Reading Poetry with College and University Students: Overcoming Barriers and Deepening Engagement

by Thomas Fink

Overview

Reading Poetry with College and University Students aims to help faculty foster students' intellectual and aesthetic engagement with poems while enabling them to sharpen critical and creative thinking skills. Reading authors across history and the globe--such as Julia Alvarez, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Mahmoud Darwish, John Donne, Paolo Javier, Yusef Komunyakaa, Audre Lorde, and Wislawa Szymborska--Thomas Fink zeroes in on how learners can surmount and even enjoy tackling the most difficult aspects of poetry.

By exploring students' emotional identification with speakers and characters of poems as well as poets themselves, Fink shows how an instructor can motivate students to produce effective and empathic interpretations. Through divergent readings of selected poems, the book addresses the influence of various theoretical paradigms, ranging from ecological, psychological, feminist, and queer theory to deconstructive, postcolonial, and surface reading orientations. Instructors receive practical guidance through these poems, poets, and modes of reading, helping to give learners raw material to reach their own nuanced interpretations and strengthen their emotional, aesthetic, and intellectual acumen.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501389474
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	09/22/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	168
File size:	805 KB

About the Author

Thomas Fink is Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College-City University of New York, USA, and author of 11 books of poetry. His scholarly publications include "A Different Sense of Power": Problems of Community in Late Twentieth-Century U.S. Poetry (2001) and Reading the Difficulties: Dialogues with Contemporary American Innovative Poetry (2014; co-editor with Judith Halden-Sullivan).
Thomas Fink is Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College-City University of New York, USA, and author of eleven books of poetry. His scholarly publications include "A Different Sense of Power": Problems of Community in Late Twentieth-Century U.S. Poetry (2001) and Reading the Difficulties: Dialogues with Contemporary American Innovative Poetry (2014).

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Barriers to Access and Engagement
2. Emotional Enticements and Aversions
3. Crossroads of Interpretation
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Works Cited
Index

Editorial Reviews

A wonderful introduction for those that teach as well as study poetry. Fink thoughtfully guides the reader through poetry-phobia by working through the ostensible emotional complexity and intellectual difficulty of a form with which many readers struggle. In a series of accessible and enjoyable chapters, Fink never oversells the pleasures of poetry and instead foregrounds dynamic techniques for fostering discussion in the seminar setting. Alongside clear reviews of current theoretical interpretive approaches and vibrant definitions of key literary terms, Fink engages an extensive body of poets from Shakespeare and George Herbert, to Amiri Baraka and Audre Lorde, Denise Duhamel and Evie Shockley. Essential reading for all teachers of poetry.” —Emma Mason, Professor and Head of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, UK

“With great erudition and a wealth of encyclopedic knowledge, expert teacher, critic, and poet Thomas Fink takes us on an inspired tour of the reasoning behind theories of reading (and resistances to reading) which come up when we engage with poems in the classroom. This extremely useful handbook combines pragmatic examples of how to apply the theories with a refreshing candor about potential obstacles and aporias which we don't often get to hear about in pedagogical narratives.” —Trace Peterson, Editor/Publisher, EOAGH, USA.

“In this lucid, sharply focused, authoritative analysis of why so many college and university students come to poetry with 'poetry phobia,' Thomas Fink has created an indispensable guide to overcoming the barriers that stand between students' understanding, appreciation, and-perhaps ultimately-love of the genre in all its clashing interpretations and various paradoxical and mutable forms.” —Mary Mackey, Professor Emerita of English and Writer-in-Residence, California State University, USA and author of The Tigers That Prowl Our Dreams

From the Publisher