A Poetry Pedagogy for Teachers

Shortlisted for the United Kingdom Literary Association (UKLA) Academic Book Award 2023

A Poetry Pedagogy for Teachers generates imaginative encounters with poetry and invites educators to practice a range of poetry exercises in order to inform instructional approaches to reading and writing. Guided by pedagogical principles prompted by their readings of Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Maya Pindyck and Ruth Vinz provide critical discussion of prominent literacy practices in secondary classrooms and offer alternative approaches to encountering a text. They do this by way of experimental readings of Wallace Stevens’ poem toward a set of thirteen pedagogical principles that anchor a pedagogy of poetic practices. The book also offers invitational exercises, the authors’ own engagements with poetry practices, as well as student examples, visual modes of theorizing, and a gathering of relevant resources compiled by two classroom teachers. This is a book for secondary English teachers, teaching artists, English educators, college writing professors, readers and writers of poetry – both existing and aspirational – and any educator interested in poetry’s capacities to pedagogically inform their subject matter and/or literacy practices.