Jerome Rothenberg

Pierre Joris

Jeffrey Cane Robinson

Habib Tengour

"Global anthology of twentieth-century poetry"--Back cover.

The University of California Book of North African Literature

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four

"The Walk," a meditation on walking and on the literature of walking, ruminates on this pervasive, even commonplace, modern image. It is not so much an argument as a journey along the path of literature, noting the occasions and settings, the pleasures and possibilities of different types of walking--through the country or city, during day or night, alone or with someone--and the literatures--the poems, essays, stories, novels, and diaries--walking has produced. Jeffrey C. Robinson's discussion is less criticism than appreciation: with an autobiographical bent, he leads the reader through Romantic, modern, and contemporary literature to show us the shared pleasures of reading, writing, and walking.

Notes on a Romantic Image

The Walk

The poem in the college classroom usually appears as an autonomous object to be dissected, thus revealing its internal relations--image patterns, meter and rhyme schemes, and types of figurative language. Jeffrey C. Robinson, a college teacher for many years, believes that there is a better way to teach poetry. His conviction, developed over many years and acted upon in his own classroom, has led to a pedagogy that urges the teaching of each poem by examining it in its various contexts. The result, as expressed in this book, is a moving exploration of the relationships among scholarship, teaching, and learning, of critical importance to all teachers of literature, as well as to those concerned with educational theory. Robinson demonstrates his pedagogy with a case study--the teaching of Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood." He interprets the students' fascinating and moving confusions and discoveries as the "Ode" loses its consoling aura and as their thinking takes a correspondingly more energetic, critical, and self-reflective turn. As a teacher, the author--whose muted autobiography itself enriches the context--has had his own concerns to which this book provides some answers: How would a prolonged encounter with one poem significantly alter students' learning? Would the poem, seen in its social relations, become less an object of worship and more an occasion for the students' own exploration of the place of art in society and in their own education? This book has emerged out of these questions. As well as being a full rehearsal of the actual literary and historical contexts of Wordsworth's "Ode," it is a meditation on the sociology of literary education and necessarily the learning apparatus of the late adolescent.

A Classroom Experiment with Wordsworth's "Ode"

Radical Literary Education

The jazz term riff is short for riffle-make rough. In Untam'd Wing: Riffs on Romantic Poetry, scholar/poet Jeffrey Robinson sets out much like a jazz musician to renew a great body of work (say, Miles Davis on George Gershwin)-to recast, as he says in the Prefatory Note, what have become monuments, with all the inertness of passive appreciation that monumentality encourages, into living forms. If he roughs up some of our long-time favorites, it's not to revise, and certainly not to improve, but on the contrary to reveal a timeless dimension that is of the very nature of the Romantic: I would define a 'romantic' poem, of whatever vintage, as one that invites its own renewal in every present. With all the boldness and subtle care of the poets he celebrates, Robinson stakes his life-long involvement as reader, teacher, and scholar/critic of Romantic poetry on an equally committed absorption and belief in the discoveries of modern and contemporary experimental poetry. Like a true marriage it lays bare both parties.

Jeffrey Cane Robinson

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