TEACHING PHILOSOPHYPart three

by ravi shankar

My own style in workshop can be seen as an amalgamation of what I have learned fromall of the aforementioned poets plus the necessary infusion of my own experiences withother writers and students. What’s must crucial to me, perhaps, is plurality, the idea that

the germ of the creative impulse must be arrived at in different ways.

So on the first day of class,I have everyone contribute

a word and give them anassignment to write a

poem that includes each ofthose words once and onlyonce in a poem delimited

in line length by thenumber of words

contributed. In anotherclass, we go on a walk

around campus, jottingdown every object of a

particular color orkinesthetic motion.

We write ekphrastic poems after first confronting works of art in a gallery. We write what I call amanipulated poem. We write sonnets and pantoums. Centos and homolinguistic translations,

imitations and poems based on non-literary forms such as mathematical proofs, table of contents,recipes and legal contracts.

It’s my goal to give the students as broad a look at the spectrumof creative possibility as possible, and so I expose them to the

Romantics from the 18th century, to Baudelaire’s prose poems, toGeorge Herbert’s concrete poems, to the confessional poetsfrom the 1960s, to the roots of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, to

various international poets, such as Pablo Neruda and WislawaSzymborska, to figures such as Blake and Rimbaud that burn

with prophetic vision, making sure that they are grounded in afew essential areas:

To figurative language, and the ability toidentify and respond to the transformation

implicit in metaphors;

To rhetorical devices, running the gamutfrom hyperbole, oxymoron, and

synesthesia, to prolepsis, prolegomenon,and parataxis;

To prosody and the ability to identify andscan the syllabic structure of any line;

To music as manifest in the use of thevarious modalities of rhyme, as well as

other sonic devices, such as alliteration,anaphora, and enjambment;

And finally to form, how to write andrecognize such disparate kinds of poems

such as ghazals, villanelles, and foundpoems.

Keep up with Ravi's website, RaviShankarProfessor.com,to keep up with all of his insights on teaching!