Sandra Lee Kleppe

Angela Sorby

Amatoritsero Ede

This book demonstrates how humans can become sensitized to, and intervene in, environmental degradation by writing, reading, analyzing, and teaching poetry. It offers both theoretical and practice-based essays, providing a diversity of approaches and voices that will be useful in the classroom and beyond. The chapters in this edited collection explore how poetry can make readers climate-ready and climate-responsive through creativity, empathy, and empowerment. The book encompasses work from or about Oceania, Africa, Europe, North America, Asia, and Antarctica, integrating poetry into discussions of specific local and global issues, including the value of Indigenous responses to climate change; the dynamics of climate migration; the shifting boundaries between the human and more-than-human world; the ecopoetics of the prison-industrial complex; and the ongoing environmental effects of colonialism, racism, and sexism. With numerous examples of how poetry reading, teaching, and learning can enhance or modify mindsets, the book focuses on offering creative, practical approaches and tools that educators can implement into their teaching and equipping them with the theoretical knowledge to support these. This volume will appeal to educational professionals engaged in teaching environmental, sustainability, and development topics, particularly from a humanities-led perspective.

Creative Educational Approaches to Complex Challenges

Poetry and the Global Climate Crisis

This edited collection offers educators at all levels a range of practical and theoretical approaches to teaching poetry in the context of environmental sustainability. The contributors are keenly aware of the urgency facing the planet’s ecosystems—ecosystems which include all of us—and this volume makes the case that teaching poetry is not a luxury. Each of the book’s three sections works from a specific angle and register. Part I focuses on pragmatic approaches to classroom activities and curricular choices; Part II considers policies and politics, including the role of the UN’s Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) program; and Part III takes a widescreen view, exploring the philosophical issues that arise when poems are integrated into sustainability curricula. This book exemplifies how poetry empowers readers to think imaginatively about how to sustain—and why to sustain—our world, its resources, and its beauty.

Poetry and Sustainability in Education

Robert Miltner

A balanced assessment of the acclaimed writer's poetry and fiction

Critical Essays on His Life, Fiction, and Poetry

New Paths to Raymond Carver

Best known as one of the great short story writers of the twentieth century, Raymond Carver also published several volumes of poetry and considered himself as much a poet as a fiction writer. Sandra Lee Kleppe combines comparative analysis with an in-depth examination of Carver’s poems, making a case for the quality of Carver’s poetic output and showing the central role Carver’s pursuit of poetry played in his career as a writer. Carver constructed his own organic literary system of 'autopoetics,' a concept connected to a paradigm shift in our understanding of the inter-relatedness of biological and cultural systems. This idea is seen as informing Carver’s entire production, and a distinguishing feature of Kleppe’s book is its contextualization of Carver’s poetry within the complex literary and scientific systems that influenced his development as a writer. Kleppe addresses the common themes and intertextual links between Carver’s poetry and short story careers, situates Carver’s poetry within the love poem tradition, explores the connections between neurology and poetic memories, and examines Carver’s use of the elegy genre within the context of his terminal illness. Tellingly, Carver’s poetry, which has aroused slight interest among literary scholars, is frequently taught to medical students. This testimony to the interdisciplinary implications of Carver’s work suggests the appropriateness of Kleppe’s culminating discussion of Carver’s work as a bridge between the fields of literature and medicine.

Against the Current

The Poetry of Raymond Carver

This book explores poetry and pedagogy in practice across the lifespan. Poetry is directly linked to improved literacy, creativity, personal development, emotional intelligence, complex analytical thinking and social interaction: all skills that are crucial in contemporary educational systems. However, a narrow focus on STEM subjects at the expense of the humanities has led educators to deprioritize poetry and to overlook its interdisciplinary, multi-modal potential. The editors and contributors argue that poetry is not a luxury, but a way to stimulate linguistic experiences that are formally rich and cognitively challenging. To learn through poetry is not just to access information differently, but also to forge new and different connections that can serve as reflective tools for lifelong learning. This interdisciplinary book will be of value to teachers and students of poetry, as well as scholars interested in literacy across the disciplines.

Sandra Lee Kleppe

About

Books

Join the club