So today is the official launch of The History of American in Poems, this site’s new PodClass.

It’s been a journey. A long, long journey that started 13 years ago (!!) back in 2013 when my friend, the poet Ann Cefola, suggested we take a MOOC, this thing called a Massive Open Online Class. And open meaning free.

It was called ModPo (and it’s still going) and run by Al Filreis from the University of Pennsylvania. We attended online lectures whenever we found the time. There were assignments but we didn’t get a grade. We watched students debate poems and wrote mini-essays about poems we read. It was deliciously nerdy.

And mind-blowing and it sent me on a rabid search for other poetry-related MOOCs out there, of which there were many but they weren’t all available right away and so I spent years waiting for and taking these classes to fill out gaps in my knowledge about the history of American poetry.

One of the things some Sarah Lawrence MFA graduates in writing complained about (when I was there in the early 1990s) was the fact that the program focused too much on workshops and crafting and not enough on the history of American poetry. To be fair, it wasn’t a literature degree. It was a writing degree (and a very low-effort thing overall); but one day in a craft class one of the more grouchy second-year students said something like, “I feel no more of an expert in poetry than when I started this degree.” And I had to agree. But even my English B.A. degree didn’t provide enough in that area either.  My seminar classes were mostly novels and I wasn’t complaining; I like to tell people I got a fancy book-club degree.

But it was time to fix all that and so the whole MOOC experience took years. And then I hit the big anthology and essay books. And then I read a few things that focused on the American-ness of American poetry and that really got me thinking about culling out poems that dealt with the  American subject matter very directly.

Big Bang Poetry has always proselyted that poetry has a larger-than-literary function in our lives, for example as statements of witness particularly useful for historians or psychologists. So this class is not solely a literary history class (although that is naturally part of it) or is it a writing class (although there are prompts for writing your own poems). It’s also a class about the experience of American-ness in all its shades of good and bad from the witnesses.

And putting the class together has been a long process of making sense of notes, organizing ideas, dealing with technical problems, dealing with the threat of A.I., which quite honestly almost made me want to chuck it all in the trash over the last few weeks. I first thought of creating a membership space to thwart A.I. bots or a very cheap paywall. But the very cheap paywall created more problems with WordPress and the conflicting plugins of WooCommerce, the pay-per-post plugin and my site’s visual theme. I had no interest in redesigning Big Bang Poetry for a very cheap paywall. Especially when money was not a motivator in the first place. Then further research revealed that some A.I. is currently illegally scraping content behind paywalls anyway. (Stop for a few days of existential crises there.) I’m a little PodClass and this is a fight I’m going to have to leave to The New York Times and the Boston Globe, who are also under threat of seeing their intellectual property scraped and repurposed without consent.

Brave new world. It was a come-to-Jesus moment that made me want to keep going under the threat of all that. I kept telling myself about the thirteen years. Although until I counted today, I thought it had been only ten.

Anyway, here it is, open and free, and the beginning of another long journey starting today:

  • The History of America In Poems Overiew
  • The History of America In Poems Syllabus (as classes are posted, find them here)
  • The History of America In Poems Podclass #1: The Introduction (American literary themes)

I’m working on the next class as we speak.