Class Discussions

I've been pretty happy with class discussion so far. We're starting our poetry unit and yesterday we heard presentations on Frank O'Hara, Allen Ginsberg and Rita Dove. Most of my students consider themselves poets rather than fiction writers and their enthusiasm for poetry has been an incredible help, especially because I feel less confident speaking about poetry than say, fiction. 

The students seem comfortable and open with me and with each other. I think having them talk to me while I take roll has helped this. I had them think about a poetic moment in their lives that they would be willing to share with the class, and I worried that it would be awkward and weird, but they had some really beautiful and interesting things to share: camping out in the desert with an Apache chief, watching a meteor shower, visiting a childhood home and finding in the yard, a dead bird infested with ants. Two students had some hallucinogenic experiences with local anesthesia before a surgery and that opened up some good laughs. My hopes are that they feel okay with being slightly quirky and idiosyncratic and let their guard down a little, because I think this is important in order to be creative and imaginative. 

My only concern right now, and I think John mentioned this in one of our earlier classes, is that my students have a hard time accepting the make believe. We were reading Rita Dove's poem "Adolescence--II" and they couldn't understand who these "seal men" were in the poem. It's obviously a very surreal poem, but they had to make logical sense of it and because it wasn't so concrete for them, they felt it had no merit. So that's where we left off discussion and I think we'll probably go back to that poem next week and do a closer reading.