CWU English professor co-authors advanced poetry textbook, first in its field

As one of the world’s oldest art forms, poetry carries with it an undeserved reputation for inscrutability.

Over the millennia, it has shifted and changed in response to both culture and environment, giving aspiring poets near-endless opportunities to find inspiration in the words and shapes of those who came before them.

Seeking to simplify the daunting task of finding one’s place in the overarching poetic narrative, CWU Associate Professor of English Maya Jewell Zeller has co-authored the genre’s first dedicated advanced poetry textbook, working alongside her longtime collaborator, Kathryn Nuernberger, a professor of English and Department Chair at the University of Minnesota.

Advanced Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology takes an unconventional approach to its subject matter, inspired in part by Zeller’s own classrooms.

“I teach poetry as a practitioner of the craft, not as a critic,” she said. “Most textbooks start with analytical chapters and then end with an anthology of related poems, but in our book, each chapter opens with poems. Rather than bringing in a bunch of new terms all at once, we present five poems, and start by asking readers to just engage with them.”

As an art form, poetry doesn’t neatly divide into categories such as “introductory,” “intermediate,” and “advanced.” For the purposes of this textbook, Zeller and Nuernberger have taken “advanced” to mean a poet who understands their own voice and how to apply it to a variety of forms, and is ready to think further outside the box. To this end, Advanced Poetry includes work from poets who are moving the medium forward, like Mita Mahoto and Douglas Kearney, whose work uses visual and sonic elements that go beyond traditional verse into paper collages and overlaid vocal elements.

“We situate the reader of the book as the person who’s pushing the field forward, and if a poet is ready to do that after reading our book, they’re probably an advanced poet,” Zeller said. “Obviously, I’m not the singular authority for conferring such designations, but we hope the book will help writers feel the kind of permission they need to take risks and push against the edges of their field.”

Advanced Poetry is part of publisher Bloomsbury’s latest series of textbooks focused on intermediate and advanced classes. Since advanced poetry is such a specialized field, a comprehensive textbook on the subject hadn’t been widely published up until now. While its discussions are high-level, the textbook retains the accessibility that Zeller believes is crucial when reading and writing poetry, while asking poets to think about how their personal aesthetic has been informed by ancestral lineages.

Her chapters on the Lyric “I” — writing in the field/ecopoetics, duende, and spells, for example — offer threads of her own influences, some of which she will discuss when she visits CWU in May for the Lion Rock Visiting Writers Series. She looks forward to sharing the resource with her students, who have been mapping their own lineages in her poetry courses at CWU, in the same way the book is laid out.