There should be a perfect German compound word for the particular sustained balance of elation and relief a teacher feels when teaching from a new-to-you textbook that just works. Someday, perhaps, I’ll be a professor with a plan, using the same time-tested syllabi and textbooks semester after semester, but at this point in my teaching-writing life, I’m still experimenting. That said, this semester I’m working with a textbook that could make a wayward instructor put down roots. Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns isn’t hot-off-the-presses; in fact, it’s been around almost a decade now. Edited by Michael Theune, it was published by Teachers & Writers Collaborative in 2007, though Theune maintains a terrific website that regularly supplements and continues the work of the book.
(Side note: this book is definitely aimed at university-level students or advanced high school students, but Teachers & Writers Collaborative puts out great books and resources for teaching all different age groups, including instructors in “non-traditional” teaching settings. Books like Our Difficult Sunlight: A Guide to Poetry, Literacy, Social Justice in Classroom & Community by Georgia A. Popoff and Quraysh Ali Lansana, and Poetry Everywhere: Teaching Poetry Writing in School and in the Community by Jack Collom and Sheryl Noethe are great guides for every writing teacher’s shelf, particularly writers who actively work with writing as a tool for social justice and community engagement.)
In poetry workshops and literature courses, I always emphasize poetic turns (not just in sonnets) and the pleasures and possibilities of poetic inconstancy (changing one’s mind, direction, or intentions), so I was glad to have the chance to try out a course aimed exclusively in that (indirect) direction. “The Mind in Motion: The Rhetoric of Poetry” is a readings course, not a workshop course, though it’s offered through The Writing Seminars, so students are still coming at the materials from a creative writer’s perspective. The course examines how argument and formal thought shape poetry, exploring poems that reveal not only feeling and observation, but also the architecture of the analytical mind at work. The course texts are Structure & Surprise, followed by Ellen Bryant Voigt’s The Art of Syntax: Rhythm of Thought, Rhythm of Song (Graywolf, 2009), supplemented by Alfred Corn’s The Poem’s Heartbeat: A Manual of Prosody (Copper Canyon, 2008) and Helen Vendler’s Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats (Harvard, 2006).
Structure & Surprise is (as one might hope), itself both structured and surprising. I love that our classroom conversation can move across time from Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” to Thomas Sayers Ellis’s “Or,” comparing and contrasting poems’ “moves” to build meaningful connections. We can still talk about chronology, “school,” and “form” in the traditional sense to build connections between poems, but the more subtle connections of structure and turn seem to encourage a critical engagement with how poems “work,” beyond superficial “diagnoses” of what a poem “is” or where it “belongs.” The book is organized into chapters by different authors (Christopher Bakken, Mary Szybist, and D. A. Powell, to name a few), each focused on a different “structure,” and each chapter ends with a number of supplemental poems. These supplemental poems are a terrific resource, as students can come to class with fresh ideas on these texts, without relying on the chapter’s author’s point of view to form an opinion.
Last week, I came to class ridiculously excited to talk about Joshua Clover’s poem “Radiant City” in John Beer’s chapter on “The Dialectical Argument Structure,” having scrawled “private/public, individual/communal, ideology/imagination, political/sexual” in the margin as if I were being graded on class participation. And in a way, I am. I can only imagine that my students can distinguish the genuine from the dutiful in their professors, and I hope that my excitement for this text is contagiously genuine.
All classroom teaching aside, I think that this text would be a great read for anyone who is interested in literature but struggles to find a through-line across centuries of poetry and into the very contemporary. When I read Natalie Eilbert’s “The Limits of What We Can Do” in The New Yorker last week, I couldn’t wait to share her poem with my students, highlighting her mid-poem “concessional” move as a way to enter a conversation about what the poem does.
The book ends with some poets’ commentaries on their own poems, as well as some potential writing exercises. I’ve added its essay suggestions for “Further Reading” to my syllabus as well. Yeats’s “quarrel with ourselves” is alive and well in contemporary poetry, and Structure & Surprise is a great place to begin (or continue) to enter the conversation.