Teaching Series: Case Study 1
It strikes me as odd that I’ve not talked about teaching yet. I do not think of teaching as the thing that interrupts my writing. Instead, I understand it as a practical arm of the research, a way to bring my thoughts to a small audience. In the next few weeks, I’ll write about how I blend my teaching with my writing.
So far, I’ve written about the structural aspects of teaching including the larger institutional frameworks and the syllabus. I’d like to offer you two case studies for how I am thinking about my syllabi and my writing next semester. First up: Black Poetry.
Next term, I plan to teach Black Poetry. I love teaching this class and I am excited to offer it again, especially after absorbing the energy of Furious Flower in September.
There are a few changes I am not making. I am keeping the course description as it is in the catalogue. I have no need to come up with a new way of describing the course. The description lists some broad questions about how to read and understand Black poetry. The objectives correspond to the modest aim of the questions: How do we read and understand Black poetry? I will not shift those from the last time I taught the course. Students will learn how to describe formal and political concerns, distinguish between and deploy various reading strategies, explain their interpretation of poems, debate the merits of an interpretation, and analyze poetry collections as whole projects. Those aims cover the whole of the class.
I will change what I teach based on what I want to read. I have not decided whether I want to teach my own poetry collection. It seems a useful way to talk about how I made decisions as a poet, but it may also be understood as manipulative and self-serving. I am not sure yet. I will keep the Black Girl Magic collection because it allows me to read a variety of voices and get students thinking about different forms for similar content. For my own writing, it grants me the opportunity to create prompts for myself. My writing goals include creating new work and experimenting with form, so I have poet laureate of Chicago avery r. young on the syllabus. We’ll read neck | bone. My other writing goal is understand how a second collection differs from a first, so I have a second collection on the syllabus: Charif Shanahan’s Trace Evidence. I am curious about persona poems, so I’ll teach Patricia Smith’s Unshuttered. There are a few other writing questions I have: the interplay of music and poetry (maybe AB Spellman’s album goes on there?), experimentation with multiple forms (Joshua Bennet’s The Study of Human Life and Bettina Judd’s Feelin’), and institution building (the newest Furious Flower collection).
Given the grading contract, I provide optional readings for them. Thus far, I have stuck to secondary critical sources: scholarship on poetry and poetics from Evie Shockley (whose poetry I’ve also taught), Meta Duewa Jones, Herman Beavers, and Rowan Ricardo Phillips. This term, I plan to assign craft essays, and podcast episodes, so that folks can hear what Black poets have to say about themselves. I’ll mention that Furious Flower’s YouTube channel is a great wealth of information on this. Again, as I am gearing up for a tour for my own collection, I want to have an excuse to look at what my peers are saying and doing and writing.
Unfortunately, I do not have the energy or the resources to create creative assignments. I am sticking the tried and true: presentations and long papers. I am curious about how they speak and write about poems: how they can be precise and generous, how they connect the small details of the poem to the whole and to the collection or to the tradition. To prepare them for this, I have to model it myself. So, that way, I get practice in being precise and making clear connections.
Every week, the syllabus holds something for me. Stay tuned for next week when I provide another case study!