Teaching persona poetry, and a Face to Meet the Faces
Happy Mardi Gras! Appropriate for a day of masks, today I had the lovely opportunity to teach the persona poem to a great group of students at Cascadia Community College. It was a lovely and enthusiastic group of people and I always enjoy talking about persona poetry, which I happen to still feel passionate about. We talked about zombies, the Hunger Games, Buffy versus The Vampire Diaries, anime and haibun, as well. Good times.
Arriving about two hours too late for the class, my contributor copy of the persona poetry anthology A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry came in the mail today. I was happy to be keeping company with wonderful poets like Collin Kelly, Jericho Brown, Ivy Alvarez…an interesting aspect is that the editors had the writers write a short note about their use of persona at the end of the book, so if you’re using this as a teaching tool, that would be great for students! It is true there is not a lot of material available for those teaching persona poetry, so this anthology is a welcome addition. I’m looking forward to using it next time I teach persona poetry!
Happy Fat Tuesday! AWP is almost upon us. I’m sad to be missing it but hope you will all have a great time and bring home to your blogs lots of gossip. I am so ready for February to be over already – this is Seattle’s meanest month, for sure. I saw a branch of cherry (or plum?) blossoms outside of a decaying barn on the way to see a house a few days ago, I think that was the first sign that indeed there may be life in this earth after the long winter…
Had a fantastic time today for my reading-Q&A-teaching guest thing with poet Jared Leising’s creative writing poetry class today at Cascadia Community College. The entire 25-something person class enthusiastically participated in class (and even returned to class after a freak fire alarm in the middle of the “exercise” section of the class, which, I have to admit, as an undergrad I might not have done.) These students asked intelligent questions that indicated they’d actually read my book – in advance. Knock me over with a feather. Then a bunch of the students bought books. (!!) And, apparently, if all poetry readers were like this class, books of poetry about comic books and Miyazaki would fly off the shelves. One girl even brought up Selkie wives! I mean, who knows about Selkies? Cool, right? And there was a Mary Biddinger doppleganger in the class. Anyway, it was a great experience, definitely worth the two-hour trip each way. If I could go do that every day, feeling like I was actually helping and encouraging people, I would be a happy girl.
Funny aside: one student asked if I had any advice for aspiring writers. When I told her the old “read” advice, she said, “I mean the good, special, real advice.” Ha!
