UMBC recently published an Arts & Culture interview with Keegan Cook Finberg, covering her thoughts on poetry and society, poetry courses at UMBC, and her newest book Poetry in General: How a Literary Form Became Public (Columbia University Press, 2025).
Reflecting on her own teaching, Finberg says:
"I want students to be okay with not understanding everything that they’re reading while exploring the aspects that they do understand—to explore why this author might want it to be difficult in the beginning, why there might be something important in that feeling of discomfort that they’re experiencing with the text. Can they notice moments of beauty in the text, even if they don’t yet understand what they mean? A lot of our conversations start with that sort of work.
And once students realize that that is the goal—that they don’t need to be able to decode, they don’t have to be the person who knows it all in the room, there isn’t one right answer—it really unlocks a very different sort of space. I often watch that sort of journey with students. They realize that there’s something inherently important about this difficulty, important even to their understanding of themselves, their heritage, the way that language works in their households, even in their larger worlds."
]]>