Reading Poetry with College and University Students: Overcoming Barriers and Deepening Engagement

Reading Poetry with College and University Students aims to help faculty foster students’ intellectual and aesthetic engagement with poems while enabling them to sharpen critical and creative thinking skills. Reading authors across history and the globe–such as Julia Alvarez, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Mahmoud Darwish, John Donne, Paolo Javier, Yusef Komunyakaa, Audre Lorde, and Wislawa Szymborska–Thomas Fink zeroes in on how learners can surmount and even enjoy tackling the most difficult aspects of poetry.

By exploring students’ emotional identification with speakers and characters of poems as well as poets themselves, Fink shows how an instructor can motivate students to produce effective and empathic interpretations. Through divergent readings of selected poems, the book addresses the influence of various theoretical paradigms, ranging from ecological, psychological, feminist, and queer theory to deconstructive, postcolonial, and surface reading orientations. Instructors receive practical guidance through these poems, poets, and modes of reading, helping to give learners raw material to reach their own nuanced interpretations and strengthen their emotional, aesthetic, and intellectual acumen.