English majoring is so different from English teaching.

This week I'm trying a new thing. One of my classes is AP Prep, which means that it's supposed to be lining students up to be ready to take AP English senior year. In theory, this is where the kids whose strengths or interests lie in English Language Arts should be, and so again, in theory, this should be my likeliest group of potential English majors. (In practice, of course, that's not necessarily who takes this course.)

So to inject a little but of literary-ness into an otherwise reading and writing skill-based course, I'm trying to give the first few minutes each day in one of my classes to poetry. These past few days, it's taken ten, which is far too many of our fifty minutes to be "getting started with a poem," but I'll press on, because I think it's fun.

Tomorrow we're going to read Wilfred Owen's "Dulce Et Decorum Est" , "Apologia Pro Poemate Meo", and "Anthem for Doomed Youth." (Some White man poetry because it's possible that I'm giving my students the impression that only women and/or people of color ever write anything worth reading. Whoops.)

I hadn't forgotten, but I'm glad I'm recalling how much I love this guy's WWI poetry. I loved these two poems before I knew how much I loved teaching, and I was just a plain-ol' English major. I wrote a paper about these and other WWI poetry for a course I took my sophomore year, and I'm reading over it now as a way to quick prep for our discussion tomorrow. I wrote it long enough ago that I don't remember my thought processes as I was putting together my thesis and argument, and so I can almost read it as though I wasn't the writer: "Keats' poetic philosphy, espcially the idea of the 'camelion poet' whose personal identity is removed from his or her poem, is completely absent as Owen' work grows closer to the Wordsworthian ideal of the poet as someone, 'endued with a more lively sensibility... than [is] supposed to be common among mankind' (894, 246). Owen's poetry, however, as opposed to being a strictly Wordsworthian poet-centered conduit for the emotion of mankind, is under the fierce possession of its creator."

Some totally self-involved part of me, a larger part than I'd like to admit, really misses being able to sit around and talk and write about stuff like this (or even know what it it's about. Keats' poetic philosophy? Totally gone from my brain. Wordsworth? Him, too. Vague recollections, that's all.)