Answering Starkey’s Question, Part II: Reading Jollimore’s The Solipsist

“What poets have you been reading?” David Starkey asked the poet-teachers at the Writing Intensive at this year’s CPITS Symposium.

What poet-teachers read and how they might bring it into the classroom is one of the things that adds value to residencies. By bringing contemporary poems into the classroom, poet-teachers in a residency prepare students not for the canon they will study in their literature courses–although we do that, too–but to practice poetry in the world community they have been born into.

For a chapbook, The Solipsist fills a great expanse: the inner cosmos.

Answering Starkey’s Question, Part I: Reading Zaccardi’s Render

At the CPITS symposium, David Starkey asked the writers in the workshop what we were reading. For poet-teachers, this is an especially important question because we often bring new literature into the classroom.

The selections in textbooks are often decades old by the time they’re published. These textbooks devote many pages to significant writers, although the examples from those writers are often selected for their decorum rather than their immediacy. Such is our comedy of manners.