MOOCing with Al Filreis and Robert Pinsky

If you've been out of school for a while, or in school and want to brush up on your poetry reading chops, a trove of online poetry classes exist to help you out. The Learning Lab section of our website has put together a set of samplers highlighting two popular MOOCs (massive open online course) available to anyone interested in poetry. The first is the most popular poetry MOOC out there, Modern Poetry, led by Al Filreis. A little about it:

Two years ago, Elliot Holt wrote an article on her experiences taking Al Filreis's massive open online course (or MOOC) on Modern & Contemporary American Poetry. Now the 10-week ModPo starts again on September 6th on Coursera.

The instructor, Al Filreis, might be familiar to Poetry Foundation listeners and readers as the host of Poem Talk. Filreis, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, espouses “the end of the lecture as we know it.” ModPo relies on collaborative close readings led by Filreis, seminar-style. The course, which has drawn 30,000 participants thus far, also uses the Poetry Foundation's archive of poems and poets.

ModPo has been created to test the proposition that there is poetic wisdom in crowds: that “collaborative close readings involving thousands of people can produce fresh interpretations of open-ended poems, and that a humanities MOOC need not be impersonal,” says Filreis. Watch this video for a taste, and click here to learn more and register .

We also have information about The Art of Poetry, led by former poet laureate Robert Pinsky.

In conjunction with Boston University and edX, Robert Pinsky is teaching a free, eight-week online poetry course which opens for registration on September 30th. The class covers a wide range of material, from classics by Shakespeare and Gerard Manley Hopkins to work by contemporary poets such as Katie Peterson and Yusef Komunyakaa. According to Robert Pinsky, “this course is based on the conviction that the more you know about an art, the more pleasure you will find in it.”

Rather than following particular schools of poetry or trends, the lectures, discussions, and readings of the course focus on various elements of the art, from poetry’s historical relation to courtship to the techniques of sound in free verse. Click here to learn more and register.

Head to the ModPo sampler here and to Pinsky's The Art of Poetry here to see videos previewing the lectures and conversations. We also have a list of poems that will be taught and discussed in these two courses.