Selling poetry (or giving it away)

To whet the appetite, first let me recommend Douglas Goetsch's essay in The American Scholar, "Poetry Stand," about a group of high school students who offer customized poems on demand.

My question for the week is a slight variation: how best can I sell poetry to my mostly not-so-excited students.This spring I'm teaching a couple sections of 2nd semester FYC, which at my college is titled "Writing about Literature." It's a comp course with students writing in response to literature (fiction, drama, poetry) they read in the class. 

The course, for me, is distinctly different from a lit survey class in several ways. Let's stick with one: my selection of poems. Many of my colleagues seem to assign one of those hefty anthologies for the course, canonical works with the now-customary overlay of multiculturalism. I'm trying a different approach, in an attempt to choose more accessible poems (not necessarily the standard fare) and to save students the cost of an anthology of which I'll only assign (maybe) 5%. (I've written elsewhere about similar concerns wrt the essay canon.) So my question, in another form: what poems or poets have you found useful in transforming the poetry-haters?

As my contribution to the discussion, here's a list of sites you may find useful to supplement or replace anthologies as sources of poetry (with the wonderful added benefit that many include audio or video clips as well as text):

Poets.org from the American Academy of Poets

The poetry site of the Library of Congress

American Life in Poetry (Ted Kooser's free weekly column)

Poetry 180 (Billy Collins's site aimed at high school students)

Poetry magazine and its Poetry Foundation

Paris Review (poems as well as its famous interview series, much of which is now available online)

Today's Poem (a new poem each day, mostly from well-known literary mags.)

Comments

[Lynn168]

Holly,

I have been experimenting, slowly, with introducing my FYC students to poetry as well. While it's not my main text, yet, I did have a successful class by reading William Carlos Williams "This is Just to Say." http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15535

I wanted to show my students that arguments can be constructed in many different forms, not just books or essays. We examined Williams' poem from the point of view of "what's the argument" and "what develops the speaker's ethos" (is he rubbing it in "you's" face that he ate the plums, or is he really sorry). We also looked at pathos (how the form of a poem was in itself an appeal to emotion), logos, and so on.

The poem is sweet and not at all what my students expect of poetry. And they really seemed to have fun discussing it from an argumentative stance.

The Illinois Poet Laureate web site also has several poems that students may be interested in. There are straight texts, but there are also several videos of poets reading their work as well as audio clips of poets and student poets. It's worth a look. http://www.bradley.edu/poet/index.shtml

[Holly]

I forgot that I also wanted to mention Yale's Modern Poetry course, with Professor Landgon Hammer, available streaming-freely on yr nearest PC: http://open.yale.edu/courses/english/index.html