Words of Taylor Swift inspire University of Iowa poetry course

IOWA CITY — With a rich history in teaching and producing top-tier writing, the University of Iowa has gotten creative not just in the works its students are publishing but the tactics its educators are taking to train them — turning from traditional textbooks for inspiration and education to society and culture, including pop-culture.

“This is the first time I’ve done it,” UI Honors Program teacher and student scholarship and development specialist Candice Wuehle said about her decision this fall to teach poetics through the lens of one of the most iconic poets of this era: singer and songwriter Taylor Swift.

Tapping Swift’s extensive discography of more than 270 songs, Wuehle in the semester that just ended taught honors students about poetic devices like imagery, metaphor, rhyme, repetition, alliteration, hyperbole, personification and irony.

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“The class is modeled after the intro to poetry courses that I've taught at other universities,” said Wuehle — who’s originally from Iowa City, graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been teaching for two years in the honors program. “But instead of traditional poems, we use Taylor Swift songs to learn about poetic devices.”

In the second half of the semester, Wuehle challenged students to apply critical frameworks to Swift songs — like the imagery of stones and bones in “My Tears Ricochet”; the hyperbole of loving to the moon in “Seven”; and the irony of being loved by narcissists in “I Did Something Bad.”

Wuehle got her inspiration for a “Poetics (Taylor’s Version)” course from emerging academic conferences and classes on Taylor Swift both nationally and internationally — including a “Swiftposium” earlier this year at the University of Melbourne organized by six universities across Australia and New Zealand.

The event engaged scholars in “critical dialogue about Swift’s popularity and its profound implications for a range of issues including gender, fandom, popular culture, literature, the economy, the music industry, and more.”

Harvard University earlier this year debuted an English class titled, “Taylor Swift and Her World,” focused on the singer’s cultural impact along with the themes and writing mechanisms threaded through her catalog.

The UI Taylor’s version of poetics is far from the campus’ first class to use popular culture to teach on broader themes or about pop culture directly. Late UI professor Donna Parsons for years taught courses like “Women Who Rock,” “Harry Potter and the Quest for Enlightenment” and “World of Beatles” — an iconic class that continues today.

A recent UI course on “Sex & Popular Culture in America” required its students to watch the first season of “The Handmaid’s Tale”; an honors course on “Classic Cult Cinema” had students attend a “Napoleon Dynamite” screening; and legendary UI Professor Jay Holstein for decades offered religious-studies courses involving movies like Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” and Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner.”

Tapping popular media, performers and texts that students already are interested in helps them not only learn the material but retain it, according to Wuehle.

“It’s like a magic trick to have students come in already passionate about the material and already extremely well-versed in it,” she said. “They show up caring.”

That’s especially helpful for intro-level poetry students — many of whom aren’t English majors. Typically, she said, teachers have to overcome the instructional hurdle of convincing students that the material they’re learning — poetry, in this case — is and will be relevant to their lives.

“I didn't have to do any of that with the Taylor Swift class,” Wuehle said.

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Most of the honors students who took the Swift-poetics class in the fall already were big fans — except one student, who said he signed up because his girlfriend was a huge “Swiftie” and he wanted to better understand the phenomenon, including Swift’s “eras.”

Through nearly a dozen albums, Swift has organized her musical and poetic evolution into “eras” — with each taking on its own creative aesthetic, from country-leaning to rebellious, from romantic and pop-heavy to Indie, featuring guest artists ranging from rap stylist Kendrick Lamar to folk rocker Bon Iver.

“It has been very fun to see him move from not knowing what the ‘eras’ are, per se, to being able to guess the forgeries every class,” Wuehle said.

“Forgeries” were one of the assignments Wuehle gave students — challenging them first to research common poetic devices Swift leaned on for each album era, and then to draft a Swift “forgery” poem tied to one of her eras by a common device replicating the album style. Students would read their forgery poems in front of the class and peers would guess the era.

“It could be either ‘Midnights,’ ‘Folklore’ or ‘Red’,” one of the honors students said of the optional era answers to one student’s forgery — which she read during a final “Swiftposium” the class held Dec. 13.

The Swiftposium involved student readings, presentations on Swift’s use of poetic devices and research on how Swift’s discography has annotated modern history — along with Swift-themed attire and desserts.

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“I will do a brief presentation on how Taylor Swift’s ‘All Too Well’ shows trauma and memory through the lyrics and images in the ‘All Too Well’ 1-minute short film,” student Isabelle Yoder said during her portion of the Swiftposium.

“Their midterm was an analysis of a poem using close reading skills, and then they developed on that for their final,” Wuehle said. “But another option was that they could make a TikTok or Instagram reel where they analyzed a song using a literary device.”

To the question of whether Wuehle will offer the class again, she said, “There’s a lot of interest.”

“I get emails occasionally from advisers who have students who are very concerned that it won't be offered again — they couldn't fit it in this semester,” she said. “So I think that I will do it in the fall semester next year.”

Although a number of popular artists could be used to teach poetics, Wuehle said Swift offers a special opportunity — given her massive catalog spanning nearly two decades.

“We think a lot about how her themes evolved over her 18-year career,” she said, boasting her students’ ability to “pick up on one word and do a sort of long arc of an analysis over her entire career, just through the lens of diction.”

“So I think Swift is unique in that she offers such a huge body of work to analyze. But also she is working within in a more traditional poetic mode than I think a lot of pop artists are.”

UI honors freshman Reese Olson, 18, said she took the Swift class because she’s a fan but also because she’s a biology major — and this offered a creative escape in a different educational direction, given she didn’t know anything about poetry before signing up.

“Now, looking back at any of her songs or anyone else's music or just writing in general, I'm kind of looking at it in a different way — being able to have a perspective that I didn't really have before learning about writing techniques,” Olson said.

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Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com