NEH Summer Seminar for School Teachers
Poetry as a Form of Life, Life as a Form of Poetry
Dates: July 6–25, 2008
Director: Helen Vendler, Harvard University
This summer Harvard Summer School and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) offer high school teachers of English language arts and related fields a varied and interesting literary experience through a three-week poetry seminar with Helen Vendler. The seminar’s aim is to deepen and enlarge the participants’ sense of how poetry might be discussed, and a key objective is to consider how poetry meditates on life and why it requires pattern to accomplish its task of reflecting life. Readings range from the Shakespearean sonnet to contemporary American poetry; specific readings are drawn from Vendler’s Poems, Poets, Poetry and the Norton Critical Edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Weekday excursions to Harvard’s libraries and museums, the Longfellow House, and Boston’s Freedom Trail, as well as a weekend trip to Amherst (the Dickinson Homestead) augment classroom study. Teachers also have access to Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room.
About the Program Director
Helen Vendler is the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University. Professor Vendler is the author of books on many poets, including Yeats, Stevens, Herbert, Keats, Shakespeare, and Heaney. She has also written several collections of essays and lectures, all published by the Harvard University Press, as is her anthology, Contemporary American Poetry. She has reviewed contemporary poetry for the New Yorker, New York Times Book Review, New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, and New Republic, and was the principal consultant for a television series on poetry called Voices and Visions. She has led several previous seminars for high school and college teachers for the NEH and was the Jefferson Lecturer for the NEH in 2004. The recipient of 23 honorary degrees from universities and colleges here and abroad, Vendler has been one of the most consistent advocates for contemporary American poetry.
Download* a letter from Professor Vendler that outlines the program.
Housing
Participants are encouraged to live in Harvard Yard during the seminar session. Suites in the Yard dorms come with a large common room, private bedrooms, an in-suite bathroom, and air conditioning. A housing fee of $1,200 will be charged for occupancy from Sunday, July 6, to noon on Saturday, July 26. All meals, to be taken in Annenberg Hall, are offered at no extra charge.
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