Strange Terrain:
A Poetry Handbook for the Reluctant
Reader
from Small Press
Distribution, or your local
bookseller.
[also, check out
Strange
Terrain's own website,
www.strangeterrainpoetry.com]
Strange Terrain is based on the program "Entering
the Realm of Poetry" I developed for the NH Humanities
Council & have taught in many venues since. If you are
interested in hosting or attending the program--in a single
session or series of sessions--as a professional
development workshop or for lay readers, contact me at
603-835-6783 or by email, and check out my "events" page
for programs near you.
STRANGE TERRAIN: A POETRY HANDBOOK FOR THE RELUCTANT
READER fills an empty
place. It is an essential resource for anyone who wants to
feel more comfortable with reading poetry: individuals,
reading groups, teachers, even friends and families of
poets. In 8 simple steps, readers will find the tools they
need to make their own confident way through poetry’s
strange terrain.
Recommended
at Alran Books, distributor
of educational materials.
"I love this
book. It's a terrific text for teaching poetry, but also
writing in general."Deb McKew, teacher, workshop leader,
creator of Words In Play.
Goodreads, four
star review by Tim Averill:
I enjoyed Fogel as a guide and
teacher even more than I enjoyed her poetry. Unlike many
“textbooks,” Fogel’s handbook is a slow-paced, plushly
exampled, and contemplative view of how poets use SHAPE,
WORDS, SOUND, IMAGES, EMOTION, AND THOUGHTS . . . [that]
carefully examines how poetry works in integrating these
elements to make meaning. And, after demystifying poetry,
she celebrates the parts of poetry that we do not get,
endorsing “remystification” and lack of tidiness as an
appropriate response to a poem. I think this book is a
refreshing one for all readers of poetry, and it led me to
appreciate some poetry that I might have missed before.
Diane Lockward,
from “Blogalicious,” Dec. 1, 2010, http://dianelockward.blogspot.com/2010/12/mystery-solved.html
This month I'd like to recommend Alice B. Fogel's
Strange Terrain: A Poetry
Handbook for the Reluctant Reader. The book is designed to make poetry
comprehensible and enjoyable to those who are intimidated
by it. And it serves that purpose, but it also is a kind of
primer, taking the reader chapter by chapter through an
understanding of the elements of poetry. What to look for
in a poem? What to appreciate? I think the book would also
be useful to those hoping to enhance their own writing
skills. It might also be useful to someone planning to lead
a workshop as it proceeds in a developmental way with first
things first, then moving on to more challenging areas. One
aspect of this book that I find unique and interesting is
that Fogel uses her own poems to illustrate the poetic
concepts. I wasn't sure if I would like that approach, if
it would seem egomaniacal. And what if I didn't like her
poems? However, I found it enlightening and fascinating to
observe a poet analyzing her own work, to witness this
poet's mind at work. And I did like her
poems.
READ ON FOR PROGRAM
INFO
*
SCROLL BELOW FOR EXCERPT FROM INTRO OF
BOOK
Like the book,
PROGRAMS offered in
conjunction with it directly address why poetry can and
should retain some mystery even when readers know many of
the elements it contains. The most important and surprising
message Strange
Terrain delivers is
that poetry is not something that we are meant to “get,”
but something that gets us.
“The
teacher was excellent. I knew nothing about poetry and now
I want to learn more about it.”—Chautauqua, NY week-long
workshop participant
“This program opened my eyes to a new world.”—NH program
participant
“The best presenter we’ve had.”—Westchester, NY American
Association of University Women
member
STRANGE TERRAIN
PROGRAMS FOR
READING GROUPS:
Strange
Terrain’s 8 Steps
enable participants to quickly see that they already have
most of what it takes to feel comfortable with poetry.
Through readings, lecture and discussions, Alice
demystifies poetry and at the same time shows readers how
to value the mystery that remains.
STRANGE TERRAIN
PROGRAMS FOR
TEACHERS:
Alice asks teachers, first and foremost, to become regular
readers and learners. In this role, they can begin to forge
confident relationships with poetry. Exercises and tips on
how to pass the same reading process onto their students
follow. Teachers may share their own poetry doubts and
“traumas,” and air questions like:
What if I
don’t “get” poetry myself? What am I missing when I read a
poem? What makes a poem “good”? Can students find poetry
relevant to their lives? Can I connect poetry to other
school subjects, even non-language arts ones? How do I
grade a poem, or a student’s reading of one? Will young
kids like poems if they’re not funny? What measurable
components can I teach, and how do I do that without poetry
becoming dry and dreaded?
Rather than
repeating elements teachers are already familiar with, such
as alliteration, rhyme or meter, participants look
at Strange
Terrain’s 8 Steps for
discovering greater depths in poetry by means of specific,
usable, and life-affirming skills. These Steps demystify
poems and help participants discover how to move through a
poem, and be moved by it, without having to know, or
pretend to know, what it “means.”
Finally, the programs cover where to find contemporary
resources for age-appropriate poetry, how to separate
students’ reading and studying of published poems from
their own attempts to write poems, and how to include
actual elements of poetry in other school subjects, such as
science, and vice versa.
*
Depending on hosts’ needs, programs may take place on a
single evening, in a half- or full-day workshop, or over an
extended time. Fees vary accordingly.
Strange Terrain
and its companion programs invigorate readers by almost
instantly changing their uncertainty to confident
enthusiasm. And as prose author and reviewer Rebecca Rule
said, it all happens “painlessly.”
*
from HOW TO
MAKE USE OF THIS BOOK
When I tell people I write
poetry, I often experience a sensation of wind; my partner
in conversation has backed off just enough to let more air
circulate between us, as if it were viral.
There is something about poetry, about how it was taught,
about its reputation as encoded messages only a certain
kind of person can crack, that makes otherwise healthy,
highly functional people, literate and perfectly
intelligent—even those who love to read—squirm with a sense
of inadequacy, burst into sheer belligerence, or quietly
avoid it like the plague, especially in public.
But deep inside, there may be a wistfulness, some primal
memory that knows it could be different—we could be let
back in, we could have a nonadversarial relationship with
these mysterious missives from the hearts and minds of
others; we could be readers of poetry.
Think of it as Poem Traumatic Stress Disorder.
This book is your self-help manual.
It is my belief that everyone can gain from the “news” that
poetry brings us. With a bit of instruction, poetry will
bring you significant new interactions with the world
around you, with ideas and sensations, with yourself and
others—not to mention that it will literally expand your
mind: According to a study published in New
Scientist, billions of neurons per
millisecond light up like Times Square on New Year’s Eve
whenever we read poetry.
To these ends, STRANGE TERRAIN is structured around three
premises or necessities integral to being comfortable
with—and finding comfort in—poetry:
Demystification, Information, and
Remystification.
First,
demystification: Readers will benefit
both from a glimpse of what it is that poets are up to in
pausing to write about their experiences or perceptions of
the world, and from a reminder that poetry is not personal
or private “journaling” but an art and a craft. The two
introductory chapters that follow this give you a chance to
discard any sense of estrangement you might have felt in
the presence of poetry in the light of this basic
demystification of what poetry is. It may still feel like
strange terrain, but at least you'll see landscapes you’re
interested in exploring.
Information
is what the
Steps of this handbook are all about. They provide a walk
through the strange terrain of poetry by means of 8 basic
tools that I’m going to show you are already in your
backpack. The reason that poetry is, in fact, approachable
and effective (once you’re guided into its realm) is that
it employs these elements that are so—well—elemental to our
existence as humans here on Earth. While the poems you pass
through here may not all be easy, you will become familiar
with their landmarks—their shapes and words, their sounds
and images, their narrative techniques. And through guided
observation you will see, without being forced to analyze
anything or to submit to the question, “What does it mean?”
just how much meaning, emotion, and thought emerge from
these elements.
The most important of the three necessities for
appreciating poetry is the third, the one I call
Remystification. Let me get to it in a
round-about way, by talking a bit about teachers.
Amongst the many people who may shy away from poetry are,
of course, teachers—for the very obvious reason that they
too are regular, educated, literate people who themselves
had teachers of poetry who . . . etc. As a visiting
artist-in-the-schools, I often hear even those teachers who
do include poetry in their lessons, knowing it has value,
confess with some embarrassment their doubt or helplessness
in the face of it. Some have their students write poems,
some assign readings, others march right in, full of
technical information and blowing dust off manuals or texts
they seem to have dug out of a time capsule. And why not?
Poetry has been around a long, long time, hasn’t it? And
so, with good intentions, most ask kids to write poems
before they know what concrete things actually make up
poems, analyze poems for their “hidden meaning,” underline
examples of onomatopoeia and alliteration, and count and
label the rhyming scheme.
Two crucial aspects of understanding poetry are missing in
all of this, without which poetry can become alien and then
anathema: the demystification and the mystery.
Here are some of the things I wish teachers were doing
instead in opening their classrooms to poetry:
- Reading a poem and saying nothing at all about it while the sounds and sensations sift through the room, through the listeners’ beings, through the windows and out into the day.
- Expressing wonder at the amazing feelings, thoughts, rhythm, music, or mystery that a certain choice of words on a page can evoke.
- Talking with gratitude about how poetry opens our hearts and minds to our lives today.
- Bringing in local poets to talk about their lives and their writing process, and including in the discussion those students (at any age) who already identify themselves as writers.
- Bringing in contemporary literary journals and poetry books to be pawed through and pored over.
- Telling themselves and their wards in words and in silent attitudes this mind-changing secret about appreciating poetry: “It’s not about getting it.”
But it will not give you answers.
The mysterious nature of what poetry says—what often cannot be paraphrased—is its lifeblood. That doesn’t mean poetry must elude us; it means the meaning of life itself often eludes us. If you want to grapple with the value of this better, you can turn directly to “Step 8: Unknowing," because it explains in detail why poetry can’t be entirely explained. The only reason it comes last in the instruction process is because it is simultaneously the least definable and most defining of the Steps.
Keeping the need for “remystification” in mind throughout may help you as you proceed on this exciting journey towards a deepening relationship between you and poetry.