FlagbooksWhat a year so far. I came back online January 2nd to a tonnage of things to finish. ArtBrawl is in full swing, the Difficult Book Club is still kickin' it. Work has been crazy busy at CNM. Family trips are happening. I'm already exhausted in month two.

RedIn fact, the group I started last year, ArtBrawl, has grown by a few folks and last year we designed a poster that we unveiled at our local Women’s March last month. The posters are free to download in many sizes in red or blue. You can visit artbrawl.org to snag some!

What a cool flag shelf I found today (see above) from the site rebloggy while looking for an image about American poetry. The quote on the page says, "(To all my American book friends) Let's all take a minute to appreciate that we live in a country where we have the freedom to read whatever we want. Because not everybody gets to do that." Awesome image and very well said.

If one of your resolutions this year is to be more informed about American poetry history, (or even political poetry history), you can take the whole history online for free. How awesome is that? And from good universities, too. Over the last three years I’ve taken as many MOOCs, or massive open online classes, as I could find, (no international poetry classes yet but stay tuned). I’ve come up with the following itinerary for an imaginary degree in American Poetry History from these online sources. And it’s kind of like an American history degree, too…as told with poetry.
 
The first thing you need to do is find out when the classes are open. Some are archived and self-paced, some you take with cohorts, and some open sporadically. Some even offer "official" certificates. I’m not sure what those are worth; some certificates are free and some want chump change and I honestly can't think of an academic market where they'd be valuable in. (EdX charges $99 for certificate and Coursera charges $49). I took them all for free.
 
In-progress classes can be stressful with due dates and discussions in forums with other people. Archived ones are usually just watching the videos and reading poems on your own time. On the other hand, sometimes the archives have fallen into disrepair and the videos and links are broken. But just a few broken things here or there. In any case, you’re never required to do more than you want, which in some cases could just be listening to all the lectures and reading poems.
 
Courses are offered on various learning platforms:
 
EdX: Harvard (https://courses.edx.org) – This is the best platform and they offer an annotation tool, (which doesn’t work on iPads), class videos, field trip videos, A-list guests like famous artists, former presidents and senators, discussion boards if the course is in-progress. It’s hit or miss when you can get into the archived classes, but keep trying. They’re worth it.
 
University of Pennsylvania (https://www.coursera.org/)  – Offers the most famous poetry MOOC with Al Filreis and provides videos of his class sessions with very bright, young students, audio lectures, forum discussions and required papers. The class is not archived but its offered every September.
 
University of IL  (https://www.coursera.org/)  – This school offers quizzes and discussions in forums, (but they forums are clunky and in my session nobody participated). The videos are not quite lectures but professors reading from academic papers. It sounds dry (and it is) but it’s quality stuff.
 
EdX: Davidson (https://courses.edx.org) —This was the most interactive platform, with videos and links to online content, interactive feedback and data gathering where you’re part of the study!
 
I went through college and never had such good training on American poetry history. Usually, my classes as University of Missouri focused on smaller surveys of American fiction or the British Romantic poets and that was it for poetry. Thousands of students are attending these MOOCs so I wonder why colleges don’t offer similar courses for students who are obviously interested in them.
 
Keep in mind these courses are, for archived classes, self-paced so the weeks mentioned below are simply guides, how the professors organized the classes. You can take double the time or half the time if you want.

 

The Imaginary Degree in American Poetry History

  1. The Poetry of New England (Colonial poetry)
    Covers the influence of religion, the wilderness, and other concerns of Puritans.
    Harvard via EdX (4 weeks)
  2. Nature and Nation – Nation Building
    Covers Emerson, Poe, The Fireside poets, and the struggle around nationhood, with controversy between intellectual British dependence versus American independence.
    Harvard via EdX (5 weeks)
  3. Civil War Poetry
    Harvard via EdX (3 weeks)
  4. Walt Whitman
    Harvard via EdX (3 weeks)
  5. Emily Dickinson
    Harvard via EdX (4 weeks)
  6. Modern Poetry (The Modernists, 20th Century)
    This course covers the geographical landscape of modernism, featuring New York City, London, and Chicago and  focusing on how science and technology began to be an influence; an overview of the canon. A good introduction.
    Harvard via EdX (8 weeks)
  7. ModPo (Modern and Contemporary Poetry)
    Time this one for completing September-December. This is a challenging and mind-bending course, non-lecture style. Students do some lifting here. There’s also no archived vision. It’s truly a massive and international group of students. And this course traces how modernism has led to the contemporary era.
    University of Pennsylvania via Coursera (10 weeks)
  8. Modern American Poetry
    This amazing course upends the modernist canon, exploring early feminist and political poets, American Indian, Asian and Harlem Renaissance poets who were pushed aside by the apolitical, white male canon. You also delve into 1930s social poets and even neglected “canon” types like Marianne Moore and Hart Crane. Also, lots of academic voices represented. On the downside, it was challenging to concentrate on teachers literally droning through their academic papers. It was disappointing that University of Illinois thought an academic essay equals an online class. They could have easily posted links to the papers as homework. Also, forum comments depended on having copies of the poems to reference providing zero links to these poems and you never knew if the poems you found online were accurate versions. Imagine a poetry lit class with no poems? You spend a good few hours tracking down the poems referenced. All that said, this class was still worth it. It opened my eyes to whole forgotten eras and poets.
    University of Illinois via Coursera (4 weeks)

    At this point you may be asking yourself, why would I take three modernist poetry classes? Because the modernists are still a massive major influence on what poets are doing today and it was a massive break from the traditions that preceded it. It’s fascinating to see how each school tries to conceptualize the 20thy century of poetry. You might want to spread out these modernist classes. You could do #6 before #1 like I did and then #7 and 8 interspersed elsewhere.

  9. Electronic Literature
    You should finish with this course, a look at the possible future of literature, a truly contemporary set of works. The teacher is very charismatic and helps make electronic poetry very accessible and inspiring.
    Davidson College via EdX (6 weeks)

Apparently University of Illinois has a class coming in Contemporary poetry. Stay tuned for that. I’m also signed up for “Reading Literature in the Digital Age” this spring with the University of Basel in Switzerland (6 weeks).

You may come across some annoying technical issues with these platforms. Coursera crashed twice on my iPad. My Udemy classes crash a lot too. Often the transcripts don’t match the video, which is tragic for poetry discussions with words like iambic and trochee. Nobody seems to proof them or take into consideration accessibility issues. At University of Illinois, this was stupefying since all the lectures were basically teachers reading essays. They could have simply uploaded their essays as video transcript text. In some cases with U of I, the assignment pages were duplicated incorrectly and there was no way to alert anybody.

Just remember, these are free classes but they’re also challenging. Only a true poetry nerd will enjoy them.