In the summer of 1999 Joan Retallack organized a conference at Bard College
on the topic “Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary.” I
was unable to attend the conference but promised I would contribute an
essay to the volume based on it, to be edited by Retallack and Juliana Spahr.
The prospective contributors were sent a list of questions revolving around
the central issue: how does teaching the new experimental poetries differ
from teaching the poetry of “the familiar canon”? Since the conference
included workshops for high school teachers, this question was evidently
designed to elicit specific strategies that might be replicated. But to my mind,
the more important questions were ones that hadn’t been posed: how does
one tell a good “experimental” poem from a bad one? And what is an experi-
mental poem anyway? In the essay that follows, first published in the Buffalo
journal Kiosk in 2002, I take a stab at these questions.
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Teaching the “New” Poetries
The Case of Rae Armantrout
How does the avant-garde poetry being written today play out in the con-
temporary college classroom? Having taught courses in “Modern Poetry”
since 1965, when I began my teaching career at the Catholic University of
America, let me begin by saying that, paradoxically, the poems of, say, Bruce
Andrews or Harryette Mullen are at one level more accessible to students
than are those of W. B. Yeats or Ezra Pound. For however scrambled a new
“experimental” poem may be—however nonsyntactic, nonlinear, or linguis-
tically complex—it is, after all, written in the language of the present, which
is to say the language of the students who are reading it. On the other hand—
and here’s the rub—since the contemporary undergraduate is likely to have
almost no familiarity with poetry, beyond the obligatory Robert Frost poem
that may or may not have been taught in high school, the class will have a
lot of catching up to do. Indeed, the notion of teaching “beyond the familiar
canon” that I have been asked to discuss here is something of a mystery to
me, because there is no longer a canon beyond which to go! At Stanford Uni-
versity, where I now teach, we have English PhD candidates who have never
read Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” much less Milton’s “Lycidas.” And when