TriQuarterly Blog

It’s National Poetry Month and TriQuarterly is proud to introduce a new web series. Reginald Gibbons, the Frances Hooper Professor of Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University, will follow his undergraduate poetry writing course with mini-essays that lay out the framework of poetry as he sees it. Professor Gibbons will report on his class discussion—and what he failed to get to, or what was too elusive, and how his students develop throughout the course.

___

First day of classes of the spring quarter at Northwestern: my beginning poetry writing course for undergraduates.  Over the last month I’ve spent at least 40 hours creating a small anthology and working out the syllabus—which in my case is a complicated interweaving of class days with assignments (even more complicated than usual because for the first—and probably last—time I have two sections of this course, one meeting three days a week and the other two).  Why so much time?  I’ve been reading and reading poems looking for just the right ones.  Working and reworking the schedule, which has made the calendar look to me like chronological cole slaw: it’s all chopped up according to the sequence of assignments.  Several different types alternate: poems, exercises, responses to some of the prose we’re reading (by the poets in my collection, The Poet’s Work), some tiny studies of individual words (using the Oxford English Dictionary—the remarkable on-line version that students and professors can access through the university library) and a couple of very brief prose pieces about poetic technique, and write-ups of readings the students attend.  

I didn’t want to teach this course again from a big anthology or a set of smaller ones.  Students typically pay $70 for a 6-pound book that they haul to and from class, and in our quarter system (rather than semesters) at Northwestern, there’s no time to talk deeply about more than what’s on about 60 pages of it. So I created my own anthology (120 pages, typed: I’ll post the table of contents on this blog soon), after rummaging through many books of poems (and many anthologies, too) to remind myself of poems—beyond some of my favorites that I knew I would use—that will help show not so much which poets have written what, over time (history of poetry—but we will get some of that) but rather to teach how those poets have written. What they have done with language in order to make a poem.  

And instead of handing out a syllabus that goes week by week through elements of poetry (structure, sound, rhythm, metaphor and metonym, imagery, forms, etc.), I am going to help everyone see as much in every single poem as possible—and let the students collect the craft elements as we go. Over the quarter, I’ll require them to create their own maps or outlines of poetry instead of handing them mine—they can reorganize when they need to, putting together the elements as they wish.  At the end of the course, they’ll turn in some revised poems, a final very short paper (after writing others during the quarter), and their individual maps.  I’m eager to learn from seeing how everyone takes in the range of the devices and strategies and tricks and structures of this craft—and my favorite subject of all: how poems move.  

 -Reginald Gibbons

TriQuarterly's Ross Ritchell and Alisa Ungar-Sargon reached out to past TQ contributors in search of news and updates. Here are their findings.

James Tadd Adcox ("The Bed Frame," "A Dial Tone," "The Off Season," and "The Weight of the Internet"; issue 139) has just published his first book, a collection of stories called The Map of the System of Human Knowledge, with Tiny Hardcore Press.

Meena Alexander ("Red Bird" and "Impossible Grace"; issue 141) was interviewed by the Poetry Society of America.

Brittany Cavallaro ("Tautology" and "Leitmotif"; issue 142), along with Rebecca Hazelton, has a book forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in 2013, No Girls No Telephones.

Eugene Cross ("This Too"; issue 141) recently published a collection of stories, Fires of Our Choosing, with Dzanc Books. "This Too" is included in the collection. Read an interview he did with The Millions here.

Su Friedrich ("Gut Renovation"; issue 141) won the Audience Award at the 2012 Brooklyn Film Festival for "Gut Renovation."

Edison Jennings ("Complexion," "Half-Life," "A Body in Motion," and "Old Bitch and Bone"; issue 139) has four poems in The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume III: Appalachia. He also has a poem, "Durable Goods," in the current issue of Zone 3, and others forthcoming in Southwest Review and Rattle. Finally, the fall 2011 issue of Town Creek Poetry includes a retrospective of his work as well as an interview.

Angela Eun Ji Koh ("Antti Revonsuo"; issue 140) recently published her poem "Menopause" in La Petite Zine.

Tyler Mills ("Penelope's Firebird Weft"; issue 140) won the 2011 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award for her collection Tongue Lyre, which will be published by Southern Illinois University Press in February 2013.

Jacob Newberry ("Origins"; issue 141) was named a Bread Loaf Scholar in Nonfiction for the summer of 2012. He also has a short story forthcoming in the Southwest Review, as well as an essay forthcoming in the Kenyon Review.

We couldn't be prouder.

Meena Alexander’s poem “Impossible Grace,” from TQO issue 141 is being honored by an international music competition. The first Al-Quds Composition Award, which celebrates the “cultural uniqueness of the city of Jerusalem,” requires composers to submit work that is inspired by Alexander's poem. The winning composition will be presented at the new Al-Quds University College of Music in October.

Alexander was the 2011 Al-Quds poet in residence.

On April 29, 1992, four Los Angeles Police Officers were acquitted of beating Rodney King, sparking what became the Los Angeles Riots. By the end, over a billion dollars in damage had been done, 53 people lost their lives, and many, like Reginald Denny, were forever changed. Twenty years later, on February 26, 2012 George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin and the aftermath of that event is still unfolding around us as acts of anger and retaliation slowly ripple across the nation. If we expand our view, we find that these types of acts are repeated all over the world, every where from Afghanistan to Canada time and time again.

Our problem is thinking we’ve got the story, that we know what happened and who the other person is. We make decisions based not on fact, but on what we believe, on what we’ve heard, and what we’ve seen. Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie calls this the danger of a single story. She says that, “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” That Zimmerman shot Martin is true, there is no question of that. What remains to be seen is whether his reasons for doing so - the story he tells, in effect - will be considered justifiable by a court of law. Our understanding of the facts is blurred by context and by who is telling us the story.

“Stories,” Adichie says, “who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories are told — are really dependent on power. Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity. Show a people as one thing — as only one thing — over and over again, and that is what they become.” Whether it’s the beatings of Rodney King and Reginald Denny or the shooting of Trayvon Martin, the problem remains the same, people carry with them the preconceived notions of society that color their perception.

What’s the solution? More stories from all voices and all points of view. Alex Kotlowitz writes that “Stories inform the present and help sculpt the future, and so we need to take care not to craft a single narrative, not to pigeonhole people, not to think we know when in fact we know very little. We need to listen to the stories—the unpredictable stories—of those whose voices have been lost amidst the cacophonous noise of ideologues and rhetorical ruffians.”

In the end it comes down to empathy and understanding, recent studies have shown that reading fiction actually increases a person capacity for empathy, the same is most likely true for narrative non-fiction. As I wrote in my previous blog, reading rewires your brain by forcing you to live through the experiences of a stories protagonist. Would Zimmerman have shot Martin if he’d read To Kill a Mockingbird? Who can say? I do believe though, that if we try to empathize and put our preconceived notions aside, this world would be a better place.