Faking It New

To what extent does innovative literature require/demand innovative teaching methods?

Teaching modernist writing that continues to challenge, and new forms of contemporary writing, how might we theorize the felt imperative to “make it new” pedagogically? Does innovative literature require or demand innovative teaching methods? At least one recent book argues persuasively that it does. Joan Retallack and Juliana Spahr rest their essay collection Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary on the premise that “contemporary literary pedagogy is chronically behind contemporary literature by about half a century,” that innovative contemporary writing renders “the familiar battery of code-breaking techniques . . . inappropriate.”¹ In one essay, Lynn Keller ponders the practical implications of the now-familiar ideas of “reader collaboration” or “active reading.” In what she calls the centripetal classroom, “discussion” involves sharing the kind of privatized reading experience proposed by Edward Hirsch in his overtly pedagogical text How to Read a Poem. With Retallack’s sequence “Icarus FFFFFalling” as her central example, Keller goes on to argue that “the new experimental poetries invite a very different model of reading, one that fosters contrasting classroom dynamics and processes” and that results in what she terms the centrifugal classroom.² The centrifugal classroom involves “a collective rather than a privatized reading process,” “collaborative reading”; “interpretive authority is dispersed; it is located in no individual and held precariously by the group”; and one finds “the class being drawn toward the world outside the poem and how language works there.”³ Nor need this methodological shift be limited to the treatment of experimental contemporary work. Jena Osman describes how “in conjunction with their reading of Eliot, I ask students to write a poem where each line is taken from a different textual source they find in their homes. They are instructed to think about why they are ordering the pieces the way they do, and to annotate the poem with footnotes. This assignment makes Eliot’s seemingly impenetrable text [The Waste Land] more accessible, in that it shifts the focus of inquiry from ‘what does it mean’ to ‘how was it made’”: a shift from interpretation of a product to participation in a constructive process putatively similar to Eliot’s.⁴

Essays like these provide compelling initial answers to my opening questions, which seem straightforward enough until we apply a little terminological pressure to the relationships among the new, the contemporary and the innovative. (Both “innovative” and “new” may be used as literary historical categories and values; only “new” and “contemporary” can also serve as neutrally descriptive chronological terms.) In my own primary teaching field, Anglophone poetry and poetics in the long twentieth century, the point can be made simply by noticing the uses of the term “new” in the titles of the two main players in the notorious anthology wars, Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry 1945–1960 (1960) and Donald Hall, Robert Pack and Louis Simpson’s New Poets of England and America (1957). Hall, Pack and Simpson introduce new poets writing in familiar mid-century modes shaped by the genteel cultural conservatism implicit in Eliotic modernism while bypassing Eliot’s formal radicalism. Allen, in contrast, foregrounds a new kind of poetry (also written by “new” poets) whose innovations have influenced U.S. American (and other) poetic practice ever since.

At the risk of stating the obvious, then, “new” is a historically specific and contingent category, and especially for teachers of modernism, terms like “new” and “innovative” have a problematic doubleness about them. In the early-mid 1950s, Frank O’Hara’s work was both chronologically and formally new. For practiced and informed readers in 2009 it is neither, though we may continue to love that work and appreciate its innovations in historical context. For many of our students, meanwhile, any poetry beyond what they were force-fed in high school is new. Poetry as a discourse is “new” for them, and even work that is not innovative in a literary historical sense or is no longer innovative to the teacher will often produce the effect of newness in neophyte readers: disorientation, bafflement, a sense of readerly inadequacy.

So how to...