Pedagogy forum, Week 5

Reading “The Day Lady Died” for class this week I, of course, had to look up several references that I was not familiar with and make the correct notations on my copy of the poem. I started to think about how this particular poem would read to a beginning poetry class with, assumedly, young, inexperienced students. It would almost be too idealist of me to assume that when a student doesn’t know a word, place, or person mentioned in a poem that they would immediately go look it up. Unfortunately, I know that most don’t. I run across this problem a lot in the Writing Center. Students, more often than not, fail to do the extra work and look up what they don’t already know. The O’Hara poem is heavy with references and not only that but the references hold certain connotations that guide a reading of this piece. These connotations are important to the reading if only on a surface level understanding of the poem. How would one teach this poem to young students (or even adult students unfamiliar with these references) that the connotations that go along with the references should be understood? There are always going to be references and connotations that students will not get without being directly informed or looking them up, but this piece seems heavily invested with an almost “stilted” reading—it is very aware of its own “intellectualness.”