Distinguished Poet A. Van Jordan Blends Film and Poetry in Middlebury Classroom
“When I teach poetry, I want to take the fear factor out of it pretty early on,” says poet and University of Michigan Professor of Creative Writing A. Van Jordan, who is spending a semester as Distinguished Poet in Residence at Middlebury. “The first thing I want students to understand is that when we’re talking about a poem, we’re not talking about anything they haven’t experienced before. We’re talking about the human condition, and we’re just talking about it through the poem.”
When Jordan reflects back to his early days with poetry in the Akron, Ohio public schools, he still finds it hard to believe he’s built a life and career out of poetry. “Poetry was taught almost like math, as if there was a single right answer to the meaning of a poem, and I was always getting it wrong.”
Needless to say, he takes a different approach as teacher, but the acclaimed author of four poetry collections recognizes similar anxieties in some students who take his classes. One solution he’s discovered is to bridge the familiar with the perplexing. In his Middlebury course, “Cinematic Movement: Poetry,” Jordan uses his love of film as a framework for helping students engage with challenging poems. Unlike with poetry, he says, students feel at ease discussing the conventions of film and other popular media. He finds that many of those ideas from film can be transferred to poems.