Today I'm taking a break from editing to return to my new Autumn House Press project, The Conversation: Learning to Be a Poet, a working title I used to distrust but that I'm now actually beginning to like. Over the past couple of weeks, I've shared some excerpts from my template chapter, which matches up Shakespeare's Sonnet 81 with word; and now I'm mulling over other connections. So far I've more or less finalized these pairings: Shelley with stanza, Brigit Pegeen Kelly with line, Hopkins with punctuation. But I've still got many, many other poetic elements to juggle and can only choose a few a conversation starters: image, of course, and sound; possibly metaphor, possibly detail. You can see that all of these elements mingle and overlap: a detail is an image is a metaphor is a sound. But each can be a useful opening gambit in a conversation about a poem.

While I'm thinking about the subject, I want to pass on a link to poet and teacher Bruce Guernsey's anthology Mapping the Line: Poets on Teaching, which has just been released. In the introduction he describes his approach, which he honed while editing the feature "Poets on Teaching" for Spoon River Poetry Review:

My plan was to ask the many fine poet/teachers I know across the country to contribute an essay per biannual issue. The requirements were simple: a practical assignment that had been class-tested to work, one that another poet/teacher could take directly to class and use. No jargon, no theory--just a straightforward exercise of about a thousand words.

The twenty essays in Mapping the Line follow this simple, efficacious pattern. The authors include Claudia Emerson, Betsy Sholl, David Baker, and many other well-known and not-so-well-known poets, and the book could function, as Guernsey points out, as "the basis of a whole semester's work" or be equally useful for those "who have been writing on their own or have been wanting to."

I'm glad to come across such a clear and usable anthology that is also so different from the book I am working out in my head. I am always thrilled to discover new ways to approach the teaching of poetry; that's why I love the participants' presentations at the Frost Place, which, like the essays in Bruce's book, are both practical and personal. It is also wonderful to be reassured that the jargon of poetics is unnecessary and obtrusive, that shrieking Schools of Thought have nothing to do with the private task of learning to place one word after another after another, that sarcasm and cynicism and belittlement are walls, not windows.