Introducing Poetry

Question: How introduce the nature of poetry?

Answer/Quote: “Since most college students arrive with rather staid concepts of poetry, an instructor may need to challenge their assumption, leading them to question what they expect in poetry and to understand how poets must decide to work either with or without fixed forms.”

Quote: “In the first class discussion dealing with poetry, my students and I compare and contrast two poems which exemplify that some poems have form and others seemingly do not. I assign Robert Frost’s ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ and Jim Hall’s remarkable ‘Maybe Dats Your Pwoblem Too’ (from The Mating Reflex, Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1980. I ask one simple question about each, ‘What makes this a poem?” and then one about both, ‘What do these poems share that makes them poems?’ “ p. 661.

Comment: Sounds like a good way to introduce poetry. RayS.

Title: “ ‘What Makes This a Poem?’: The First Day of Poetry.” TJ Viator. Journal of Reading (May 1991), 661-662.