"My Susan Howe" or "Howe to teach"

pp. 213-223

in: Joan Retallack, Juliana Spahr (eds), Poetry & pedagogy, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006

Abstract

In the spring of 1999, I began teaching an advanced composition and literature course at Davenport College, a two-year vocational college in South Bend, Indiana. Although I had taught the course several times before, this time I subtitled it "Women and Literature," mainly because most of the students whom I had been teaching at this college were women over thirty-five, returning to school either to get a job or improve their careers. At the tail end of an eleven-week syllabus that included Emily Dickinson and Susan Glaspell, I decided to try an experiment by ending the term with the poetry of Susan Howe. Many of my colleagues said I was crazy to try to teach that "arcane" stuff to such "under-prepared" students, but the results were far better than even I had hoped. Although I employed some very teacher-centered techniques, the success of teaching Howe's The Nonconformist's Memorial¹ did not have much to do with me at all; it had more to do with trusting the premise and purpose that Language poetry itself purports: to involve the reader in the production of meaning.

Cited authors

Dickinson Emily