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Wanted: A Verse Curriculum and Pedagogy

David J. Rothman discusses the curriculum of the Poetry Concentration in the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Western Colorado University, which offered a close emphasis on poetic form. He designed the founding curriculum of the Poetry Concentration and led that concentration from 2010-2019, after which the curriculum changed dramatically. 

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by David J. Rothman

“True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.”

—Pope, “An Essay on Criticism,” Part 2

“Irish poets learn your trade
Sing whatever is well made,
Scorn the sort now growing up
All out of shape from toe to top,
Their unremembering hearts and heads
Base-born products of base beds.”

—Yeats, “Under Ben Bulben”

“Say my love is easy had,
Say I’m bitten raw with pride,
Say I am too often sad,—
Still behold me at your side.

“Say I’m neither brave nor young,
Say I woo and coddle care,
Say the devil touched my tongue,—
Still you have my heart to wear.”

But say my verses do not scan,
And I get me another man!

—Dorothy Parker, “Fighting Words”

1.

In 2009, Mark Todd, the founding Director of the MFA in Creative Writing at Western Colorado University (then Western State College of Colorado), approached me about designing a graduate-program creative writing curriculum in poetry along lines we had been discussing for years. I leapt at the chance and did so, and when Mark heroically succeeded in getting the full program proposal approved, I wound up leading that concentration for four years before becoming director of the full program for another five years after Mark left in 2014. Under Mark’s leadership and together with J.S. Mayank, who designed the film concentration, and Russell Davis, who designed the genre fiction concentration, we created an extraordinarily rigorous creative writing curriculum closely focused on craft in all disciplines. The program grew further when writer and publisher Caleb Seeling of Bower House Books and Conundrum Press (the latter of which he had purchased from me a number of years earlier) came in to direct the certificate in publishing, which eventually became its own MFA track under the leadership of the novelist and publisher Kevin Anderson, and again in 2019, when the university approved our proposal for the creation of a new track in Nature Writing, now headed by the gifted novelist Laura Pritchett. Because it was during this time that the program also acquired Christine Yurick’s journal THINK to develop the poetry concentration even further, it seems fitting to discuss the pedagogy and curriculum of that innovative concentration here, as the story of its origin has never before appeared in public print.

From the beginning, and with Mark’s enthusiastic support, we wanted to create a poetry MFA curriculum radically different from, and far more rigorous than any we had seen. My own motivation for this had basically two sources. The first was my deep disappointment with almost every poetry workshop I had ever taken. And I had taken my share, with some of the best. In my undergraduate years at Harvard (1977-’82), that university may have offered one of the strongest rosters of poets in even its own storied history: Mark Strand, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, Czeslaw Milosz, and Robert Fitzgerald. Each one had obvious and major strengths as a poet and could be compelling in the classroom. Almost all, however, had little if any understanding of either pedagogy or curriculum when it came to training young writers (to be fair, Milosz didn’t aim to do this, teaching primarily courses in history and poetics). Milosz mostly lectured (and won the Nobel the year he was teaching and giving the Norton lectures), and Strand, Heaney, and Walcott offered standard Iowa-style workshops in which students brought in new work each week and passed it around for critique, with only rare direction about what or how to write. I vividly remember moments when Heaney and Walcott, gifted as they were, would look quizzically at a student, clearly wanting to convey something about how to improve a poem, but nonetheless at a loss for how to do so. It was a very specific kind of look—a pedagogical frustration.

All these poets were brilliant, if mostly in offhand and charismatic fashion. It was only Fitzgerald, however, who had a systematic approach to what he did, which turned out to be transformative. His class “Versification” changed my life, as it did the lives of many others, for Fitzgerald used a radically different approach from any other teacher I had ever encountered in such a class. His curriculum systematically presented every single major metrical form (along with a number of stanzaic forms) in English, including their historical background, their structure, how to scan them, how to think critically about them, and how to imitate them, all in a rigorous way. Each week, he lectured on a form and sent us home to read history, criticism, and linguistics of that form, along with plentiful examples, some of which we were to scan; we then were to imitate the form in a poem of our own and scan our own work. Occasionally, we were asked to write an accompanying short essay. It was not so much a course in “poetry”—a term of judgment after all, rather than of craft—as a course in verse technique, as the course title made clear. As I recall, we began with imitations of Anglo-Saxon strong stress alliterative meter, moved on to imitations of classical quantitative metrical forms (notable Catullan hendecasyllables and Sapphics), ballad meter, what he called “riding rhyme” in imitation of Chaucer’s prescient heroic couplets, iambic tetrameter couplets, blank verse, triple meters, sonnets and rhyme royal, and free verse, with several other stanzaic forms along the way. The course also more or less followed the historical development of English language and poetry.

Nothing could have been further from the pedagogical chaos of the other courses I had taken, in which, as in so many thousands of similar courses as they are still taught around the country, there was no coherent approach to the teaching of meter, rhyme, rhythm, form, structure, linguistics, history or technique. In those classes, students simply threw a poem on the table and other young writers, presumably under the guidance of the instructor, tried to discuss it. Even then I had the feeling it was a bit like trying to fix a car with only your bare hands, though I didn’t know exactly why. Absolutely no one presented work with either meter or rhyme, or even written according to well-thought-out principles of free verse. There was no technical vocabulary, no one tried to (or probably could) scan anything, and the resulting conversation generally devolved into awkward critiques of sense and sensibility, with predictable and often unpleasant emotional displays (passive aggression; defensiveness; intellectual self-aggrandizement and bullying; political grandstanding; etc.).

Fitzgerald, on the other hand, never remotely engaged in any of this kind of teaching. Much of the class was taken up with learning new techniques and their structure and history. Critiques of student exercises (not poems: exercises) were always gracious, calm, rational, and focused very closely on versecraft in and of itself, and when we students spoke (which was rare), that was what we were supposed to offer as well. Terminology and technique were introduced week by week, studied, imitated, and practiced. The students’ weekly verses were encouraged to be low-stakes affairs that focused on craft, rather than efforts to scale Parnassus. They had to be grammatical and make sense, of course, but assuming they did, the focus was entirely on whether or not they scanned, whether or not they had been scanned correctly, and if not, why not. Corrections, when offered, had to do with making the verses work, not with adjusting the student’s spirit. We were encouraged to understand that we were not writing poems, but rather practicing the writing of verse. The goal was not to try to produce great poems, but rather to train young poets. The emphasis, therefore, was on things that could actually be taught, like how to write a coherent Sapphic, rather than searching for the Pierian spring.

This approach to teaching and the organization of the class was a revelation. The idea that there was actually a technique, or rather a seemingly endless range of techniques—and an enormous history of passionate, brilliant discussion of such techniques, across all ages and languages imaginable—landed like a thunderbolt. In place of vague discussions of whether or not a student had “earned” an image in this or that line, there was … the entire history of poetic practice, much of it obviously absorbed and annotated by the poets themselves. There was also, beginning in the 20th century, the great contributions of linguists like Jespersen, Chatman, Trager, Smith, and others, whom Fitzgerald deeply respected and duly introduced at the right time. When I say that this work changed many of our lives, it is no exaggeration. I went on to write my dissertation on the prosody of free verse under Denis Donoghue, to create Western’s curriculum, and to publish the textbook Learning the Secrets of English Verse (Springer 2022) with my former student, the gifted poet Susan Spear, which lays out some of that curriculum and may be the first textbook to use Fitzgerald’s own innovative scansion system. Other Fitzgerald students, such as Dana Gioia, Jacqueline Osherow, and Brad Leithauser, have all played a major role in keeping alive his teaching and the methods and perspectives he preserved and passed on to us. And indeed, there were precious few doing any work like Fitzgerald’s at the time in the entire country. They would have included J.V. Cunningham at Brandeis, Lewis Turco at SUNY Oswego, Miller Williams at the University of Arkansas, Donald Justice at the University of Florida, and perhaps only a few others. His approach was almost unheard of, and in retrospect, all the more precious for that.

This brings us to the second motivation for the Western curriculum, which was essentially an expansion on Fitzgerald’s pedagogical and curricular model. Like my textbook coauthor Susan Spear, I had a rigorous musical education on both piano and (of all things) the bassoon and have worked as a semi-professional classical, rock, and jazz musician since I was 15. When I took Fitzgerald’s course, what became immediately apparent was that his pedagogy and curriculum were structured exactly as such material would be presented to young musicians. It was focused on technique, it moved from simpler work to more complex, it was based on exercises rather than high stakes affairs, it demanded relentless discipline, it was always historically and structurally informed, and critique was based on those terms. The idea was, again, to focus on developing the writer more than on producing great writing: in other words, to train people, rather than to worry too much and too soon about the product. For all the talk in most creative writing programs about “process,” this approach is generally neglected, for the best way to teach real people is to focus on the acquisition of technique rather than to encourage displays of explosive juvenile genius. To have process, you have to have a process, which in educational terms means, again and again, a systematic pedagogy and a curriculum that moves carefully and thoughtfully from the simpler to the more complex over time—and the time is measured in years. Without these foundations, all the talk in the world about “process” will not create it.

Indeed, as Elijah Blumov has recently suggested, it would have been far better for creative writing programs if, when they came into being, more had sought to set themselves up along the model of conservatories and allied themselves with colleges of art and other creatively oriented institutions rather than English departments. For English departments are part of the Germanic-inflected American university system, where a premium is generally placed on the creation of new knowledge. In light of the tremendous advances made across the last century in science and social science, this has led over the last several generations to ever more fanciful attempts in all humanities disciplines to demonstrate their relevance by creating simulacra of those other fields: deployment of increasingly hermetic terminology; endless exfoliation of ersatz theories that supposedly reveal new insights into art; arguments for understanding all creative work in the context of social and political relevance, and so on. Creative writing programs embedded in English and literature departments could not possibly resist these developments, as that is where the money and status were. As a result, they continue to avoid and downplay the far less apparently intellectual work of training aspiring poets to write sonnets, or to evaluate Saintsbury’s claims about the importance of rhyme in the development of English accentual-syllabic meter, or to consider the merits of William Carlos Williams’s theory of the variable foot in free verse and its relation to the logaoedic tradition. The underlying reason for this seems clear: the professional advancement of the professors in such programs depends explicitly on fulfilling the expectations of committees on tenure and promotions, and when what they value is what English departments value, this is what you do, even at the expense of the art you are supposed to be teaching. Teaching young artists how to make beautiful, meaningful things for non-academic audiences is a different enterprise from pursuing academic fashion, prestige, and advancement, and most MFA programs have been unable to resist the institutional pressures of the programs where they are housed. As a result, they emphasize how to say things, and in particular, how to say complicated things that make one sound intelligent and worthy of academic advancement, rather than how to do things. But learning how to do things is a large part of what coming to be any kind of artist is all about.

Strong poets have always known that learning how to do things—in particular, how to measure —is as crucial to our art as to any other, and tell us so again and again, as evidenced in the epigraphs to this essays. As W.S. Merwin writes in his late poem “The Long and the Short of It,” “As long as we can believe anything / we believe in measure.” Other comparably strong examples could be multiplied endlessly from almost any period and in any language. Yet with very few exceptions (James Matthew Wilson’s program at the University of St. Thomas comes immediately to mind) few of those who would teach young poets their craft heed this advice.

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2.

All of the foregoing has to do with why Mark and I sought to design an MFA poetry curriculum and pedagogy at Western directly inspired by Fitzgerald and the traditions of music education, one that would introduce advanced students to the traditional ways of writing verse (and, with luck, poetry) in the most rigorous, well-structured, and sequenced way possible. Part of this included hiring the best faculty we could find, and we were tremendously fortunate over the first decade to have Tyson Hausdoerffer (who became Program Director after I left), Ernest Hilbert, Julie Kane, Andrew Sellon, and David Yezzi as the faculty who played a major role in developing the courses we offered.

The underlying concept of the program was to present basic skills first and then move to more advanced studies in genre, linguistics, and history, along with doing everything we could in the limited time we had to give students additional practical skills such as writing poetry book reviews and in public speaking and teaching—skills that would be useful in the larger literary world. The program had a low-residency format, meaning that students gathered for three consecutive summers, with two intervening semesters between each summer residency, during each of which full-time students would take two courses, for a total of four full courses in each of two academic years, along with the three summer residencies, for a total of three summer residencies and eight semester-length courses.

What follows is the sequence of courses as it evolved and stabilized over time, with descriptions of each course. As I hope is evident, the idea in the first summer and then the first year was to give students a grounding in the basics of verse composition and the lyrical genres, along with a background in linguistic history and prosodical history. During the second summer, students took a course in public speaking with an emphasis on presenting poetry, always taught by a strong writer who was also an Equity actor (first David Yezzi, and later Andrew Sellon). In the second year, students studied major verse genres (verse drama and verse narrative) and modes (such as satire), along with how to write book reviews and to teach poetry themselves. Each also had to take a one-semester course in another genre offered in the program, either popular genre fiction or screenwriting. In the third and final summer residency, students took a course on poetry and music and presented their capstone manuscripts (including a reading).

I drafted each course syllabus and was the first to teach most, but most were then modified, sometimes significantly, by those who taught them, all of whom were not only gifted poets and writers, but also critics, scholars, and teachers (and actors, in the case of Yezzi and Sellon). Here are the syllabus course descriptions in what appear to be their final iterations on my hard drive, the products of our collective efforts, slightly edited to avoid redundancy:

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SUMMER I

Scansion Immersion

In his History of English Prosody, George Saintsbury points out that “The main business of the poet … is to get poetical music out of the language which he uses.” The first summer intensive,therefore focuses on the fundamental craft of using language in this metaphorically musical way to make verse. Students read, scan, and study poetry in the major metrical forms that have developed over the course of the history of English poetry, ending with a study of free and nonce verse forms. They also write exercises in all the major metrical forms and practice scansion of their own poems. Students briefly examine a number of different scansion systems, learning about their premises, theory, and practice. This material is tremendously rich and difficult—it is the music theory of verse. But don’t panic! All of this material will be repeated in greater detail (and with more time . . . ) in the first eight weeks of the fall semester in CRWR 636. The point of the summer course is to introduce it and give all the major meters a first go. You will be learning about this material for the rest of your lives, and you have to start somewhere—so here we go.

Upon completion of this course, students will have a basic understanding of how meter and rhythm work in the English poetic line, along with an outline of how this aspect of craft came to be as it is. They will have a working vocabulary of the tools that poets writing in English have developed to practice their craft. They will also have some sense of how those tools developed over time, and they will begin to use these tools in their own creative and critical work.

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FALL I

Metrical Traditions and Versification I

This one-semester course expands dramatically on the outline of your first summer course. We now delve deeply into the development of the metrical tradition in English poetry from the beginning to the present. Students read poems in all the major metrical forms (Anglo-Saxon Strong Stress Meter, the ballad, classical imitations, iambic tetrameter, blank verse, triple meters, free verse forms, etc.), and then do the same for the major fixed stanza forms (couplet, terza rima, quatrains, Venus and Adonis stanzas, rhyme royal, ottava rima, Spenserian stanzas, etc.), along with historical and theoretical commentary. Each week students also imitate the forms and scan their own work and that of others. Further, in a crucial part of the course often overlooked in other such classes, students study outlines of the development of theories of versification and prosody in English. Students read a wide range of works, many of them by poets, in which they describe their craft and that of others, and they compare theories of and approaches to metrical poetry. In this course, students are expected to scan and write poetry every week, and to produce a short essays on various traditions of versification, along with at least one research paper.

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History of English Language / Studies in Translation

Poets work with language and need to understand its past as deeply as composers understand the history of music or artists the history of art. In this course, students survey the historical development of English, with particular attention paid to development of poetic forms. As English developed, so did its means of artistic expression. The more deeply one understands how those means changed over time, the more likely one is to be able to use them in sophisticated and compelling ways, as all are still alive in the language.

Because much of the history of the language grew out of contact with other languages, the second part of this course takes up the question of translation from theoretical, historical, and practical standpoints. The link between the two parts of the course is the understanding that the development of lexical, prosodical, grammatical and syntactical forms in linguistic usage is at the core of poetry and is deeply related to how the language was affected by the influence of other languages. Virtually every form of English poetry (including free verse) grows out of attempts to imitate forms in other languages, especially German, Greek, Latin, French, and Italian, as well as Hebrew, Celtic languages, Japanese, and Farsi. Forms as diverse as blank verse, the sonnet, the sestina, the villanelle, Sapphics, free verse, the haiku, the ghazal and many more entered English at first through translation. Students study and compare translations, read theories of translation and attempt translations of their own. Reintegrating that material with the development of poetry generally not only illuminates the reading of poetry but should help students to write their own. In other words: those who wish to write well should understand the links between the history of the language and the influence of other languages on it, and that understanding is the central aim of this course.

Students who complete this course will gain a strong grasp of the general development of English and the ways in which poets have been affected by it and affected it in turn. They will also have a basic grasp of how other languages have fed the development of English, both as a natural and as a literary language. They will also possess a deeper understanding of the complexities and importance of translation in literary history. Those with more advanced language skills will have the opportunity to work extensively on translations of their own.

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SPRING I

Metrical Traditions and Versification II

This course takes up fixed lyrical forms and then a number of the major lyrical genres. Students read poems in all the forms and genres under consideration along with historical and theoretical commentary. Each week, students imitate the material under discussion and scan their own work and that of others. Students also delve more deeply into specific theories and approaches to the art, much of it by the poets themselves. Finally, students write one essay analyzing a poem in a fixed lyrical form and another looking at a lyrical genre.

Students who complete this course will have a rich understanding of the fundamentals of the major verse techniques (not only meter, but also stanza forms, lyrical forms and lyrical genres such as the elegy, nature poetry, love poetry, ballads, philosophical poetry, occasional verse and so on) used by poets writing lyrical poetry in English, along with their sources, the history, criticism, theory, and practice of these forms. They will be able to scan, interpret, analyze, and evaluate the execution of these forms in the work of others, and to imitate these forms in their own creative work.

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Historical Foundations of English Prosody

This course builds on “History of the English Language.” While that course focuses on linguistic history broadly conceived, this one specifically addresses and traces discussions about the development of English verse structures, especially in the formative period, from the beginnings until 1650. A full survey of this material would include another semester up to 1798; a course on the 19th century; and another on the 20th century, with a separate section on American prosody.

Why such close attention to the history of literary prosody? Poets work with language and need to understand its history and structure as deeply as composers understand the history and structure of music or artists the history and formal properties of art. In this course students study the historical development of English with specific attention to the development of metrics and poetic forms. The major works include foundational treatises and original works by poets, and also, critical and linguistic history.

Students who complete this course will have a strong grasp of the general development of English and the ways in which poets have been affected by it and affected it in turn, especially in its formative period for verse, which was the early modern period, up to 1650.

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SUMMER II

Public Performance

Reading poetry aloud to an audience is an integral part of the poet’s craft. With poetry readings now more common than ever, no poet can responsibly ignore this vital aspect of the life of words.

Richard Wilbur has noted that it is not sufficient to achieve excellence on the page alone. Literary distinction in magazines and books must be coupled with the poet’s ability to draw on the techniques of the actor to present his or her work aloud to an audience. Contemporary poets who fail to give serious attention to the oral presentation of their work do so at their peril.

The recent rise in public readings is actually just a renewal of the ancient emphasis, standard in Roman society for example, of literature as an auditory experience. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries enjoyed such prominent public readers as Charles Dickens, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dylan Thomas, and countless others who drew large crowds to their work through oral presentation.

Most poets, however—either through ignorance or neglect—are woefully ill equipped as readers of their own work, collapsing into monotonous singsong and mumbling when presenting their own poems. This practicum, which constitutes a hands-on workshop combining literary and theatrical practice, is designed to break down the elements that compose effective reading. Through textual analysis, vocal and breathing techniques, and group discussion and critique, students will explore the methods used to create a pliant reading style, one that does justice to both the talents of the reader and the qualities of his or her work. Through textual analysis, vocal technique, and group discussion and critique, students will create a pliant and powerful reading style to best serve their work.

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FALL II

Narrative Poetry

This course considers major narrative poems and their forms—what are generally acknowledged to be not only some of the most important and influential poems in the history of the world, but some of the greatest works of art of any kind: The Odyssey, The Iliad, The Old Testament, The New Testament, The Aeneid, Beowulf, The Divine Comedy, The Canterbury Tales, Paradise Lost, The Prelude, Hiawatha and up to works in the twentieth century by E. A. Robinson, Robert Frost, Robinson Jeffers, Derek Walcott, W.S. Merwin, Mark Jarman, David Mason and many others. All of these poems, including those in languages other than English, have had a tremendous impact on the tradition of poetry in English.

While students cannot read all of these works in this course, they will examine how the poems work formally and generically, study the theory of epic and other forms of poetic narrative, and attempt to imitate such forms in their own poetry. The course includes extensive readings of major narrative poems from the beginning to the present, as well as major readings on theories of narrative poetry.

[Plus: Required out-of-concentration course in either screenwriting or genre fiction]

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SPRING II

Verse Satire / Verse Drama

This course takes up satire and verse drama, both of which have been a part of the poetic tradition since antiquity. Satire—the subject of the first half of the course—is a genre (or, in the case of Roman satire, a form) in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and even society itself, into improvement. Satire is generally humorous, though its greater purpose is often quite serious and involves an unflinching moral appraisal. Wit is a common feature of satire, as are irony and sarcasm. Students will trace the evolution of satire from its origins in antiquity to its modern practitioners. Noted satiric works will be discussed critically in the form of brief essays and imitated in original verse compositions.

In the second half of the course, students will examine the tradition of dramatic verse, which extends at least as far back as ancient Greece. For a very long period, verse drama was the primary dramatic form. The English Renaissance saw the height of dramatic verse in the English-speaking world, with playwrights such as Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare. While the form is little practiced today, a number of the most significant works of modern literature are verse drama by Yeats, Ibsen, Eliot, and others. Students will trace the evolution of verse drama from Molière to its modern practitioners. Noted verse dramas will be discussed critically by students in brief essays. Students will also be responsible for writing dramatic verse.

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Poetry Book Reviewing / Poetry, Literacy, Pedagogy

This course may at first appear to bring together two oddly disparate realms, but they make good sense in the context of our curriculum and are part of what make it distinctive. The goal is to have a course in your fourth and final full semester in which you think about and respond to other dimensions of the world of poetry than writing it. None of you may ever write a book review or teach—but the chances are you will do one or both of these things, as you may also work as editors, as publishers, as board or staff members at literary organizations, even (heaven forbid) administrators, and so on. Look around you – most poets do this and more, because the poetry world—the literary world—has many manifestations that go far beyond merely sitting in a garret scribbling sonnets (though of course we encourage you to do that). We couldn’t cover everything but decided that the topics of this course are crucial to giving you a sense of how the larger poetry world actually works. Both involve theory and practicality; both offer us a sense of historical sweep and yet also invite us to participate in the present; both immediately engage us in debates that matter deeply about the future of our art—and neither is taught anywhere near enough.

Poetry Book Reviewing. Magazine and journal editors are almost always eager to find good, reliable reviewers. For a writer, publishing book reviews offers opportunities of all sorts: to think out loud, to polish your critical prose, to participate in the debates of the day, to appear regularly in print, to add to your reputation, to get lots of free books, and even to get paid. More, because there is substantial demand, writing reviews is a way to join the larger literary conversation that is easier than beginning by trying to score a book contract, or even to place original creative work without a track record. The majority of strong writers participate in such criticism—even Stephen King writes book reviews!—because reviews are a foundational part of the culture. We will consider all kinds of book reviews, from short notices to the kind of extended essay-reviews which appear in journals such as The New York Review of Books and we will discuss the crucial elements in crafting a good review, along with the business of placing them.

Poetry Pedagogy. Because many graduates of MFA programs themselves become teachers, this half-course reviews a wide range of techniques and materials available to teachers of poetry in K-12 and undergraduate programs, preparing students to pass on what they have learned to others.

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SUMMER III

Poetry and Music

In ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound proposed that “poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.” How do musical elements of poetry affect us as readers and listeners? How does one write for musical settings? Before the modern era, poetry was often sung. In fact, from its earliest uses in ancient cultures, poetry has served alongside music to entertain and enlighten in both religious and secular performance. The class will address the purely musical elements of the language and ways they may be used in both written and musical environments. The class will also focus extensively on practical aspects of writing for a musical setting and constructing finished song lyrics and opera libretti. Progressing through both brief lectures and an intensive maieutic method, students will confront their own evolving thoughts about the relationship between poetry and music. As a centerpiece of the course, students will compose a one-act opera libretto (write synopsis, select characters and setting, determine thematic focus, write both recitative and arias, arrange stage directions) and engage in detailed discussion of theories addressed in assigned reading material.

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Capstone

Each student works with an adviser to develop a book-length poetry manuscript, also giving a 30-minute reading.

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The full syllabi to each course outlined above also included a thorough list of course topics, many pages of specific assignments, assigned readings and lengthy bibliographies, far too much material to print here (though I am happy to share them with anyone who is interested). The goal in every case was to give students enough in every single course to suggest a lifetime of creative and critical exploration. To give a sense of that scope, Learning the Secrets of English Verse includes material only from one of the above courses, the first, “Metrical Traditions and Versification I,” covering the meters and repeating stanza forms of English. One could easily imagine a textbook based on every other course, and it would be a worthy project, as few if any exist that guide students in a systematic way through learning how to do the work of each such class. Consider: how should we teach aspiring poets not just prosody and versification, but their history? While there are many fine primary works readily available in the field, including the extraordinary Smith anthology of Elizabethan essays, there appears to be no guided study that presents appropriate excerpts and then leads students through the history of this crucial field, which is otherwise so broad and deep as to be overwhelming. Indeed, the field is hardly ever studied seriously in the very programs that aim to train and educate our best young artists. The same could be said of most of the other subjects covered in the courses we offered.

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3.

There are many who see the kind of curriculum sketched out above as pedantic, or superfluous to the teaching of poetry, or somehow contradictory to the spirit of the art. I have spent much of my life disagreeing with this view, and at this point, I see no reason to cease from mental fight or let my pen sleep in my hand. It is absurd to think we can ever even begin to hope to create the most vibrant poetic culture possible without training our most ambitious young poets in the areas sketched out in the curriculum above, which only follows in the footsteps of many of the greatest poets in the history of the world, who not only practiced the techniques discussed in each course, but wrote and argued about them at great length. Robert Bridges was so obsessed with unlocking the secrets of Milton’s versification in Paradise Lost that he wrote three books about it, articulating in the process not only a new understanding of blank verse, but also the notion of non-alliterative accentual verse that became a cornerstone of Robinson Jeffers’ greatest work, and the concept of syllabics, which was then fully put into practice by his daughter, Elizabeth Daryush, and thereby conveyed to many others. This seems worth knowing. Yet what happens instead in most programs that aim to educate and train young poets is nothing of the sort. Indeed, many are overtly hostile to a curriculum and pedagogy that focus systematically on the theory, practice and craft of the art, as if poetry is somehow different from every other art and even human undertaking, requiring little or no curricular scaffolding and skills-based pedagogy to train those who wish to pursue it.

It seems reasonable to argue that we should take the education of young poets as seriously as we do the training of surgeons, accountants, engineers, architects, and even ballet dancers, pianists, and actors. I’ll happily settle even for Little League as a model, with the same kind of structure, practice, and progressive drilling you can see on any baseball diamond in America any day it’s dry. If children under ten can practice fielding grounders and bunting, surely graduate students can learn about stress-based imitations of classical quantitative meters, especially if they hope even to be able to read not only translations of Sappho, but Spenser, Tennyson, Swinburne, Frost, Marilyn Hacker, Timothy Steele, Rachel Wetzsteon, A. E. Stallings, and hundreds of others.

Poetry, the art for which we have by far the longest articulate record, a tradition reaching back many thousands of years in every written language on earth, has an astonishing history of craft and technique that is the heritage of anyone willing to put in the time to study and imitate it. Indeed, it is beyond the scope of anyone to learn more than a fraction of it, though Terry Brogan did a heroic and field-transforming job of organizing it in his great bibliography, English Versification, 1570-1980: A Reference Guide with a Global Appendix. Beyond that there are, of course, all sorts of questions to ask, the profound questions of poetics, such as:

• Why do we read and write poetry in the first place?
• How can or should we come to understand what we do in relation to history, to politics, to psychology, and to spiritual life?
• How do we create institutions that support our beautiful, complicated, and troubled art?

All of this matters right to the root of what we do, but to have any hope of responding to such questions in a compelling way, let alone of creating art and criticism and scholarship and teaching and institutions worthy of those questions, we need a poetry curriculum and pedagogy up to the task of preparing us to ask and consider them. In the end, no curriculum can give us strong poets. We must leave that to luck, God, and the muse. But even the great need a good education. The curriculum and pedagogy outlined above are not sufficient, but they are necessary.

Source: THINK 14.2 (Summer/Fall 2024): 113-32. 

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When young, David J. Rothman had the good fortune to study with Czesław Miłosz, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, Mark Strand and Robert Fitzgerald. His most recent books are a textbook, Learning the Secrets of English Verse (Springer 2022), co-authored with Susan Spear, and My Brother’s Keeper (Lithic 2019), a Finalist for the Colorado Book Award in poetry. In 2019 he won a Pushcart Prize for the poem “Kernels,” which originally appeared in The New Criterion.