Here's a blast from the Kelly Writers House's past that's emblematic of its spirit of outreach to diverse audiences and an interesting precursor, of sorts, to ModPo. "Six Poets Each Teach One Short Poem to High-School Students," was a special event first held in May 2009 that brought together students from Liza Ewen's poetry course at Friends Central School and a half-dozen poets from the Philadelphia community, who discussed favorite poems "that would somehow convey something significant about themselves as a poet." It was such a great success that a second event was organized by Al Filreis and Ewen in May 2010.
In a blog post not long after the 2010 event, Filreis gave this rundown of the participants and their choices:
Rivka Fogel taught "This Room" by John Ashbery, a beautiful indirect memorial to Pierre Martory and non-narrative meditation on absence as presence. Sarah Dowling then came in and taught a section of "A Frame of the Book" by Erin Moure. Jessica Lowenthal then taught Harryette Mullen's "Trimmings." Randall Couch taught a very early poem by John Keats before revealing that it was Keats. John Timpane taught an Yvor Winters poem about the emotional complication of saying farewell to an adult child at an airport; Wintersean restraint and emotional distance abound here and strike one (strike me, at least) as a refreshing sort of illiberalism in an age of gobs of conventionally sentimental parent-child verse. Tom Devaney may have taken the pedagogical prize on this day, presenting William Carlos Williams' "The Last Words of My English Grandmother" — a seemingly easy poem for h.s. students to grasp. Yet it also does everything a modern poem does, and makes a remarkably good scene of instruction.
Video and audio of both events can be found here, along with PDF copies of the poems under discussion. You'll find much more programming like this, from KWH and elsewhere, on PennSound's Anthologies / Collections / Group Readings page.
