagers.
As a result, I've spent the new year reading poetry, almost exclusively—when I've been reading prose, it's mainly been prose written by poets. A particularly exhilirating read has been Charles Olson's Collected Prose, especially the volume Human Universe, which is written in a urgent visionary style that recalls some of Philip K. Dick's loopier nonfiction writings—Olson, like Dick, has the ability to compel me into believing (temporarily) that everything in the entire modern world is crucially predicated on some ancient secret that is both utterly esoteric yet somehow in plain sight all the time.
I haven't yet managed to tackle the first volume in the book, a long exegesis of American incantation Moby Dick, but what I've read so far has been a lot of fun.
I want to write something about William Carlos Williams here, but that's going to have to wait for another time. Labels: poetry_commentary
Thursday, February 12, 2004
| |||||||||||
|