Maybe when we are discussing poetry, I could ask them what strategies their teachers have given them for reading poetry. We could discuss how useful they have found those to be. Maybe I could give them some of my strategies for reading poetry, particularly discussing how I chose the poems for the class and why. (I do some of that anyway, but maybe we could shut our syllabi, open the book, and have the students skim for possible poems to read. I might find some other good ones that way. It would also be a way to show what “non-prepared†reading of a poem might look like.)
Note: This is buried in the blog entry on lecturing, but since I want to be able to find it quickly next semester when I think of it, I am putting it in here like this.