Say Something Wonderful: Teaching the Pleasures of Poetry

FAIN: FV-50106-06

DePaul University (Chicago, IL 60604-2201)
Eric Selinger (Project Director: March 2006 to September 2008)

A five-week summer seminar for fifteen school teachers on the joys and challenges of teaching poetry.

"Say Something Wonderful: On Pleasure, Poetics, and Poetry" is a five-week summer seminar for schoolteachers which explores the pleasures of poetry from a variety of critical, historical, and aesthetic perspectives. As they discuss the relationships between reading and eros, knowledge and snob-value, pleasure and difficulty, teachers will deepen and broaden their knowledge of poems, poets, and poetic forms from a variety of periods and cultures, and they will hone their own skills as close readers and oral performers of poetry. Building on its successes in 2003 and 2005, this seminar will again equip its participants to link, in their own classes, instruction and delight.