Transgressive Poetics in the Twenty-First-Century Classroom

Transgressive Poetics in the Twenty-First Century Classroom is a direct response to the increasing pressure to sanitize or censor curricula that educators across K-12 and higher education face. Each chapter pairs literary analysis with pedagogical implications to argue for the increased use of poetry in the classroom, centering a structuralist approach to analyzing early twenty-first-century poetry in the transgressive classroom as a site of resistance. Using this approach, Transgressive Poetics prioritizes some of the most distinct and pervasive formal traditions in contemporary American poetry: received forms, invented forms, erasure, nontraditional forms, and “unreadable” poems, or poems that resist a traditional or linear reading.  Stephens opens with an in-depth look at received forms that will feel familiar to many educators, including the sonnet, villanelle, pantoum, sestina, and ghazal, providing keen examples of how twenty-first-century American poets work within and push against these forms to remark on structural oppression and systemic injustice. The author offers Tiana Clark's "Broken Sestina Reaching for Black Joy," for example, as an opportunity for students and educators to encounter Clark's infusion of metapoetic commentary and social critique as a direct interrogation of the correlation between received forms and sociocultural power structures.  Later chapters delve into recently invented forms like the duplex and golden shovel, as well as more experimental and conceptual approaches to poetry as textual artifact, such as Danez Smith's "Rondo" and Roda Avelar's "Jotxland Epic," both of which upend traditional expectations about what constitutes a poem. Stephens also includes concrete, actionable learning activities for educators who may feel apprehensive about or unprepared to incorporate poetry into their courses. Transgressive Poetics is a timely and necessary addition to broader discussions about censorship, pedagogy, and art as activism that will serve educators at every stage in K-12 and higher education classrooms.