Zyzzyva Interview with Juan Felipe Herrera

This is a great interview! Read about this amazing man, his tenure as a CPitS poet and his tenure as the Poet Laureate of California.

ZYZZYVA: Generally speaking, how does teaching inform and renew your own writing?

Juan Felipe Herrera: Well, my students are brighter than me, and they are more original than me and much quicker of mind—so I am very fortunate to be in their company. I learn a lot. The shape of their poems, for example, their innovative translation approaches, their leaps into international and multicultural poetics … and their ideas.

Photo by Randy Vaughn-Dotta.

20 Reading Poetry Strategies from The Atlantic

Worth reading. My favorite is #7.

A poem cannot be paraphrased. In fact, a poem’s greatest potential lies in the opposite of paraphrase: ambiguity. Ambiguity is at the center of what is it to be a human being. We really have no idea what’s going to happen from moment to moment, but we have to act as if we do.

You could develop a lesson around this article, if you were clever. Or, just pass out the article and let students discuss.

Charles Baudelaire by Gustave Courbet (Wikimedia Commons)