Chad Parmenter

 

Email: parmch01@luther.edu
Office: Ockham House 108
Phone: 563-387-1180

Snapshot

Chad Parmenter, Visiting Assistant Professor of English, comes to Iowa from mid-Missouri, where he received his Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing, with a focus on poetry.  He started writing poetry around 6 or 7, and has been doing it more or less consistently ever since.  Recently, he has fallen in love with the kind of poetry that takes a particular project and stretches it the length of a book, which has led to his writing collections of poems focused on Batman, the photographer Edward Weston, and other subjects.  He enjoys writing about poetry, as well, and has presented conference papers on T.S. Eliot and Jean Parmentier, the 16th century poet and mapmaker who he has decided is related to him.   

Poems of his have appeared in Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, and elsewhere.  He has won the poetry contests of Black Warrior Review and Hotel Amerika, and had a poem featured on Verse Daily.  His chapbook, Bat & Man:  A Sonnet Comic Book, is forthcoming from Finishing Line.  His translations of Jean Parmentier's poetry have appeared in Circumference.  His article on T.S. Eliot, "Eliot's Echo Rhetoric," appeared in Yeats-Eliot Review.

Chad's chapbook of poems, Bat & Man: A Sonnet Comic Book, was published in April 2012 by Finishing Line Press. These contemporary sonnets about Batman are persona poems spoken in dialogue, between Selina Kyle and Bruce Wayne, with the driving narrative that she has woken him up from a nightmare, and he describes it to her, sonnet by sonnet. Each one adds to what you might recognize as the ritual activity of most Batman comics and other media:  retracing what led Bruce Wayne to become Batman, revising that story in the process. 

Teaching Philosophy

Whether teaching a bilingual poetry class to students in Kenya’s Kibera slum or discussing literature with students at Mizzou, I find that the key approach for me is to teach with the students’ contexts in mind and at the center of the class.  What are their goals for the class?  What are they hoping to learn?  What connections can we make together between the material that we’re studying and the culture that we study it in?  I try to help them to make those links in a way that empowers them to forge their own connections outside of the class, between English and their worlds. 

The most basic way that I invite students to look at the course material in a larger context is also the way that I assess whether I am helping them to do so:  I ask them, during class discussion times, what the course can do for them, based on where they are coming from.  My American literature students talked about the importance of getting a deeper understanding of American history, and I used that information to incorporate more of a historical focus on the course readings.  We discussed the authors’ lives and the events that their work may have been addressing.  I offered my thoughts, and listened to theirs.  Treating the class as that kind of dialogue, for me, means being willing to connect with the students, to take simple steps like working to learn their names and asking how they’re doing.  If I can take a few basic facts about their lives into each day of teaching, and share a few of my own, then we are able to work better as a community.