Paradise Prose blog celebrates ModPo
Shreya, writing from Oxford in the UK, has posted a blog essay on ModPo. You can find the entire essay HERE. Below are the final paragraphs:
One thing I’ve always loved about literature is that people in different times and places can be in conversation. A poet in the present day responds to a poet of the 90s who responds to a poet of the 70s and all the way back. The ModPo course takes us through notable figures chronologically and those in influence of one another, recreating the nature of literature in the first place. We can see the full evolution of American poetry as we know it today.
ModPo has been valuable to me not only as a critic but also as a poet. The poets of ModPo have taught me how to express the deepest loneliness, the shock of cold blooded murder, injustice, you name it — to borrow the title of one of the poems, ModPo gives you ‘Thirteen Different Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’. I am so deeply grateful to the University of Pennsylvania and the Kelly Writer’s House for running this incredible initiative. Needless to say, I am going to miss it dearly when the live course ends at the end of November.
Where next? I am a little bit disheartened that ModPo is one of a kind, that there aren’t more MOOCs, administered by universities across the world, that encourage close reading and discussion of poetry. I want to see equivalent MOOCs for postcolonial poetry, ecopoetry, British poetry, all the flavours of the rainbow! I suppose it must be a challenge of securing funding and teaching staff as much as anything. Curious to see how the MOOC poetry universe unfolds…
