Teaching poetry: Helen Vendler at Harvard University
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 31 ส.ค. 2016
- "How does a master teacher introduce students to poetry? What are the critical choices that she makes to help students experience literature with greater pleasure and understanding? As part of the Bok Center series Reflections on Teaching, poetry critic and scholar Hellen Vendler of Harvard University suggests answers as she guides students through a reading of William Butler Yeats's masterpiece "Among Schoolchildren (1928)" -- Container.
Teaching poetry: Helen Vendler/ Harvard University. Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning ; produced and directed by Jamil Simon / Harvard University. Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning ; produced and directed by Jamil Simon - เพลง
I can listen to prof. Vendler all day. She is so impressive.
Thanks for the youtube make it possible to watch , to listen teachers from another part of the earth . Im actually from Siberia
ฉันอยู่ประเทศไทย../l am from Thailand.
Ms. Vendler's remarks on the best way to teach poetry should be required listening for all teachers of literature. When I think back on the woeful way in which I was introduced to poetry, where reading it was made to seem a task of drudgery, it's a miracle I came to love poetry at all
Helen Vendler is one of the most interesting and erudite facilitators of poets and poetry. Her approach to the subject is suffused not only with depth but a personal touch which enlivens her presentation. Our gifts---not without countervailing curses---lead us to our destination.
I like how she incorporates the storytelling elements to break up what could be construed as the monotony of metrics.
This is probably an odd way to describe someone but I think Helen Vendler is an analytical NINJA. Her book 'Poems, Poets, Poetry' slices and dices poems in a way that reveals all there is to know about it but none of it feels contrived and her words don't give me a headache to read either. You all probably know what I mean. Those insufferable works that were written in academese where you have to read a paragraph ten times and still not know what it said. Her work is not like that at all. Her clarity is incredible. When I read her book, I found myself alternating between 'WOW' and 'ah, yes, I can see that'. If she were my English teacher in high school, I'd have done much better at Literature. Thankfully she gave us her books so I can learn even now at 32.
Excellent lecture. Thank you. This poem seemed cryptic and mysterious to the point of instilling a sense of overwhelming impotence, in my education and ability to derive pleasure from poetry that draws one in but never discloses its secrets. I was always attracted to it because of that wonderful and enigmatic last couplet, which I knew, was the secret to which all of the prior rhetoric was building towards. And so it was, and so much more. So yes, a hearty thank you.
I greatly enjoyed this. Both her description of her own purpose and methods in teaching, and the actual reading of the poem were it seemed to me, instructive, interesting, thoughtful. A rich work of the mind and heart done by a great master teacher and critic of Poetry.
Enjoyed your discussion and I , too, am bored with history of a poem or meaning... let me hear the poem and see if it engages me.
I’m a poet specializing in Japanese forms: haiku, tanka, haibun, kyoka, senryu. I hope you don’t mind me sharing a tanka and my haiku, a tribute poem to Bashō’s frog with commentary by the late AHA founder and poet Jane Reichhold who considered my Basho haiku among her top 10 haiku of all time. What an honor.
Here’s the Bashō poem and commentary:
Bashō’s frog
four hundred years
of ripples
At first the idea of picking only 10 of my favorite haiku seemed a rather daunting task. How could I review all the haiku I have read in my life and decide that there were only 10 that were outstanding? Then realized I was already getting a steady stream of excellent haiku day by day through the AHA
forum.
The puns and write-offs based on Basho's most famous haiku are so
numerous I would have said that nothing new could be said with this
method, but here Al Fogel proved me wrong. Perhaps part of my delight in this haiku lies in the fact that I agree with him. Here he is saying one thing
about realism-ripples are on a pond after a frog jumps in, but because it refers back to Basho and his famous haiku, he is also saying something about the haiku and authors who have followed him. We, and our work, are just ripples while Basho holds the honor of inventing the idea of "the
sound of a frog leaping is the sound of water".
As haiku spreads around the world, making ripples in more and larger ponds, its ripples are wider-including us all. But his last word reminds us all that we are only ripples and our lives are that ephemeral. It will be the frogs that will remain.
~~
And my tanka:
returning home
from a Jackson Pollock
exhibition
I smear my face with paint
and turn into art
~~
-All love in isolation
from Miami Beach,
Florida.
Al
I had once lived in Sligo town where late William Butler Yeats himself lived, walked, ate, etc. There, I had met many descendants of Yeats' contemporaries, those related to Maud Gonne, Gore Booths, etc. That was a long time ago and I have forgotten all about them.
Ah sher I would have seen you walking at Thoor Bally lee beside the brook after tea...
This is an illuminating lecture on Yeats's Among School Children .Yeats has used the myth of Zeus and Leda in many of his poems . The learned professor has explained the symbols lucidly . Besides , she has made cross references to explain the obscure passages . Excellent .
Imagery and syntax being different from the shape of a poem is thoughtful of her to convey to her students. Wordsworth's "immediate pleasure" of only great poems makes much sense to me.
An unsurprising and masterful tour de force from Professor Vendler.
Minute 30 has a great response to if students ever think you are simply rambling when they don't see the relevance of your digression :)
excellent programme
Wonderful proponent for poetry..
are you still active on youtube?
You're AmAzInG!
Should poetry exist? If so, whose? What role does the reader play in qualifying the work(s)? What about canon? The gatekeepers? What will AI do to poetry and poetics? If poetry is called poetry, is it poetry for others? Isn't poetry just a product of poetics? Does a static poetics, and thus a static poetry, exist? Whose art? Whose interpretation? Whose world? What function does the context play in the reception of language, the qualification of 'art'? Does art exist? Should it? Why and why not? Is art inevitable? Is miscommunication, exclusion, needed for one thing to be not the other thing? If art is inherently exclusive, what should we exclude? People? Or conventions? Or contexts outside of the now? Please answer these questions...we are trying to find the answer...
Very interesting. Poetry is so big isn’t it?
Consummate teacher.
I think the nature of poetry is very sensitive so as such you can not teach someone to write poetry. Poetry is mistik and it is just accidental expretion of soul. The best and the most beautiful melody of poetry is when is developing by self. Every time I take pen and I want, decade to write the best poetry is turned to be the worst writing. But one day in heart of midnight inside my chest something is vespering and that happens to be the best poetry. The nature of poetry is like beautiful girl she has to love you. She is apsolutly free....
You spell almost like an Elizabethan- I love it. As for “something is vespering…” that’s so luscious I’m just going to have to steal it.
Her books are much better.