Table Of ContentPoetry and Pedagogy
across the Lifespan
Disciplines, Classrooms, Contexts
Edited by Sandra Lee Kleppe
and Angela Sorby
Poetry and Pedagogy across the Lifespan
“This is a book that may well transform thinking about poetry forever. Its
authors explode the many myths and misconceptions about how one reads,
understands and utilises the affordance of poems. They demand a re-imagining
of the practice of poetry and show how poems, in all their manifestations, can
offer unique satisfactions for the many and not just the few. This is a refreshing,
exciting and much needed book that will make a difference to how poetry is
read, taught and enjoyed.”
—Professor Andrew Lambirth, Immediate Past President of the UK Literacy
Association
Sandra Lee Kleppe • Angela Sorby
Editors
Poetry and Pedagogy
across the Lifespan
Disciplines, Classrooms, Contexts
Editors
Sandra Lee Kleppe Angela Sorby
Inland Norway University of Applied Department of English
Sciences Marquette University
Hamar, Norway Milwaukee, WI, USA
ISBN 978-3-319-90432-0 ISBN 978-3-319-90433-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90433-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018954352
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful for partial research funding from Inland Norway
University of Applied Sciences, which made this project possible. Thanks
are also due to Christopher F. Roth for his indefatigable help in preparing
the manuscript. We are also grateful to the individual contributors for
their patience and hard work in bringing this anthology together.
Every effort has been made by the contributors to stay within fair use
practices when quoting the poems discussed in this volume. Where more
than a few lines of a poem are cited, we have sought and received copy-
right permissions as follows:
Moira Andrews, “November Night Countdown.” Copyright © Moira
Andrews, 1999. First published in Rhymes about the Year, edited by
John Foster (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Reprinted with
permission of the author.
Yusef Komunyakaa, excerpts from “Light on the Subject,” “Vigilante,” “I
Apologize,” “When in Rome,” and “The Thorn Merchant’s Mistress”
from Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems ©2001 by Yusef
Komunyakaa. Published by Wesleyan University Press. Used with
permission.
Solmaz Sharif, “Vulnerability Study,” from Look. Copyright © 2016 by
Solmaz Sharif. Reprinted with permission of the Permissions Company,
Inc., on behalf of Graywolf Press. www.graywolfpress.org
v
Contents
Part I Poetry Across the Disciplines and Modalities 1
1 Poetry and Accounting: “What Is It You Plan to Do with
Your One Wild and Precious Life?” 3
Richard Tobin
2 The Chemistry of Poetry: Transfer Across Disciplines 19
Angela Sorby and Tracy Thompson
3 Teaching Poetry Through Dance 37
Vivian Delchamps
4 Poetry and Pedagogy in St. Teresa of Avila (1515–1582):
Affirming Life Lessons for Women 57
Anne M. Pasero
5 Teaching Poetry with Painting: “Why Do You Thus Devise
Evil Against Her?” 73
Sandra Lee Kleppe
vii
viii Contents
6 Whatever Gets You Through the Night: Poetry and
Combat Trauma 95
Kristin G. Kelly
7 Pedagogies of Personhood: The Place of Lyric in Cultural
Criminology 117
Jesse Zuba
8 Multimodal Encounter: Two Case Studies in the Recovery
of the Black Signifier 139
Jim Cocola
Part II Poetry Pedagogies and Theories in the Classroom 163
9 Push the Envelope: An Alternative to Testing and the
Teaching of Emily Dickinson’s Manuscripts 165
Jacqueline Jean Barrios
10 “Ten Fat Sausages”: Poetic Sense Units, Vocabulary
Chunks, and Language Acquisition in Young Learners 187
Christina Sandhaug
11 Helping High School Readers Interpret Challenging Texts
Using Lenses from Literary Theory 211
Hallie Smith Richmond and April Salerno
12 The “Effanineffable” Weakness of Poetry: The Duality of
Bringing Poetry into the Teacher Training Classroom 237
Johan Alfredsson
Contents ix
13 English Poetry in the Foreign Language Classroom:
A Study of Teacher Perspectives, Purposes, and Practices 255
Juliet Munden and Torunn Skjærstad
14 Why Teach Poems About Animals? Animal Poetry Across
Disciplines and the Life Span 277
Heidi Silje Moen
15 Teaching Unlikely Poets: Herman Melville, Harriet
Beecher Stowe, and Frances E. W. Harper 303
Brian Yothers
16 Expanding the Turn: Using Poetry to Prepare Students
for a Post-Truth World 327
Conor Bracken
Index 349
Notes on Contributors
Johan Alfredsson is PhD in Comparative Literature, and Associate Professor at
the Dept. of Literature, History of Ideas and Religion, at the University of
Gothenburg. He has published books on Swedish poet Bengt Emil Johnson and
Gender Perspectives on Scandinavian Modernist Poetry, and a number of arti-
cles and book chapters on Swedish and Danish contemporary poetry (mostly in
Swedish). In English he has published on the interplay between Swedish con-
crete poetry and sound technology.
Jacqueline Jean Barrios is a PhD student at UCLA’s Department of English
studying 19C British and American Literature and London, especially represen-
tations of affect work, service and collecting. Her public humanities work con-
nects her research to her other role as a veteran public school teacher of
underrepresented youth for whom she directs LitLabs, orchestrating guest
experts from the humanities, architecture and the arts to imagine new pedagogy
for the twenty-first century South LA urban teen reader of the nineteenth cen-
tury novel.
Conor Bracken is a poet, translator, and educator. His poems have appeared in
Colorado Review, Indiana Review, The New Yorker, and elsewhere, and he has
received fellowships from Inprint, the Frost Place, Squaw Valley Community of
Writers, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences. Author of Henry Kissinger, Mon
Amour (Bull City Press, 2017) and translator of Mohammed Khair-E ddine’s
Scorpionic Sun (CSU Poetry Center, 2019), he is an assistant professor of English
at the University of Findlay.
xi
xii Notes on Contributors
Jim Cocola is associate professor and associate head for the humanities at
Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where he directs the Worcester branch of the
Bard College Clemente Course in the Humanities. Author of Places in the
Making: A Cultural Geography of American Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa
Press, 2016), his honors include awards from the American Comparative
Literature Association and fellowships from The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
Research Center and The MacDowell Colony.
Vivian Delchamps is an English PhD Student at the University of California,
Los Angeles. Her academic interests include nineteenth-century American lit-
erature, poetry, dance, disability studies, theories of the body, and bioethics. She
currently serves as the Disability Studies Advisor for the UCLA Disability Law
Journal. A ballerina and competitive ballroom dancer, Delchamps founded the
Dancesport Club at UCLA and teaches dance to students of all ages.
Kristin G. Kelly is Associate Professor of English at the University of North
Georgia; she has taught courses in English composition, American literature,
and film and literature. Her current research concerns the aftermath of the wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan, especially as reflected in the poetry and prose of combat
veterans. She has poems, essays, and reviews published or forthcoming in jour-
nals such as South Atlantic Review; Annals of Internal Medicine; War, Literature
and the Arts; The Examined Life, and several others.
Sandra Lee Kleppe is professor of English-language literature at Inland
Norway University of Applied Sciences. She is the author of The Poetry of
Raymond Carver: Against the Current, and editor/co-author of Ekphrasis in
American Poetry: From the Colonial Period to the 21st Century.
Heidi Silje Moen works as an Associate Professor at Inland Norway University
of Applied Sciences, Faculty of Education. She currently teaches undergraduate
and graduate classes in Postcolonial literature and theory, film adaptation, and
courses in English literature, culture and didactics for teacher students. Her pre-
vious research has been on the poetry of Ezra Pound. Her current research inter-
ests include animal poetry and education, and the portrayal of monsters and
monstrosity in cultural expressions across the ages.
Juliet Munden works with English as a second language at The Inland
University of Applied Science in Norway. After completing a degree in philoso-
phy and psychology, she went on to a career in pig farming and vegetable grow-
ing. Later she gained a PhD in the reception of Eritrean literature. During the
last twenty years Juliet has trained teachers, written school textbooks, and
