Making Room for What We Read

Abstract

Abstract In a world of Google-age information accessibility and Facebook-fueled quick rants, the author is interested in teaching a process of reading poetry that does not include easily accessed “answers” or result in reactionary analysis. By using contemporary poetry in introduction to literature courses, the author invites students to resist any quick way of accessing information about the poem. Instead, using Billy Collins's poem, “Introduction to Poetry,” the author helps students explore slower, maybe more contemplative and welcoming ways to listen to the language of the poems they study. And, along the way, the author invites students to consider the particular intellectual virtues they are cultivating in order to read well. In this essay, the author uses Aimee Nezhukumatathil's poem “Hummingbird Abecedarian,” published through the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day project, and a poem the author had only read a couple of times before introducing to a group of second-semester first-year “Introduction to Literature” students, as an illustrative example of how using contemporary poems can deepen students’ reading experiences when there are no academic resources around to save them from taking time to read well.